Guides
Guides for running the work
These are the long answers. How to price a job so the number holds up when the truck breaks down, how to raise prices without losing the customers worth keeping, and what has to change when the work outgrows the person doing it.
Each one is a method you could follow with a notepad and nothing else. Where there is arithmetic, it is worked through rather than summarized.
How these are written
Every guide shows its numbers. A guide that tells you to know your costs and then never shows a cost is an article about the idea of pricing, which is not much use at seven in the morning with a quote to send. So the examples carry real figures, including the awkward ones: the hours nobody bills, the callback that ate the margin, the overhead that does not stop when the crew does.
Nothing here is gated. There is no form between you and the method. Some guides pair with a tool that does the arithmetic for you, and that is a choice, not a toll gate.
Most of them start with what an hour costs you
Pricing work, raising prices, deciding whether a job type is worth keeping: all of it rests on one number, which is what an hour of your technician time actually costs once overhead, unbillable hours and the employer side of payroll are counted. Most businesses carry a number that is too low, and every price built on it is too low by the same margin.
The labor rate calculator works that number out with you. It runs on the page, and you only get asked for an email if you want the spreadsheet version to keep.
Who writes them
MinnSight builds and runs operations systems for small service businesses, which means we spend our time inside the part of the business these guides are about: the schedule, the job records, the invoices, the procedures somebody has been meaning to write down for two years. The guides come out of that work rather than from a keyword list.
If you want the background on who we are, that is on the about page. If you would rather skip the reading and get a specific answer about your business, the free audit returns one on the page in a couple of minutes.
A guide gets written when the same question turns up three or four times in a row, which is why the list is short and grows slowly. If the thing you are stuck on is not here yet, say so. That is usually how the next one starts, and it is a better use of a few minutes than another article nobody asked for.