Your truck is looking pretty worn out, can you afford a new one?
You always wanted that expensive piece of equipment, can you afford it?
You have toyed with building or buying a shop, can you afford it?
Well… good news, it’s not hard to find out.
How?
By letting math expose the answer.
So often we make these kinds of decisions emotionally rather than logically.
And we are indeed emotional beings, we usually want logic to back up and confirm our emotions.
Our emotions don’t usually back up or confirm logic.
Meaning you can see living proof that you can or can’t afford a thing on a spreadsheet, but our emotional decision-making will usually trump the logic.
I can’t control or guide your emotions, but what I can at least do is show you the logical outcome of the thing you want to buy or do in your business. 😜
How?
By plugging every dollar you spend (or want to spend) in your business into a budget, and then seeing how that flows through to your rates.
When you do this, a common response is “Oh! Buying that new truck only impacts my hourly rate by $1.25 a man-hour?! That’s a no-brainer!”
Meaning, they’ve translated how the new cost flows through to their rates.
Then when they see the new rate, it’s like, “I can do that, no problem.”
When you look at the big price tag for the new truck, it looks like an overwhelming amount.
But you break it down to your hourly rate, not a big deal. It is negligible.
The big idea here is that it is your customer’s job to pay for all of your expenses in your business.
Not your job.
Your only job is to find customers who will pay your rates for the product you provide.
Now granted, you can price yourself out of the market. But that’s kind of a different tangent/discussion.
What I want to help you do is shift your mindset from what the wishlist item costs you, to what it’ll cost your customer.
For instance, I was talking to a contractor that was considering buying a SynkedUP subscription to price his jobs profitably and do job costing.
Emotionally, he wasn’t sure if he could afford it.
Of course I’m biased, but I was thinking “Bro, you can’t afford not to buy it.”
But that doesn’t matter.
What matters is how he felt, and he needed the confidence that he could swing the cost.
So we did some quick math and learned that buying SynkedUP for a full year would only impact his hourly rate by 34 cents a man-hour.
Wow… when you put it that way….
See what I mean?
Investing in your business is not spending your “fun money”.
Rather, it is building the engine that produces the product that your customer wants. (and will pay for)
Now… you’re probably thinking, “Hmmm… how much would my wish list item impact my rates?”
Well, lucky you, I got just the tool to figure that out.
I have the quick n dirty labor rate calculator (5 min)
Or the detailed full on budgeting tool that breaks everything down in detail. (30-60) min
Help yourself, and hit me up if you have any questions on it.
Go get em. 💪
Weston Zimmerman
SynkedUP CEO and founder
