My top five least profitable handyman jobs

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.

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 that should have significantly increased the price, even if I was pricing it based on that different business model.

The third mistake that I made was that my pricing was more based on fear versus the numbers that I needed to hit to make a profit. I was too worried about having a good price versus saying, Here’s what I need to charge to run a profitable business. And that’s a mistake that a lot of people make. So that’s job number one, one of my first jobs. Did I learn a lot? I’m not even sure I learned all that much from that job. I learned that I probably wouldn’t take on a painting job like that with their furniture in the house and that if I did, I would probably need to charge more. But I was still pretty new. I wasn’t even sure that that was a pricing mistake as much as I thought it might have been a lack of skill. But it wasn’t a lack of skill. It was definitely how I was looking at that job and the pricing mistakes.

All right, second job. The next job I want to talk about was a deck repair that I did. Now, I don’t remember how I got this lead, but I go out there, visit the customer, and they need some deck repairs. Basically, their deck that’s on their second story, the joist hangers are starting to pull away from the ledger board that’s attached to the house. So they’re worried that their deck will fall down, basically. And you could see it was pretty bad. And if you tried to nail them back, it really wasn’t working very well. So they wanted me to figure out a way to support this. So what I ended up deciding to do after consulting with another contractor was cut some blocking, nail the blocking to the ledger board, and then nail the joists to the blocking from the side at an angle, and just basically support it like that. So I had to cut all these blocks and nail them in.

After I write up an estimate, I’m sitting there looking at it, and I’m like Man, this seems really expensive, based on how long I think it’s going to take and the wood and the lumber involved.

I start massaging the numbers, trying to lower the price because it just felt uncomfortable for me to charge that much when there’s no way that I would pay that much.

The job ends up taking twice as long. I don’t make very much money. I don’t remember the exact numbers. But more relevant here are the mistakes that I made quoting that project. Not that I wouldn’t take that project on again, and not that I did anything wrong with my repair, but the pricing mistakes were very clear to me now. The first pricing mistake I made was I allowed the customer’s perception of difficulty to determine my price. When I was quoting the job, he was saying things like, Oh, I just need these nailed up here, nothing major, just something to keep it from loosening further or falling down. I don’t think it’s going to be a big project, just something whatever you can do. And so from his perspective, this is an easy project that shouldn’t take very long. And I allowed his perception influence how I looked at the project and also determine how long I think it should take or how much it should cost to do, which is another huge mistake that happens pretty often when a customer looks at something.

“This is just really easy. I just want to add a new room to my house. It’s not a big deal, nothing major, just a small room, maybe a little bathroom over here, too, and maybe I’ll throw in a few windows, too.” They just really have no perspective on how challenging it is, or they think it’s overly simple, or they know that they’re going to manipulate me psychologically by doing that. Who knows? But either way, I let their perception influence me on how easy the project should be, how the project should be done, which is another mistake, and then how much I should charge.

I’m the expert here, right? I should be the expert. I’m going to quote it how I know it needs to be done, to be done right, and I need to quote enough to where I make a profit.

Another mistake I made here was that I quoted a new project without doubling my estimate. So one of my rules that I eventually figured out was that if I’m doing a new project, I’m going to sit down, I’m going to write out my estimate on how long I think it’s going to take, multiply that by whatever rate I’m trying to hit, and then double it because it always takes twice as long as you expect it to.

So that’s a deck repair job. I didn’t get any bad reviews or anything like that. The person was pretty happy with it. I did make some money, so it wasn’t a total failure, but there were definitely some clear mistakes on that project.

The next project I will talk about was pretty much a complete disaster. So, some lady requested a lead on Service Magic, which is what HomeAdvisor used to be called back in the day when I started my business. They changed their name to HomeAdvisor. So I got this Service Magic lead, and I knew that if I don’t respond to these leads immediately, Then I’m going to lose the job because most of these customers who look for small jobs on platforms like HomeAdvisor or Angie, the first person they get on the phone with that sounds like they’re competent and nice and is going to do the project, they’re going to hire them. They don’t necessarily want three quotes on a small project. That’s too much wasted time for them. So I knew it. So I called her immediately. I call her up, I talk to her. She says, Oh, I got this gutter and it’s leaking, blah, blah, blah.

