This works when you're small but gets harder to sustain as you grow. Shooting from the hip might close jobs early on, but it's not a pricing strategy. When I started I had a rough sense of what to charge, but it wasn't until I did a proper cost breakdown that I realized I was undercharging and definitely not paying myself enough.
Letting the client anchor the price is risky. If they say a number first, you're negotiating from their floor, not your actual cost structure. The jobs that feel like wins can quietly be the ones bleeding you.
Having a set price based on your real costs — labor, overhead, equipment, profit margin — means every job either makes sense or it doesn't. No guessing, no hoping.
