Know exactly how many jobs you can handle per week, where your revenue ceiling sits, and whether you're at capacity or just disorganized—before you take another call.
A solo tradesman working 5 days × 7 billable hours has 35 billable hours per week at absolute maximum. Subtract drive (7.5 hrs), admin (5 hrs), callbacks (1–2 hrs), and no-shows (0.5 hrs wasted), and real capacity is closer to 20–22 billable hours. That's 4–5 jobs at 4.5 hrs each. Anyone promising 8–10 jobs/week is double-booking or burning out.
A 5% callback rate at 4.5 hrs/job costs you 14 hours per quarter in free labor—nearly 2 full days. That's $1,100–$1,500 in lost revenue at market rates. Tracking callbacks by job type often reveals 1–2 specific job types causing 80% of them. Fix the process or stop taking those jobs.
You can't add more hours to the week. You can raise your average job value. Going from $850/job to $1,100/job (30% increase) adds $1,000+/week in revenue without adding a single hour. That comes from upselling, better qualifying, and stopping the habit of quoting cheap jobs to fill the schedule.
The Tradesman's Business Starter Kit includes a weekly schedule template, revenue planning spreadsheet, and the core business forms every solo trade needs to run lean. Guide from $19 — Complete Kit with all 19 templates, $49.
Get the Business Kit — $19Before you commit to a job, do you know if you have the crew hours to deliver it? This planner calculates your total available labor hours per week after factoring in crew size, billable hours, scheduled jobs, and time off. Use it to avoid overbooking, set realistic start dates, and stop promising timelines you can't actually hit.