I’m like, Okay, well, my minimum service charge is $75. How does that sound? I’ll be over there at this time. And so says “Oh, that’s way too expensive. I’m on a fixed income.”

So I was like, Okay, how about $40? So I said, Okay, go over there for $40. I didn’t have any other projects on my schedule. I really wanted the job. So I go over there, I do the job. It takes me well over an hour and a half. It’s way more difficult to get to than I thought it would be. It’s different than what she explained on the phone. It takes me way longer than I expected. It was a pretty frustrating situation. I ended up just charging her the $40 because I didn’t want to upset her. And I leave, and then three or four days later, I get a one-star review on Service Magic, and I’m like, What happened? I gave this lady a huge discount. I did the service for way less than it should have cost. She also gave me a negative review because her gutter was leaking in a different area. It was a total mess. I barely made any money. It was super frustrating to do. And then I get a bad review.

So I made a few mistakes that led to this. And the first one was being desperate for the job. I shouldn’t have been so desperate that I’m going to lower my rates and charge less because that usually doesn’t lead to a very good situation. Now, at some point in your business, it pays to have that desperation because it’s going to cause you to take on jobs that you wouldn’t normally take on that are going to be learning lessons for you that might add to skills that are going to pay off later. It’s hard to say that’s totally a mistake, but in this case, it was. But my biggest mistake there was I wasn’t prepared to navigate that situation. I was still under the idea that anyone and everybody who needed a home repair was my customer, and that if I was too expensive for them, that was my problem. But later on, I realized that not everyone is my customer. And no matter how awesome I am, some people are just never going to pay a decent rate for a service like that. They just want the lowest price, and maybe they won’t even hire somebody to do it, even at the lowest price. So, I wasn’t really prepared for that conversation or that whole situation.

Another mistake I made was lowering my standards based on what I quoted. So, instead of inspecting the entire gutter system, because I charged enough to offer above and beyond-service, I would have found that other issue and avoided that bad review. However, since I didn’t charge enough, I just wanted to get out of there as quickly as I could. I ended up getting a bad review, which was emotionally devastating while I was starting my business, and I didn’t even make very much money.

So the gutter repair job. That job was not fun.

Now, let’s move on to my least profitable job, number four, a custom shelf job. So, one of my friends hired me to build some custom shelves and hang them on the brick wall in their home. And so I was looking at this project. I was like, Oh, that sounds like a It’s a really cool project. Not only do I want to do this anyway, even if it was for free, but this will be a cool experience.

Maybe I’ll get some good pictures for my website. So I’m sitting here writing up the quote. I’m going to price out all the lumber, price out how much it’s going to cost to stain the shelves, how long it’s going to take to install them, how long each step is going to take. And I’m looking at this quote. I’m looking at like, man, that sounds way too expensive. And so, of course, I look back, massage the numbers, and lower them down based on something that seems more appropriate to me. How much would I pay for some custom shelves or just shelves in general? How much would I be willing to pay for some shelves like this? So, I ended up quoting $300. I don’t remember the exact number. I think the materials cost about 75 at the time. And then it ended up taking me about 10 hours over a few days to build the shelves. Then, I had to go install the shelves on a brick wall. So, in the end, I ended up making $20 per hour on this project. And I will say it was enjoyable in some way. I like working with my hands, of course.

But again, this is a business, right? You got to make money. It’s not about doing something you enjoy as much. It is about that, but also, you have to make the money!

The mistakes I made on this project were mainly that I based my quote on what I thought shelves were worth versus what I needed to make a profit. Whenever you approach a situation with that, it’s almost always going to lead to underpricing. Instead, I should have just looked at it like, Okay, it will take me this long. It’s going to cost this much of materials. This is how long it’s going to take me. Okay, I’m going to charge this much. Even if it was $3,000, that’s the price that I should have given and allowed them to make the decision at that point. Not trying to force, not trying to bend math into my favor, and just bend time in some way by rushing or being more efficient to somehow make this thing work that I desperately wanted to work. So, I was making decisions more based on fear, again, than numbers.

