When I started out, small jobs were great—cash flow, simple logistics, easy to manage solo. But here in California, the licensing requirements kick in pretty quickly, and honestly, it's tough to build a sustainable living doing five-hundred-dollar jobs one after another. You *can* make decent money as a solo operator doing small work—maybe a hundred and fifty grand a year if you're disciplined—but there's a lot of feast and famine, and you'll inevitably take jobs that aren't worth your time. If you want a vacation, your income is at a stand still. Worse yet, if you get injured you will be out of work.
The math changes dramatically once you bring on employees. We used to do quarter- day minimums (so trying to do small jobs), and what happened was customers would try to pack as much as possible into those two and a half hours. We'd end up doing callbacks on jobs we should've gotten right the first time because we were rushing to satisfy our customers. When we shifted to larger projects and raised our rates, those callback problems basically disappeared. Not that we don't get call back but now I make sure we have enough time to do the job right instead of losing a whole day on a faucet that's being difficult. The administrative overhead for a one-and-a-half-hour faucet swap is almost identical to a three-day fence job—you're still scheduling, taking photos, managing details. Do enough small jobs and you're just spinning your wheels. Lose enough money on things that are kind of stupid and you'll only want the projects that are worth the headache.
My take: if you're flying solo and okay with the unpredictability, small jobs work fine. When I first started out, I'd play volleyball every morning, start my days at 10am and could pick and choose my customers and have full control of my schedule. I focused on getting a ton of reviews which did set me up really well when I wanted to transition to bigger projects. But if you want to scale with employees (or want to ultimately be able to leverage other people's time to earn you money) and build something sustainable long-term, you're better off positioning yourself differently—less "handyman," more service provider—and focusing on bigger projects where the economics actually make sense. Handyman is a service, not your identity.
