How do you calculate your baseline price before sending a quote out?

I think anyone that's basing prices off their competitors is making some really big assumptions that could get themselves in trouble. If you base it on someone else's price you are basically assuming they are saavy business people that have a firm understanding of their P&Ls and are pricing themselves for growth. I'd guess that 9/10 contractors are not like that. 

Basic rule of thumb - for every $1 you spend, your should be charging $2. Obviously you aren't going to get your overhead back on one job but you need to come up with an hourly rate or day rate for labor that will help you get that back over the course of the month. 

our minimum rate is a half day - $550. It works out to $137.50/ hr. What I learned years ago when my min charge was less, people would run my guys around trying to accomplish as much as possible in 2 hours then we'd get callbacks then poof! There goes any profit. I'd rather have ample time to accomplish tasks, only work with people who can afford quality services. I'd rather have my guys not work and make no money then have them work at someone's house, have to coordinate everything, and give me stress - AND make no money. 

One thing that I think could help significantly is having a database of all jobs that you have done. Having each past job labeled with price, time spent, what the job was, what equipment was used, what parts were needed, etc and then connecting some sort of AI to it that can access all of it. You could then ask the AI "hey I'm quoting a job for X and should take about Y time" and it would spit out a good estimation of what it should cost based on your own historic data. Its a system that could be set up with claude in a couple hours.

One thing I would make sure gets counted is the time that is not actually spent doing the job. Travel, picking up materials, loading up and cleanup can eat into the profit too. A job may look good on paper until all of that extra time gets added in.

Early on, I definitely priced more by feel and by what I thought the market would tolerate. Over time, I started looking harder at the true cost of a stop: labor, payroll burden, drive time, fuel, supplies, dump fees, software, and the admin time around the job.

For a route-based business, drive time is a huge one. A yard that takes 15 minutes to service can become a bad account fast if it also requires 20 minutes of windshield time.

I also pay attention to the revenue per visit and whether the route can support our target number of stops per hour (our minimum is 2.5 with the goal of 3+ an hour).

The biggest lesson for me was realizing that competitor pricing is useful context, but it can’t be the calculator. If their labor costs, route density, overhead, or service level are different, copying their price can put you in a hole pretty quickly.

I’d rather know the minimum number that makes the job worth doing before the quote ever goes out.