As a professional handyman, I’ve completed many jobs that paid well over $200 per hour and some that paid less than $20.

In this podcast episode, I share five of my least profitable jobs.

Why?

Because those are the ones with some of the biggest lessons.

HS051 – My top 5 LEAST profitable handyman jobs (and the mistakes that cost me big)

Welcome to another episode of the Handyman Startup Podcast. My name is Dan Perry, and today I’m going to share five of my least profitable jobs that I’ve done as a pro handyman. I’ll share what those jobs were, why they weren’t profitable, and the mistakes that I made that led to me losing time and money on those jobs.

Now, pricing mistakes are very common during the first few years for most new service providers, and many of them can be avoided with the right insight and approach. Fixing or avoiding these mistakes is one of the easiest ways to boost your income as a pro handyman. I’ll say that again. Avoiding Simple pricing mistakes that almost everybody makes is one of the easiest ways to boost your income and make more money in less time as a pro handyman. If you’re just getting started, I think you’ll find this episode very helpful. And learning from my mistakes can easily save you thousands of dollars over the course of the next year, and potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of your career.

Now, before we jump into the content today, I’d like to mention that this is a monthly podcast. If you’d like to learn more about starting a handyman business that can replace your income, generate over $100,000 per year in profit, and give you more control over your schedule while allowing you to do services you enjoy without having to hire employees, without having to work more than 40 hours per week, then head over to handymanstartup.com/free. There, you can sign up for my free email newsletter where I share updates and exclusive content you can only access if you’re a subscriber. Plus, I put together a free startup kit that you’ll receive once you sign up. In that, you’ll learn 10 profitable handyman services you can start offering right now, common business mistakes that new handymen almost always make and how to avoid them, and my number one marketing strategy for filling your schedule with profitable jobs. So pause this right now, open up your web browser, visit handymanstartup.com/free, and sign up for my email newsletter. It’ll only take a minute, and you’ll be all set to receive that free startup kit, plus exclusive content and updates shared only with my subscribers.

All right, let’s jump right into five of my least profitable jobs ever. Now, a quick caveat here. These jobs were mostly done in 2012 and 2013, when I was just starting my business. Since then, we’ve seen inflation total about 35% since then. So $100 back then had the same purchasing power as $135 now. Or to put that a different way, you’d have to have $135 now to buy the same stuff that you could buy for $100 back in 2012. So these prices might be even lower than what you’d expect for 2024. But just keep that perspective when I am sharing the numbers.

All right, job number one. This was a painting job that I did for a friend of a friend, and this was the first job that I ever did as a handyman outside of jobs that I’d done for a couple of friends and on my own home. So this is like the first one. And this was for a young couple. They just had a new baby. They’re living in this two-story home, and they needed their upstairs master bedroom painted, the hallway painted, and the guest bathroom painted.

They also wanted a baseboard and they had a drywall repair downstairs. They call me; they know I’m just starting my business, and I take all the measurements and exchange pleasantries. Then I go home, and I have no idea how much to charge for this. I called up somebody I knew who was a contractor, and I asked him, How would you quote this job? And he said, Well, painters usually charge by the square foot. So you just find out whatever the rate is in your area, multiply it by that, and you come up with a number for that. The same thing applies to the baseboards; you multiply whatever the rate is by the linear feet, and you charge by the linear foot. For the baseboards, you charge for painting by the square foot. So I’m like, Okay, great. So I sit down, I write it up. I come up with this quote, I think it’s like $900. I can’t remember the exact number. But I thought, Wow, that seems high. Okay, $900 just to paint a couple of bedrooms. It’s almost $1,000 just for some painting and on the baseboards. It seemed high to me.

It’s not something I would personally invest in. But anyway, I submit this quote. I do the job, and the job ends up taking me way longer than I thought it would. It took me an entire week to do this project. I was there for eight hours minimum each day, running up and down the stairs, hustling as hard as I could, trying to do really good work, but it was a lot of work. And it took me a full week. If you run the numbers, you will see that there was about $200 or $300 in materials for that project. I think more like $300. So I made $600 for an entire week of work. And if you do the math, that’s only $15 per hour. Plus, I felt rushed and stressed pretty much the entire time I was doing the project. And then, to top it off, the customer didn’t even seem happy about it when I was done. They probably knew they got a serious discount, but they also probably thought it would take way less time, and then I would do it in a day or two like a professional painter probably would have.

I didn’t get any referrals from this job. That customer never hired me again. I didn’t make very much money. I mean, it was a pretty bad situation. I didn’t enjoy that. It was my first job. It was early December when I was first starting my business. Now, looking back at that project, I would have charged probably more like $6,000 for a similar project. But realistically, I’d probably turn it down because I don’t like painting jobs. I don’t take on painting jobs anyway. I wouldn’t have even quoted the job.

So, what mistakes led to this? What were my mistakes?

Now, the number one mistake here was that I was too eager for the job. When I was quoting processing this job, I was thinking, I need to make absolute sure that they say yes to this so I get this job. This is my only job. This might be my only opportunity. And I was thinking irrationally at that moment, processing it as if it was my only opportunity. And if I didn’t get If I were to get that job, somehow my business was going to fail or something. I don’t know what was going on in there, but I was too eager.

And whenever you’re too eager for a job, and you need that job, that’s almost always going to lead to bad pricing decisions. Another mistake I made was quoting based on a different business model. I operate a handyman business that provides a variety of small repairs. So I can’t necessarily compete with a painting company that has benefits different from those of working with me. I’m the guy that you call to do everything. I’ll do a wide variety of projects. You only have to call one person. There are other benefits behind that. So, my pricing model isn’t going to be the same. Whereas a painting company is going to hire cheap labor to do that job, so they’re going to be able to make it profitable despite charging a little bit less, maybe charging those rates. Plus, there was a bunch of stuff that I missed out. There were a whole bunch of additional factors that I should have factored into my pricing. For example, sanding the paint, a lot of the prep work that I needed to do, removing the old baseboards, painting the baseboards, the fact that it was upstairs and I had to go up and down the stairs, the fact that they had furniture in there that I had to move around while I was doing the project, which made it way more difficult to work.

I think they still had their bed in the middle of the room, so I had to work around that while I was doing this project. So there are all these different factors