WorkBench Press @WorkBenchPress

Everyone says raise your prices. Nobody says how. Here's the mechanical version — what you actually do on Monday morning.

Two techs. Both busy. Both well liked. One of them is costing you $45,000 a year. You know your overall margin. You almost certainly don't know it per person, and that's where the number is hiding. Tech A: 1,400 billable hours, $196,000 invoiced, rarely goes back to a job. Tech B: 1,150 billable hours, $161,000 invoiced, and about 6% of his work comes back. The $35,000 revenue gap is visible if you ever look. The callback gap isn't: 6% of 1,150 hours is 69 hours of rework, which at $140 of charge-out is $9,660 of capacity burned on work you'd already been paid for once. $45,000, and from where you stand both men look equally flat out. They leave at the same time. They both say the day was busy. Neither of them is lying. This isn't an argument for firing anyone — it's almost never a character problem. It's that the fix for B, whether that's training, a checklist on the jobs he keeps getting wrong, or simply a different mix of work, is worth $45,000 a year. And you cannot make that decision, or even know it's available, while the number doesn't exist. One column on the job sheet. Who did it. That's all it takes to start.

Seven percent. New quotes only. Callout first. Count for six weeks. That's the whole thing, and it's the fastest money available to a trade business that isn't already in trouble. First chapter's free: workbenchpress.com/sample

5. Count what actually happens. Track your close rate for six weeks. Unchanged? You left money on the table and should go again. Down more than ten points? You're near the ceiling for now. Either answer is information you've never had about your own business.

That $200 job made you $19. Every job carries fixed cost before any work happens. The call, the quote, the drive, the setup, the pack-down, the invoice, the follow-up when it doesn't get paid. Two hours of non-billable time per job, and that's being generous to yourself. At a $46 loaded cost, that's $92 the job has to cover before a spanner moves. So: a $200 job, about an hour and a half on site. Fixed cost per job — $92 Labour on site — $69 Materials — $20 Total $181. You made $19. Nineteen dollars. For a slot in the diary, a drive across town, and a job that pushed something else back. This is what a minimum charge is for, and it isn't about punishing small customers — it's the opposite. It's what makes the small job worth doing, so you can keep saying yes to the people who only ever need an hour of your time. Most trades need a minimum somewhere around two to two and a half hours of charge-out. Without one, every small job on your books is quietly subsidised by your big ones, and the busier you get with small work the worse the month looks. The owners who are flat out and broke at the same time are almost always running without one.

Your supplier has three prices and you've been on the second one for years. Trade accounts are tiered. There's list price, there's the standard account price, and there's the negotiated price. Most small operators sit on the middle one indefinitely and treat it as a fact of nature. It isn't. It's the price for people who don't ask. On $140,000 of annual materials, moving 4% is $5,600. If you run a 12% net margin, $5,600 of profit is what $46,667 of extra revenue would have produced. One phone call versus a month and a half of selling. What to ask for is specific. Not "any chance of a discount" — that's a favour, and favours get quietly withdrawn when your rep changes. Ask what your annual spend with them was, in writing, and what tier that volume qualifies for. Tiers are a category. Categories stick. If they won't move, get a quote from their competitor on your twenty most-bought lines. That piece of paper is useful whether you switch or not, and it's the only thing that reliably changes the first answer. The worst outcome here is that nothing changes and you've lost twenty minutes.

You charge the same at 9pm as you do at 9am. That decision costs you $8,400 a year. The phone goes at nine. You answer, because you always answer. You go out, because someone has water coming through a ceiling. And you bill your standard rate, because putting it up feels like taking advantage of someone having a bad night. Here's what that hour actually costs: an evening, the goodwill of whoever you were with, and a tired start tomorrow that quietly takes an hour off your productivity and never gets attributed to it. Say 40 after-hours callouts a year at three hours each. 120 hours. Moving from $140 to $210 — a standard 1.5×, not a gouge — is $8,400. And the objection you're bracing for mostly doesn't come. People calling at 9pm have already decided it can't wait until morning. They aren't price-shopping, because there's nobody to shop — which is exactly why they're calling you and not the big outfit with the answering service. An after-hours rate isn't greed. It's the price of something genuinely scarce, which is you, at night. The real cost of not having one isn't the $8,400. It's that you've quietly decided your evenings are worth nothing, and on that basis you'll keep answering that phone for another ten years.

You're sitting on $84,000 of work you've already done the hard part on. Count your open quotes. Not this week's — all of them. Most trade businesses have around thirty sitting there at an average of $2,800. That's $84,000 of specified, priced, decided work. You did the site visit. You wrote the scope. You put a number on it and sent it. Every one of those cost you time and none of them is earning. And they didn't say no. They said nothing, which is a completely different thing that gets filed in the same mental drawer. One round of follow-up at a 10% conversion is $8,400. That's a week of revenue for an afternoon on the phone — no marketing spend, no site visit, no quote to write, no new customer to win. It's the cheapest money in the entire business and almost nobody goes and gets it. The reason is that following up feels like chasing, and chasing feels like you need the work. You don't. "Did you get a chance to look at that?" is a question, not a plea. Most of the people who went quiet got busy, lost the email, or were waiting on a partner — and a good number of them are still going to do the job with somebody. Might as well be you.

Charging by the hour means getting better at your job cuts your pay. A job takes you six hours. At $140 an hour that's $840. Two years later you've done it a hundred times. You've worked out the order to do it in, what to bring, which bit always goes wrong. Now it takes four hours. $560. Same result for the customer. Same quality. Arguably better, because you're not learning on their house any more. $280 less, because you got good at it. That's not a quirk of the pricing model. That is the pricing model. Hourly rates price your time, and the better you get, the less of it you have to sell. Fixed price does the opposite. Quote the job at $840. Do it in four. You've earned $210 an hour and the customer paid exactly the number they agreed to — they were never buying hours. Nobody has ever wanted six hours of plumbing. They wanted the thing to work. The objection is always "but sometimes it takes longer." It will. That's what the spread across a hundred jobs is for, and it's exactly why you need margin by job type — so you know which work you can price fixed and which work you genuinely can't. Every year of experience you have is currently costing you money. That's worth sitting with.

Write down your last 20 jobs and where each one came from. It takes twenty minutes and it will annoy you. Most owners say word of mouth. Then they do the exercise and the list looks like this: 6 from one builder 4 from Google 3 repeat customers 2 neighbours of previous jobs 5 nobody can account for That's not word of mouth. That's one referral partner carrying 30% of your revenue, and a Google listing you have never once touched. Two things fall straight out of it. First, on $400,000 of revenue, that builder is $120,000 a year. If he retires, moves, or falls out with you over one bad week, that goes overnight and there is no plan, because nobody plans for the loss of a thing they never counted. Second, the channels you've never measured are the ones you've never improved. Four jobs from Google with zero effort is the single clearest signal you'll get all year, and it's invisible until you write the list. The five you can't account for matter too. That's the gap between what you think your marketing does and what it does. This is the cheapest marketing work available, because it's the only kind that tells you what to stop doing.