Hey SirDumas - You are on the right track. It's good to get a handle of that stuff early on. I'd say the faster you can give prices for things the easier your life will become later. You need to figure out what 1-2 years from now your business would need to have steady growth then charge that today. Are you going to need a bigger work truck? What's that monthly payment? Do you have storage? Etc etc. Figure out what you'd pay somebody, all in with burden, multiple it by 2 then that's the amount you bake in to the price.
What I've done to save me a lot of thinking is have either a half day or full day rate. Half day is $550, Full day is $950. If you're by yourself your would probably be less but that's what I need to charge to have it make sense for me. I generally stay away from any jobs less than a half day because by the time you load your tools, hit the store, wrap your mind around a project, that's a half day anyway. Why plan your day around an hour job unless you're willing to do a bunch of small jobs in a day (we all were at one point)?
Also, I use chat GPT for pretty much all estimating now. It knows my rates, I have it in the settings to heavily scrutinize my thought process and challenge my thinking (so it's not just being agreeable). I have it put together a production schedule for a job and I review that to see if it makes sense then make sure the daily charge rate translates to the final number.
I hope that's not confusing but HMU privately if you want more info on any of that!
