What a Week of Rain Actually Costs You

You're sitting in the truck at 6:40 in the morning watching the radar go green from Texas to the river.

Trailer's loaded. Two jobs on the board. Your guy is already on the clock. And you're doing the thing every washer in this state does — squinting at a phone, trying to decide if you can beat it, knowing you probably can't.

You call both customers. You reschedule. You drive home.

And you tell yourself it's fine. It's one day.

It's not one day. You lost about $900 standing in that driveway, and you're going to do it forty-nine more times this year.

Lets count the days you actually work

Here's the part nobody does. Go pull up last year's calendar.

Two hundred fifty working days on it. That's a five-day week, all year, minus a couple weeks off.

Now count the ones that actually happened. Not the ones you scheduled — the ones where the wand ran. Take out the rained-out mornings, the days it blew too hard to get on a roof, the afternoons you got two hours in and packed it up soaked.

Say it came out to 200 days.

That's fifty days gone. One day in five.

And that's not bad luck, that's Louisiana. Lafayette averages 118 days a year with rain on them. Baton Rouge 114. New Orleans 115. Even up in Shreveport, the dry corner of the state, it's 101. This isn't a bad year. This is every year.

Here's the mistake, and it's a math mistake

You priced your work as if you'd work 250 days.

Say you charge $150 for a billable hour and you run about 6 billable hours a day. Two hundred fifty days at six hours is 1,500 hours, times $150, and that's the $225,000 you had in your head in January.

You worked 200 days. Twelve hundred hours. $180,000.

Forty-five thousand dollars. Not stolen, not undercharged, not a slow year. Just days that never existed and a price that assumed they did.

Now here's the part that gets everybody, and I want you to sit with it for a second.

Losing one day in five does not cost you 20 percent.

It costs you 25.

Because the 200 days you did work have to carry all 250 days worth of money. Twelve hundred hours have to produce $225,000. That's $187.50 an hour, not $150.

Twenty percent of your days went missing, so your price has to go up twenty-five. That's not opinion, that's just division. Run it yourself: 225,000 divided by 1,200.

What a single wet month looks like

Lets do the math now on two months side by side. Same business, same crew, same everything, except one month you got 22 days and the other you got 16.

Your fixed nut is $1,598 a month. Truck note, insurance, phone and software, storage, the loan on the rig. That comes out whether it rains or not. It does not care.

The dry month. 22 days, 6 billable hours a day, 132 hours. At $150 that's $19,800 in. Fixed nut $1,598. Helper 22 days at 8 hours, $23.40 burdened, $4,118.40. Machine hours 132 at $7.06, $931.92. Chemicals and fuel at $9.50 a billable hour, $1,254. Left for you: $11,897.68.

The wet month. Six days washed out. 16 days on site, 96 hours. That's $14,400 in. Fixed nut, still $1,598. Machine hours drop to $677.76. Chemicals and fuel drop to $912. And your helper — you kept him on three of those rain days doing shop work and organizing the trailer, because if you send a good man home with no pay three times he goes and finds somebody who won't do that. Nineteen paid days, $3,556.80. Left for you: $7,655.44.

Four thousand two hundred forty-two dollars the rain took out of one month.

And $561.60 of that is what you paid your guy for three days he never touched a wand. That's not waste. That's what keeping a crew costs. But it's a cost, and it belongs in your price, not in your stomach.

"So I just raise my prices 25 percent?"

I know what you're thinking. "I can't go tell my customers I'm going up twenty-five percent because it rains."

You don't. Nobody buys your hourly rate. They buy a clean house.

What you do is quote the job with the real number underneath it. A two-story house wash that took you two and a half hours doesn't get priced off $150 an hour, it gets priced off $187.50 an hour. The customer sees one number, and it's a number that survives a wet week.

And you fix this once. Your fixed nut doesn't change month to month. Your machine hour doesn't change. Your burdened labor doesn't change. You do this arithmetic one afternoon and it works for the next year — you're not recalculating on every quote, you're pulling from a sheet you already built.

You can have this fixed by Friday.

What it costs to leave it alone

The washer who prices for 250 days and works 200 does not go broke. That's what makes it so hard to catch. He just runs a little short every single month and never knows why.

He's the one telling you the truck note snuck up on him. He's the one paying for a pump on a credit card in November. He's the one who can't give his guy a raise even though the man has been with him three years and shows up every morning.

That's the false profit narrative again, just wearing a raincoat. The jobs were profitable. The year wasn't, because the year had fifty days in it you never got paid for and never priced for.

Your guy's kids don't stop eating when it rains. Neither does your truck note. The only thing that stops is the money coming in — and that is exactly why the rain has to live in your price, not in your luck.

Recap

• Count your real working days. Not the ones on the calendar. The ones the wand ran.

• One day in five lost is normal in this state. Lafayette gets 118 wet days a year.

• Losing 20 percent of your days means raising your price 25 percent, not 20.

• Your fixed nut of $1,598 comes out on rain days too.

• Rain paid your helper $561.60 last month for shop work. That belongs in the price.