Pricing

How I Learned to Price Every Job the Same Way — and Finally Knew I Was Making Money

By Travis Evans, Founder of TradeGOAT · 20+ years in the trades

For most of my career, I priced jobs the way nearly every trade guy I know prices them. I looked at the work, thought about what it would take, and landed on a number that felt right. Sometimes I nailed it. Sometimes I left money on the table. And every so often I won the job, did the work well, and found out at the end that I'd basically worked for free.

The misses weren't even the worst part. The worst part was that I couldn't tell you why any number was what it was. The price lived in my head. If you'd asked me to explain how I got there, or to teach somebody else to do it, I couldn't have handed you a method, only two decades of gut feel.

That's a real problem, and if you run a trade business, I'd bet it's your problem too. It doesn't matter whether you install elevators like me, run HVAC, pull wire, pour concrete, or hang gutters. The job changes. The pricing problem doesn't.

Gut-feel pricing has three quiet costs

You can't teach it. If the only person who can price a job right is you, your business is hostage to your own head. You can't hand a bid to an estimator, you can't bring your kid into the business the right way, and you can't take a week off without the numbers going sideways.

You can't repeat it. Every job becomes a fresh guess, so your results swing. One job carries you, the next one bleeds, and you can't see the pattern because there isn't one, only mood, memory, and how busy you were the day you quoted it.

You can't tell if you're actually making money. Busy is not the same as profitable. Plenty of shops run flat out all year and end up with nothing to show for it, because the price was never built to leave real profit behind in the first place.

The fix isn't a better gut. It's a repeatable method.

Here's what changed everything for me: pricing shouldn't be a feeling you produce on the spot. It should be the same steps, run the same way, on every single job. Mine comes down to three:

1. Add up what the job truly costs you. That means materials, labor, and the piece almost everyone forgets, which is your overhead for the days that job ties up your business. Your truck, your insurance, your phone, your office: that clock runs whether the job is profitable or not, so it belongs in the cost.
2. Decide the margin your business actually needs, not to just survive, but to grow.
3. Price so that margin is real. One clean margin on your true cost. Not "mark materials up 20%, guess a little extra on labor, hope it covers itself." That old way is exactly why pricing feels like a dark art. One margin on true cost is something you can explain, defend, and do the same way every time.

Because overhead goes into the cost before you take your margin, the profit number you see is honest. It's not a number that looks good on the proposal and then quietly gets eaten by the cost of keeping the lights on.

Repeatable means teachable

Once pricing is a method instead of a feeling, you can hand it to someone else. Your estimator can run it. The person you're grooming to take over one day can run it. You can step away for a week and the numbers going out the door are still your numbers.

The price is only half of it. Closing the loop is the other half.

Here's what I didn't fully appreciate until the method was running: a price is a prediction. It's your best guess at what a job will cost and what it'll leave you. And because a real method captures that number instead of losing it in your head, you can finally hold the finished job up against it and see the truth.

You can look at a job before and after and see exactly where it bled. Was it labor hours, a material you underpriced, or trips you ate? And you don't even have to wait for the end. You can watch a job against its price while it's still running, and catch it drifting toward the red while there's still time to do something about it, instead of finding out after it's closed, when it's too late to fix.

Then, across many jobs, those same captured numbers show you the patterns: which kinds of work actually pay, where you consistently underbid, whether your margin is holding. You stop re-guessing your pricing and start managing it.

Why I built TradeGOAT

I built TradeGOAT because I needed it. I wanted this method to run on every job automatically, with true cost in, overhead handled, and one honest margin, the same way every time, and then I wanted the tool to stay with the job all the way to the last dollar, so the number I promised myself going in is the number I can actually check at the end. For any trade, not just mine.

And I built it to work with the paperwork you already use. I was never going to ask a contractor to throw out the proposal and the process they've spent years getting right just to use a piece of software. It stays your business, your prices and your documents.