this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2026
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Equipment and wages, but also all the time you have to put into your business that isn't billable.
Time spent on the phone, scheduling people, time spent doing estimates for jobs, time spent doing business accounting, time spent on truck maintenance, time spent disposing of materials that you've hauled away.
You can pay someone to do almost all of that, and charge for estimates if you'd like, but paying for an accountant or a secretary turns a time cost into a money cost, so you're either losing your hours or doing extra jobs to pay for your accountant. Since finding enough work can be a challenge, it's easier to put in your time, but spending, say, 8 hours a week on accounting is still 8 hours you weren't paid that week.
Taking your truck in for maintenance also means you're paying a mechanic, who has to price similarly to you for all the same reasons, so if you're measuring in time spent per day, you'll find setting aside time to do maintenance yourself is probably worth nearly as much as what you'll make actually working.
Charging for estimates would be great, except that's a privilege you get when you have enough work that you can decline jobs. If you don't have that much work, eating the 10$ of gas (probably 30+ now, but 10$ then) is better than having a customer decline to call because he's paying for you to do maybe nothing, in his mind.
Some weeks I worked 5 days, some 2-3 days. I was college age and either was fine for me at the time. The arborist was putting in 40-50 hours of work on that slow week, 60-70 on the full one.
A larger organization is gonna break all those time costs into additional employees that manage the day to day, an accountant, a mechanic, a secretary, and that's a great way to visualize all the costs that you can't bill for that someone who is working on their own or as a single-crew business is still paying for, just in time they don't get reimbursed for instead.