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Handyman invoice example for Marketing

all right welcome to 2024 All You Beautiful bulletproof handy men and women get your note taken materials out because you're getting actual answers on this video I'm going to tell you what pricing structures there are I'm going to give you advice on where ballp Park you might start your pricing at now all of these do depend and that's kind of the reason for this video is every time I ever went to look for pricing guides for running a handyman business the answer seem to always be it depends without really giving me a starting point so my goal here today is to explain to you what types of pricing structures are most common and to give you some actual pricing that you can get started with then depending on where you live and what the cost of living is and all kinds of other factors you can start adjusting your pricing up or down but the answers you're looking for will be here in this video so if you do want to get some note- taken materials I do highly suggest you write this down it's not too complicated but let's go ahead and jump right in so the first type of pricing I'm going to talk to you about is one that I don't use super frequently but I do have for very specific jobs and that's just set pricing that's having a very specific price for a very specific job and that price is always the same uh the example I'll give you with my business is going to be a toilet replacement now I work for property managers almost exclusively that's kind of what I promote on this channel although I make sure my information is good for every body but for my property managers most of them have an agreement with the owners of the homes that they manage and the agreement says if the price is not going to go over a certain Milestone if it's not going to go over this then the manager doesn't need approval from the homeowner to assign the workout and then if it is going to go over then they're going to need to get approval and that number tends to be $350 so there are some jobs that I've just made a flat 350 50 that perhaps would have been 375 400 whatever it might have been or maybe sometimes they'd be a little under 350 sometimes they'd be a little over but what I've done is toilets are the perfect example now you can go to Home Depot and buy a toilet for about a 100 bucks sometimes they're 87 bucks sometimes they're 127 bucks but a toilet is about 100 bucks so if you can charge 250 to get you up to that 350 if you can charge 250 plus the price of the toilet which is 100 bucks you can do a toilet for 350 or less and there are guys out there charging 250 including the toilet and there are guys out there charging $500 plus the toilet and pricing is everywhere but for me what I found is that over time after I do a lot of toilets I typically find that if I just do all my toilets for 350 at just a basic swap for $350 exactly that makes my property manager lives easy because the homeowners don't want to spend $400 on a new toilet and they may or may not be more likely to say no if approval is sought but if I can offer the solution of hey I can stay under your maintenance limit or just keep it right at that 350 I can do that every single time for you so that when you want to have me replace a toilet you just send me the job I'll do it and I'll guarantee we won't go over 350 so that's one way that's what I just call set pricing I do have that type of pricing for other jobs but we're not going to dive into exactly what I charge for every single job so next is going to be very very common within the property management industry as well um as well as with just working for homeowners but this one is very common with property managers and it's the idea of a trip fee now you can also call this a trip minimum there's some Nuance to differences but essentially what the trip fee is is I'll give you my example for how how I run my business I have a $125 trip fee when I first started out the agreement was $125 trip fee and that covers any work that I can get done in the first hour and if I go over then I'll charge more now I don't have a set hourly rate for if I go over that hour in fact I don't even use that system anymore I still have the $125 trip fee but I treat it as more like $125 minimum now so nothing specifically is covered in that trip fee it also doesn't mean that I start charging more than 125 from the moment I get there all it means is if you send me a job any job doesn't matter what it is I'm not going to charge less than $125 now my own personal policy is if it's a job I get done in let's say 30 minutes or less which honestly most of the one-off jobs I do can be done in 30 minutes or less if I have my inventory and all the tools on hand when I arrive but what I'll do is if it's under 30 minutes typically I'm just going to charge my $125 trip fee and that trip fee should work around most of the country now if you're in a rural area or if you're in a just a a state or a county that happens to be very blue collar where lots of people have these skills maybe you'll have to drop down as low as 80 I suggest not going under 100 but you might have to go as low as 80 if you're in a small rural town uh if you're in La I feel like 250 to 300 might be a perfectly Fair fee as well I have a lot of guys on this channel who are in High Cost of Living places that are charging 200 or more as their trip fee but for me mine's 125 if I get the work done under 30 minutes if it's a simple job it stays 125 however if it's electrical if it's Plumbing if it's outside in the middle of the summer on the roof and 120° Heat heat that's going to cost more if I have to crawl under a crawl space that's full of dog crap and stuff and spiders and I don't want to be there that's going to cost more but basically I start with that $125 and then I charge up from there so what a lot of guys are going to do is and you can do this I don't suggest the hourly but what a lot of guys will do is they'll have a trip fee plus hourly so what they're going to do is they're going to say okay I have a $100 trip fee plus $40 an hour which is kind of like having $140 minimum or they'll say I have $125 trip fee plus $80 an hour after the first hour and then most of their jobs are 125 but then if they go over an hour then it's going to be what 205 so a lot of different ways to do it so the first one is set pricing that's the example of the toilet for 350 just a flat fee every single time second one is a trip fee plus hourly the third one is what I call Trip fee plus line items and what I mean by that is uh move outs