Enter your desired owner's salary, annual overhead, and target net profit margin — get the gross revenue number your business needs to hit. Then break it down by month, week, and job.
Free PDF: one-page revenue planning template, quarterly milestone breakdown, and a pricing audit checklist to find where you're leaving money on the table.
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Ask most solo operators or small shops what their annual revenue target is and you'll get a blank look or "as much as I can get." That's not a plan — that's hoping. And it leads to two failure modes: taking every job at any price because you're not sure what you need, or turning down work that would have actually moved the needle.
The correct order is: decide what you want to take home → add overhead → add profit buffer → arrive at revenue target. Most people do it in the wrong direction, trying to maximize revenue and hoping what's left is enough. Start with your personal number and build up.
The most useful output of this calculator is the jobs-per-week number. If hitting your target requires 8 service calls per week and you're currently doing 4, that's a marketing and capacity problem. If it requires 2 large installations per week and you have the pipeline for it, you're probably fine. The weekly number tells you whether your business model can deliver the revenue you need.
Revenue is vanity; profit is sanity. A trade business at 8% net margin has no cushion for a slow month, an equipment failure, or a bad debt. At 15%+ you can absorb a bad quarter and still pay yourself. Below 10%, you're one slow season from crisis. Build the margin target into your pricing — not as an afterthought, but as the starting point.
Revenue planning worksheets, pricing calculators, estimate templates, and business forms to run a trade business that actually builds wealth — not just income.
This calculator works backwards from your desired take-home pay to tell you exactly how much revenue your business must generate each year — factoring in overhead, taxes, and your target profit margin. Solo contractors use it at the start of each year to set a real revenue target instead of guessing what a 'good year' looks like. Enter your desired annual income, overhead costs, and margin goal, and you'll get a single number to aim for — your minimum viable revenue.