Now, a lot of people who are listening to this right now are probably thinking, “Well, what if I don’t have a lot of leads coming in? What if this is the job that I have right now? This is my only opportunity. I don’t have a lot of leads coming in, so I need to take this job to make some money.”

And I understand that perspective. Sometimes, you will need to take a job that’s less than optimal to make a little money to get some cash flow to run your business. I get that. However, the problem with this is that it’s short-term thinking. It pays in the short run, but it hurts you in the long run because there’s an opportunity cost to every job that you take for suboptimal profits. So let’s say you take a job that’s a week long, and you’re underpaid for that entire job. Well, if you would have instead taken that entire week to work on learning a new marketing strategy and implementing that marketing strategy for your business, then maybe next week or even next month, you’re going to have a lot more leads to choose from, so you don’t have to take these suboptimal jobs. Sure, you’re not going to get paid for that time immediately. You’re probably going to have to pay money to learn or implement that strategy, and you’re going to be working for free to do it. However, the long-term payoff is going to be much more valuable. So, the opportunity cost is always there when quoting a job.

Moving on to my least profitable job number five. And this job was to replace a battery in a smoke detector. And again, this is during my first few years in business, so I don’t have the confidence. I didn’t have a mentor teaching me about pricing psychology, minimum service charges, and all that. So this customer calls me up. They’re an existing customer. Like, Hey, we got a smoke alarm going off. It’s on the second-story ceiling. We can’t reach it with any of our ladders. Can you come out and change that? And I’m like, Sure. I’m on the spot. So I’m like, All right, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, Yeah, I’ll just charge 60 bucks. So I say, 60 bucks? She’s like, “Great, okay. Come over for 60 bucks; fix this for us. Sounds great.”

So I go over there. I drive 30 minutes across town in my truck, load all my tools into my vehicle, go 30 minutes across town, get there, and do a good job. It takes about 10 or 15 minutes. Then another full half an hour back. So I’m at least an hour and 15 minutes, considering the phone call, I’m an hour and a half into this project now. So I’m not making very much money here. This wasn’t that big of a deal because I didn’t waste that much time. It wasn’t that big of a deal. It was for an existing customer.

But there were a couple of mistakes that I made in this situation. First, I thought I needed to provide that service to keep the customer. I felt that I needed to give them a discount, and I needed to do the job right away and solve their problem. Otherwise, they would never hire me again, and they would find somebody who would. So that’s a mistake right there because that’s undervaluing myself. And another reason that’s a mistake is that customer never hired me again in the future.

So they never hired me again anyway, despite the fact that I lowered my prices, lower than my minimum service charge, handled their job immediately when they called me, and did it with a smile. And they still didn’t call me back for any more projects in the future.

Again, this is a lack of being prepared. I was put on the spot with my pricing over the phone, and I wasn’t prepared for that interaction. I didn’t know how to address that situation. I hadn’t planned it out in advance. And that’s something that happens often, is if you don’t have your pricing dialed in before you interact with customers, you often are going to make these knee-jerk reaction decisions that are optimal that lead to lost income. Sometimes that lost income is maybe a hundred bucks, like in this case. Sometimes, that lost income is several thousand dollars on a bigger project where somebody puts you on the spot, and you’re just like, Okay, yeah, that sounds good. And then you agree to it, and then now you’re stuck. So it pays to have that stuff figured out in advance.

I hope this was helpful for you. To learn more about setting your prices, determining your pricing strategy, talking money with customers, and all things handyman pricing, I highly recommend my pricing course, $100K Handyman Pricing. Now, obviously, I’m biased, but having that information when I started my business would likely have led to over $100,000 in additional profits during my first couple of years in business. I see this as the easiest upgrade you can make to your handyman business, whether you’re doing just a couple of jobs on the weekends on the side for friends and family, or if you’re starting a full-time business. These things that you learn in this program are going to help you make more money instantly on the next job. Pricing is based on psychology more than anything else. The psychology the customer brings to the interaction, the psychology you bring to the interaction, and then the combination of the two. When you really understand that and you internalize these concepts in pricing, it gives you so much more power, so much more confidence, and so much more clarity to make more money in less time.

I hope you enjoyed this podcast. Thanks for listening. I’ll see you in the next episode.