are a great example for this one so I have when I do a move out my process specifically for a move out or any vacant property that's got a long punch list this may be a a new property they're onboarding or it may be somebody just bought a house and they just have a lot of things they want fixed before they ever move in and this one is trip fee plus line items and what that means is I'm going to have that $125 trip fee at the very top of that invoice or estimate and that trip fee for a larger job like that if I'm doing trip fee plus line items that trip fee doesn't cover any work whatsoever because this is for a larger job that's got a whole lot of items so I know it's going to be more driving around and stuff and more planning so what I do is I charge $125 for the move out trip fee and that only covers the admin work the driving procuring materials cleanup hauling stuff to the dump all of that kind of stuff and actually I normally wouldn't include if I do have to go to the dump I'm probably going to charge extra for that as well if I don't have to go to the dump then that trip fee is just still covering like me bringing it home and throwing it in the trash can here but it starts with a 125 doesn't cover any of the actual work that gets done only the things that aren't related to the work and then as I go down that list I'm going to charge a set price for each item on that list now it's not always a set price sometimes it's jobs that are going to take vastly different amounts of times and materials where I don't have pricing set on it and I'm going to come up with what I think is fair for each line item but the rest of the line items do have set prices and let me show youall actually let me bring up my other screen scen cuz I should be able to show you where's it at where's it at is it this one why is that blank two well that shouldn't be blank that's weird well that sucks what's going on here give me one second guys it is not showing display 2 display to there it is all right so here we go I'm going to show you my line items let's come over to here we're going to click on this gear icon up here click on settings and then come over here to products and services so what you see here is a lot of my individual line items and each of these let's open up a random one as you can see I've got it identify it as a service rather than a product I've got it identified and I use this uh this labeling system for all of these labor cuz it could be material so labor comma doorbell comma button comma replace or I've got the description I've got the unit price $27 so every time I replace a doorbell push button I'm going to charge 27 so I got my trip fee at the top and then after that I just start clicking down the line each one of the these jobs that I do that I have custom lion items for I'm just going to click on it do a quantity and it's going to add it to that invoice and by the way guys you can actually if you use jobber which by the way there's a link in the description for a free trial of jobber if you use my link it comes with 20% off for the first three or 6 months I can't remember which I think it's six but anyways if you use my link you can get jobber for 20% off and if you use jobber you can actually download all of my custom line items every single one of these you can download and how you're going to do that let's go back to the home screen real quick so this is your home screen in Jabra let's say you download Jabra and you start using it come up to the gear icon at the top right click on settings from settings come over here to the left click on products and services this takes you to where we just were and if you scroll down to the bottom here you're going to see import CSV and Export CSV CSV is just a comma separated file right so I've exported this CSV so that I have it in a file if you go to the description on any of my videos down at the bottom there's going to be something to click on where you can request a lot of different documents from me that I provide for free and by the way they're always for free because there are no pay walls on this channel I'm never going to have you guys paying me for any information you need to start and or run your handyman business so once you click into that you'll be able to download my CSV file and it's going to be labeled as such and what that file is going to give you looks like I have 145 items right here so far I had 100 just a few days ago and over the last two days I've actually added 45 new items I'm trying to get more and more of these with set pricing and keep in mind the idea of this is that you charge your trip fee and that doesn't cover any work and then each individual item that you do you're going to click on these and it's going to autop populate you put the quantity in and it's going to add the price up you can also have some of these I have materials line items not only labor line items but material items do change quite frequently but anyways you can download that file once you get that file downloaded onto your computer you come here into jobber just the way I showed you to get here you come to down here to the bottom and you're going to click right here on import CSV and then you're going to click select CSV file that's going to take you into whatever you have on your computer where you store your documents that you've downloaded or created and you're going to double click on my CSV file that you downloaded and it's going to import it into your jobber account then you'll have all of my custom line items and what you'll need to do is you don't want to just go right off of my pricing and my descriptions things change in different geographies in different places and at different times you're going to have different types of clients than me but this will give you a good starting point and then you can go through read my descriptions change them to suit whatever you would like them to say change the pricing to suit the pricing that you would like to have but yall can actually import for free my line items you're just going to need jobber to import it into and by the way if you're receiving value from this video or from this channel in General my my theory has always been that if I provide you with value then that's when it's worth your while to help me out and the way you can help me out number one since jobber sponsors this Channel and I've been using jobber by the way for three years now since I first started this business long before they ever sponsored me they sponsor me cuz I know their software very well I'm very in-depth with it it is my favorite software I don't think