The quote that loses money

You can win a job, run it well, finish on time and get paid every penny you invoiced, and still be worse off than if you had stayed home. It happens often enough that most trades have a story about it.

In my experience it is almost always one of four things.

One: markup was mistaken for margin

You added eighteen percent. You did not make eighteen percent. Markup is measured against cost and margin against price, so eighteen percent on top of cost is about fifteen percent of what you charged.

That gap is small on one job and considerable across a year. If you want to keep twenty five percent, you have to add thirty three. Most people who discover this discover it after a bad quarter.

Two: overhead was left for the markup to cover

Van, insurance, phone, the hours spent quoting jobs you did not win. If those are not inside the cost you marked up, then the markup is not profit, it is overhead recovery wearing profit's clothes.

Easy to test. Take last year's overhead, divide by the direct cost of the work you did, and see what percentage it comes to. If your markup is smaller than that number you have been working for nothing for a while.

Three: the changes were never written down

This is the expensive one, and the friendliest clients cause the most of it. Someone asks on site, you say yes because it is five minutes, and it becomes a pattern. By week six you have done a day and a half of unbilled work and it is too awkward to raise.

The test is not whether it was discussed. It is whether it was approved before you started. Anything you started without sign off is money you spent without permission to bill it.

Four: contingency was treated as padding

Contingency covers what you could not have known: what is under the floor, behind the plaster, inside the wall. It is not a cushion for a rushed estimate.

Five percent on a job where you could see everything is reasonable. Five percent on a refurb with an unsurveyed roof is a decision to absorb the roof, and it is better to price the roof as its own risk than to pretend a blanket number covers it.

The part people skip

None of this is about quoting higher. Two of the four are arithmetic, one is paperwork, one is a survey. You can fix all of them without becoming more expensive than the person you are bidding against.