How to price travel so a job across town does not run at a loss
Three structures cover almost every service business, and the choice between them depends on how spread out the work is rather than on preference.Nine costs an estimate leaves out, and the party who ends up paying them
Each of these is real, recurring and routinely absent from a written quote, which means it is absorbed by whoever noticed it last.What a probation period is for, and what a wrong hire actually costs
A trial period does not change anyone's legal rights in most of the country. What it does is create a schedule for a decision that otherwise never gets made.A one-page agreement that holds up, and the seven clauses that make it work
Most small business disputes come down to four or five terms nobody wrote down, and all of them fit on a single sheet of paper.Write the change order before the work, or pay for it after
Most disputes on small jobs are not about the original price. They are about work nobody wrote down, agreed to verbally in a hallway.The invoice is ninety days late. Lien, small claims, or write it off
Three routes exist for an unpaid invoice, they have different deadlines and different costs, and the choice is usually made too late to matter.A freelancer raised rates by a fifth and lost three clients. The math worked
Losing customers after a price increase is not evidence the increase was wrong. It depends entirely on which customers left and what they were costing.Converting a sole proprietorship to an LLC, and what actually changes on Monday
The filing is the easy part. The work that determines whether the structure protects anything is the housekeeping in the weeks afterward.A shop rewrote its job ad and the applicant pool changed in three weeks
The old advert produced volume and almost no fit. Four specific changes cut the number of applications and raised the number worth interviewing.Six steps to an hourly rate that covers what the work actually costs you
Build the rate from available hours and real overhead rather than from what the last outfit charged, and the number stops being a guess.Your best month can empty the bank account. Here is the month that does it
Profit and cash answer different questions. A worked month shows how a bakery can bill more than ever and still miss payroll.A landscape crew, five hours of weekly drive time, and the repricing that fixed it
A two-crew yard maintenance company found a fifth of its paid hours went to driving between scattered jobs, then changed how it charged.