there's anything else on the market y'all should be using to run your handyman business but if you want to return the favor if you receive value from this video and you want to return the favor go get yourself a free trial of jobber give it a shot you know if you don't like it don't buy it and if you do like it do buy it but you downloading that free trial lets jobber know that I'm doing my job which keeps them sponsoring the channel which gives me extra time that I can take away from the business to reinvest back into the channel to make these videos for you so let's let go ahead and close out of this and go back to just my beautiful face here so that was trip fee plus line items and that's how I do all of my move outs as a trip fee plus my custom line items and then for whatever jobs don't fall into a custom line item with a set price I attach a price depending on how the job went and how long it took next next type a lot of guys are a big fan of this especially I find if you're working for homeowners and especially if you're working for homeowners on bigger jobs or with long punch lists and that's the idea of a day rate now day rate doesn't always mean day rate it can be a day rate it can be a half day rate a quarter day rate but the idea being that you want to make a certain amount of money for being out of the house and working for a day I think a good place to start for a day rate and yes this is going to sound High to some of y'all but I do believe that this is a fair price based on all of the overhead for for example paying for jobber all of the overhead your insurance your workman's comp all of that stuff that's overhead that eats out of that labor that you charge so I feel like 600 a day is pretty good price now a lot of guys might start at 300 or 400 a day I really wouldn't go under that unless you're just so desperate that you've got to pay that electric bill tomorrow or they're cutting your electric off you know we all got to do what we got to do to take care of our families but as far as planning and running your handyman business over the long term what I try to shoot for as sort of a minimum where I'm happy at the end of the day is $600 for a day rate now $ 800 is possible a th000 is possible depending on where you live more than a th000 is possible and sometimes I have $300 days and sometimes I have $400 days but 600 I feel is a good price for a full day rate and then typically if you break that down you can say okay so my half day rate is going to be 350 but maybe you want to be busy all day every day so you might make your half day rate um sorry so the day rate 600 your half day might be 300 but if you want to stay busy all day if you want to incentivize people to block off a larger portion of your day that they're guaranteed paying you for you might make your half day rate instead of 300 make it 350 or 375 and then of course if you go from 600 to 300 half of that's $150 so you'd have $150 for a quarter day which most people are going to assume is going to be like 2 hours so here's the problem with 150 for 2 hours your trip fee if it's 125 that's going to be for basically an hour of your time cuz you're going to drive there maybe it's a 20 minute drive and then you get the job done in another 20 minutes and you clean up and you got a little invoicing to do or something so you're looking at $125 for an hour so 2 hours would be $250 so if you're down here charging 150 for a quarter day you're really kind of screwing yourself out of income that you could have had to take care of your family because you're too worried about charging too much so just keep that in mind most guys are going to do a full day or a half day so call it 600 for a full day 400 for a half day again I'm trying to give you the answers you're actually looking for while still making it clear that yes it does depend if you live in LA and somewhere where you can't even rent a one-bedroom apartment for $2,000 a month you need to be charging way more than what I'm telling you and if you live in a little tiny town with a population of 8,000 in the middle of nowhere full of hardworking Blue Collar men you might have to charge 60 it may not even be viable or it may be viable cuz you can charge 60 but then your rent is so cheap and your food is so cheap and everything just the cost of living in general is so cheap that you can afford to get by doing that but that's uh so that's the day rates and then finally approved estimates these are always super nice and I actually do my estimates the same way as I do the trip fee plus line item so like for the move outs cuz guys I only do estimates for bigger jobs if it's not a bigger job then doing the estimates kind of a waste of time like I can just go fix your stuff faster than what I can come up with an estimate and send it to you and wait for you to approve it etc etc so if I'm doing an estimate it's typically on a bigger job with more items on a punch list and I'm going to use my trip fee method and the other thing you can do by the way uh this is a trick I learned to really boost my revenue is when I get a move out if it's in a hurry or if it's small I might just go over there and knock it out and do my invoicing as I described previously however if we're not in a hurry and if it's a bigger move out or if we're not in a hurry and it's small but I see that there's lots of other things that the property manager didn't notice need to get fixed then what I'll do is instead of knocking the work out that day instead I'll just do a full inspection and by the way in my documents you can download there is a giant inspection checklist for you in there as well so you can start doing these thorough inspections for your property managers but what I'll do is one of two things uh say it's like four items on a move out I might do the four items and inspect and then come and invoice those four items but then I'm also going to make a new estimate and on that new estimate is going to be with jobber if you have the grow plan you can do a line item approve or deny so what that means is most software with most companies and even with jobber if you don't have the grow plan or maybe the connect plan can't remember which but most companies when you're writing an estimate the client cannot approve or disapprove one line item at a time they're approving the whole estimate or they're not approving the whole estimate so what I find is that I can send my property managers an estimate that has a few items they requested at the top and they don't want you to attach a bunch more items if they can't line item approve or deny so I'll