The One Job in Your Business Nobody Ever Priced

I want you to do something before you read the rest of this. It takes about four minutes and you can do it on your phone.

Open a job board — whichever one people in your trade actually use — and search your own region for the job you personally do. Not your title. The work. If you quote, search for an estimator. If you run the schedule, search for a scheduler or a project coordinator. If you’re the one the difficult customer asks for by name, search for whatever that person is called where you are.

Write down what it pays.

Now hold that number next to what actually reached your account last year. Not the revenue. Not what the business turned over. What you took.

That distance is the most useful number in your business, and most owners have never once measured theirs.

The short answer, before anything else

Stop asking what you deserve. Ask what it would cost to hire somebody to do your job.

That’s the whole method. The number already exists, somebody else publishes it, and you can look it up this afternoon. Everything below is just the careful version.

The strange thing you’ve probably never noticed

You could tell me, to the dollar, what it costs to replace almost anybody in your business.

The lead hand. The person on the phones. The one who opens up. You had to decide those numbers, and somebody would have walked if you had decided wrong, so you got them roughly right and you have kept them roughly right ever since.

There’s exactly one job in the building you can’t price. And it’s the one doing the most work in it.

That isn’t an accident and it isn’t a character flaw. It happens because of a filing decision nobody ever made out loud: your pay gets treated as a reward — a share of how the year went — while every other role in the business is treated as a cost. And costs get benchmarked. Rewards just get felt.

So your number was never set. It was whatever was left over, and then it became a habit, and then it became the way things are.

You didn’t underpay yourself out of modesty. Nobody ever priced the job, so there was no number to be short of.

Two things you will be told this is. Both are wrong.

You’ll probably be told both of these this year, by somebody who means well. Knowing why neither is right will save you a season.

“It’s your reward for the risk.” The risk is real and it’s yours. But the risk is paid for by owning the thing — by what the business is worth, and by what it distributes when it’s healthy. That’s a separate line from what the work is worth. Running the two together is precisely how the work ends up unpaid, because a good year makes the arrangement look fine and a bad year makes it look like your fault.

“It’s a question about your entity, or how you’re taxed.” That’s a real question and a good one for your accountant. It will change what happens to the money on the way out — draw, salary, distribution, the order in which things are taken. It won’t tell you what the job is worth, which is the thing we’re doing here.

I’m not going to give you tax advice. I’d be bad at it, and it isn’t what’s actually bothering you.

The exercise. It takes an afternoon.

1. Write down what you actually do. Not your title — the work. The quoting. The scheduling. The one customer who will only speak to you. The Sunday paperwork.

2. Go and find what each of those costs to hire. Job listings for your trade, in your region. A staffing agency will tell you for free, because they want the placement. Fifteen minutes on the phone gets you a better number than an afternoon of guessing.

3. If your job is really two jobs, price both. That’s the honest answer, and it’s usually the one that explains the tiredness.

4. Add it up. That’s the market cost of your job.

5. Put next to it what actually reached your account last year.

The gap between what you take and what your job costs is the number.

If you’d rather not do the lookup by hand, how much should I pay myself? runs the same steps in about two minutes.

Here’s one worked all the way through.

Call him Michael. A business doing $1.8 million a year, one owner. His job is really two jobs: he quotes everything that goes out the door, and he runs operations. So he prices both. An estimator in his region runs about $108,000. An operations manager, about $78,000. That’s $186,000 for the role as it actually exists.

Last year he took $94,000.

The gap is ninety-two thousand dollars — not because he was doing anything foolish, but because nobody had ever run the math.

Those figures are mine, not a client’s, and I picked them so the math is easy to follow. Yours will be different. The math won’t be.

The part I would want somebody to tell me

You aren’t the only person who’s ever going to run that math.

A buyer runs it first. It’s one of the earliest things anybody does when they price a business — work out what it would cost to replace the owner, and take it off. Not out of malice. It’s just math, and they do it whether or not you’ve ever done it.

Which means that number’s going to be produced about you eventually, by somebody whose interests are not the same as yours.

You may as well be the one holding it.

When the number is bigger than the business can pay

For a lot of people reading this, it will be. That isn’t a failure. That’s the finding.

So you make it ordinary.

Price the job, not the person. Write the figure down as what the role costs, the way you’d write it for anybody you were hiring — because that’s all it is. Then pay as much of it as the business can genuinely meet, on a date, the same way everybody else is paid.

If today that’s half the number, pay half of it. And put the whole figure on the page anyway.

The written number is what does the work. It turns “I’m not taking much at the moment” into a shortfall with a size. A shortfall with a size is something a business can be run at. A vague feeling isn’t.

There is no line in any accounting package called whatever seemed reasonable in the circumstances — which is a shame, because in most small businesses that line would be doing an enormous amount of work.

The fix is smaller than the fear. An afternoon of looking up what jobs pay, and one line written down. Nobody has to be fired and no price has to double.

What changes

The month stops being a mood. When your pay is a priced line rather than a leftover, a thin month becomes visible instead of absorbed — and things that are visible get dealt with. The quote gets looked at. The terms get enforced. The customer who takes sixty days gets a phone call, which is a conversation most owners have been avoiding for years and which almost never goes as badly as they expect.

And now you get to leave. A business that can afford to replace you is one you can step out of — for two weeks, or for good. Right now, the reason you can’t isn’t that nobody could do the work. It’s that nobody has priced it, so the business has never had to carry it.

Which leaves one obvious question sitting there. If a buyer is going to take your replacement cost off the price — what is the price? What is the thing actually worth, before anybody starts subtracting from it?

That’s a different number, and a longer conversation — and it’s the one most businesses fail.

Common Questions

How do business owners usually pay themselves?

There are three common routes: a draw, a salary, or a mix of the two. The route is usually a deliberate decision. What tends not to be decided is the amount — in the books I look at, it is whatever is left after everything else is paid. That is the gap this note is about: the mechanism being common says nothing about the number being right.

How much can I pay myself as a business owner?

As much as your job costs to hire, paid as far as the business can currently meet it. Look up what someone would be paid to do the work you personally do, in your region, and treat that as the price of the role. If the business can’t pay all of it yet, write the whole figure down anyway and pay what it can — the written number turns a vague shortfall into a measurable one.

What is the best way to pay yourself if you own an LLC?

That is an entity and tax question, and it belongs with your accountant — the mechanism (draw, salary, distribution) changes what happens to the money on the way out. It is a genuinely different question from what the job is worth. Settle the number first; the mechanism is easier to decide once you know what you are trying to pay.

How do I legally pay myself from my business?

The lawful routes depend on how your business is structured, and the specifics are your accountant’s and your attorney’s ground rather than mine — this note is about the size of the number, not the plumbing that moves it. What is worth knowing is that the two questions are independent. Getting the mechanism right does not tell you whether the amount is right, and a correctly processed payment can still be far below what the work costs.

Michael is a composite drawn from many real owners; figures are illustrative. Education only — not financial, tax, or legal advice.