Free calculator for landscaping and home service owners

Find out what an hour on the job actually costs you.

He charged $65 an hour. His real cost was $88. Twelve years of jobs that quietly lost money, and he never saw it. Run your own numbers in about ten minutes with the free True Hourly Rate Calculator.

What this actually tells you

Most owners price off what the last guy charged, or what feels about right, or what they charged three years ago plus a little. That works until it doesn't.

The calculator walks you through six steps and gives you one number at the end. Your True Hourly Rate. That is what it costs to put a crew on the road for an hour, with your profit built in. Once you have it, you can look at a job and know before you bid it whether it makes you money.

1Total annual business expenses
2Total available work hours, billable staff only
3Adjust for realistic billable hours, because nobody bills 100% of the day
4Your hourly break even
5Your target profit margin
6Your True Hourly Rate

Takes about ten minutes. You need last year's expenses and a rough headcount. That's it.

Open the calculator

What owners find when they run it

Almost nobody likes their number the first time. That is the point of running it.

Adam runs a landscaping company. He wasn't struggling, he was busy. Crews out, jobs done, revenue looked fine. When we ran his numbers we found he was losing money on more than half his maintenance contracts. He didn't need more jobs. He needed to know which jobs were worth having. Ninety days later his profit was up, with no new customers.

Matt is a general contractor who was losing money every month. Same market, same team, same trucks. We found which jobs actually made money and he stopped saying yes to the rest. Eight months later he was stacking profit.

You will probably find at least one service you have been running at a loss. Better to find it in a spreadsheet than at the end of another season.

Who put this together

Derrik Schweppe has run over 10,000 one on one coaching calls with service business owners. This is the first thing he runs with a new client, before touching pricing, hiring, or marketing, because everything else depends on knowing this number.

It is the same calculator his paying clients use. You get it free, you keep it, and you can run it every year.

Questions

Is this actually free?: Yes. First name and email so we know where to send it. No card, no trial, no call required.
How long does it take?: About ten minutes if you have last year's expense total handy. Round numbers are fine for the first pass.
I'm not a numbers guy.: Nothing here is harder than filling in six boxes. The tool does the math. If you can read a job estimate you can run this.
What happens after I put my email in?: You get a sign-in link that opens the calculator. Derrik sends a few emails after that with how to use it. Unsubscribe any time and you keep the calculator.

You have been pricing off a number you have never checked. Ten minutes and you will know the real one.