estimate the few items at the top exactly the way they asked me to but I'll also do my inspection and guys I'll add 10 or 12 or 20 more items onto that estimate with my again with uh let me show you this again with all of these customized line items so if I notice that it needs a new carbon monoxide detector and they didn't find that I'll just click on that and add it to the estimate and I'll click on each individual item that I found that's additional so that way if they don't want any of that extra work done or for whatever reason they're just they're not going to do anything about it they can still click on and approve the items they asked for and you still get your approval and you still do your work but what I can tell you from experience is if your pricing is basically fair and it's legit stuff you found and by the way you can upload pictures on jobber to your estimate as well so each lion item of the new things you found you can attach a picture to those lion items so they can see that it truly is broke but I find that they will typically approve most of the additional items that you put on there if they're legit it items and if the pricing is fair and if the total fits within the budget and that's the other handy thing too with a line item approve or deny let's say they have an $800 budget and you send them all these line items that if they were to approve all of them comes out to $1,100 well they don't have an $1,100 budget but what they can do is just approve the right work to get up to that $800 budget and then they can still stay within their budget they don't necessar necessarily fix all the additional items you sent them but they're going to fix a lot of them um so approved estimates those are the best way to go guys just make sure when you do your estimates that you're very clear about two things first thing make sure you're clear about exactly what work is included what you're actually estimating for and how much that's going to cost and then number two you need to have a line in there which is in my custom line items there is a line for you to click on to just add to each of those estimates that's pre written that says no work not specifically listed within this estimate is to be assumed because what they'll do is let's say they want you to replace an interior door on a vacant property you go replace the interior door and after you're done and you invoice they come back a week later and say hey you didn't paint that door well they didn't approve you painting that door they didn't ask you to paint the door they asked you to replace the door to which they might reply well of course we wanted paint painted why would we not want it painted to which my reply would be I don't know that you want me painting it I would assume that you'll want it painted but this is a vacant property it needs all kinds of paint work done and as far as I know you have a painter who's going to come paint or you're going to ask me to give you an estimate to paint later or you just have another handyman who goes around to all your vacant properties touching up paint like I don't know now of course for me I would always have the next line be another individual Pro or deny line item that says add paint to this interior door for $100 and that's fine if you want to do it that way as well but do make sure that you're very clear about what work you're going to do how much it's going to cost and specifically let them know that no work not specifically spelled out in this estimate is to be assumed because they will assume they'll be upset that you didn't do something they thought you were going to do that you never said you were going to do but now they're upset so so you got to make sure you got that line in there uh next okay we're right at the end now so um I talked to y'all about jobber uh also as far as insurance I use next insurance I have since just about the very beginning of this business there's also a link in the description to get a free quote from them uh I have a newsletter the bulletproof handyman newsletter there's a link in the description to click on that and you'll be able to get my newsletter also if you go request any of my documents when you sign up to get my documents that will also get a newsletter sent on its way to you and then finally last but not least I know a lot of y'all aren't going to be a fan of this but I am on the xplatform formerly known as Twitter I'm going to start doing live streams on there very soon because they're adding a video option so what we're going to be able to do on X is when I do an X spaces uh currently it's Audio Only but y'all can I can turn on your microphone and we can actually conversate back and forth instead of me just reading your comments and then responding and talking to a camera I'll be able to actually talk to you back and forth when we do that and then also they're adding video this year and that's the exciting part because when they add the video to it not only we'll be able to talk back and forth but we'll be able to see each other why we talk so go look for bulletproof handyman or handyman hangout either one on Twitter find me there formerly known as Twitter it's now and follow me over there I'm going to be doing more and more over there however YouTube is not going away either I'll always be here doing stuff as well so let's recap real quick you've got set pricing that's like the $350 flat price that I charge on toilets you've got a trip fee plus hourly that can be where part of the work is included in that trip fee and then it's hourly after the first hour or that first hour can start billing right away you've got trip fee plus line items that's what I do on bigger jobs such as move outs and then you've got day rates half day rates quarter day rates and then finally approved estimates and yes you can just do hourly some people do flat hourly I really don't recommend it it's the one subject I won't get into detail with on this channel uh working hourly causes people to think that you're their employee and you're not their employee you're a service provider they need to let you know what they need done before you get there when you get there you do what they need done you charge the agreed upon rate and then you're done you don't want to be in a position where somebody said oh well you're $100 an hour and I want to pay for two hours and I want you to just do whatever work I tell you to do you're not an employee you're a business owner so I don't recommend just doing flat hourly work otherwise I love you guys I hope y'all are out there killing it and I will see you on the next video