Storm Work Pays Different

Every washer in Louisiana has the same two thoughts when the cone turns our way. Get the family safe. Then get the trailer ready, because the phone is about to ring off the hook.

And it does. Storm work comes in hot. Nobody is shopping three quotes. Nobody is asking if you can do it cheaper. People say yes to a number that would have made them laugh in June.

So you go. You drive three hours. You work two long days in the heat with mud everywhere. You come home with a check for $2,400 and for once you feel like you got paid what you're worth.

You figured you cleared about fifteen hundred and fifty bucks.

You cleared $751.

Nobody stole from you. Storm work just costs different, and nobody ever showed you where.

Lets walk the job, stone cold numbers

Two days. You and one guy. Twenty-two hours on the clock each, drive time included. Fourteen hours of run time on the machine.

Your helper makes $18 an hour. That is not what he costs you. Once you add his payroll taxes, his comp, and the time you pay him that isn't on a wand, he costs you $23.40 an hour. Twenty-two hours of that is $514.80.

The machine costs money to run whether the customer sees it or not. Fuel, oil, pump, hoses, tips, the belt that will need replacing. On an 8gpm belt drive that runs about $7.06 an hour. Fourteen hours is $98.84.

Two hundred forty miles round trip in a loaded truck: $82 in fuel.

Now here's the one that gets everybody. In July you buy 12.5% SH for $4.60 a gallon. The week after a storm, every washer in three parishes is buying it and the supply house knows it. You paid $6.75. Twelve gallons plus degreaser for the mud line came to $109.

No power at the house, so no water. You hauled it. $45.

Nowhere to sleep within an hour of the job, and the hotels that still had rooms knew that too. One night, two rooms, $260. Two days of food for two men, $100.

And the part nobody writes down: storm grit is not dirt. It ate the swivel on your surface cleaner and chewed the packings in your pump. Spread across this job, $120.

That's $1,329.64 gone before you have covered one dollar of the truck note, the insurance, the phone, the software, or the storage yard.

The costs that don't care whether you work

Your fixed nut runs $1,598 a month. Truck note, insurance, phone and software, storage, the loan on the rig. It comes out whether you wash a house or sit in traffic behind a downed pole.

You bill about 110 hours a month. So every billable hour has to carry $14.53 of that nut. Twenty-two hours on this job is $319.60.

$2,400 minus $1,329.64 minus $319.60 leaves you $750.76.

Twenty-two hours. $34.13 an hour.

Your helper costs you $23.40 an hour and drives home. You made eleven dollars an hour more than the man holding the other wand, and you're the one who owns the truck, carries the insurance, and eats it if the check never comes.

"But storm work is double my normal rate"

I know what you're thinking right now. "That job would have been twelve hundred at home, I doubled it, how am I not way ahead?"

Because you doubled the price and you also doubled the costs, and then some. At home there's no hotel. At home there's no six-hour drive. At home you have water at the spigot and SH at summer price and the customer pays you Friday. You raised the top line 100 percent and you raised the bottom about 130.

This is the false profit narrative, and storm season is where it hides best. The job looks like the biggest ticket you wrote all year. It is. It just isn't the most profit you made all year, and you won't find that out until the pump goes out in November.

What the job was actually worth

Say you want $60 an hour for your own time. That is not greedy, that is a working owner's wage in this state.

Costs of $1,329.64. Overhead of $319.60. Your 22 hours at $60 is $1,320.

Add it up and the number is $2,969.

The job wasn't $2,400. It was $3,000.

At $3,000 you keep $1,350.76. That is $61.40 an hour, and it is the same two days, the same drive, the same mud. The only thing that changed is that you knew your number before you opened your mouth.

Six hundred dollars. On one job. That's the pump you're going to need anyway.

The part that isn't about you

Here's the backend nobody talks about. Storm money is the money that carries you into the slow months. October and November come, the phone gets quiet, and whatever storm season left in the account is what pays your guy in December.

Price it wrong and you're not just short. Your helper is short. His family is short. Instead of one mouth to feed, you're feeding yours, your family's, your workers', and theirs — and every one of those plates gets set from a number you picked in a parking lot with your phone at 12 percent battery.

Most accounting firms will never tell you this. They see your storm work in March, on a tax return, as one line called income. They are not in your corner, they are in your wallet. Knowing what a storm job costs is not their business. It's yours.

Before the next one

• Storm jobs cost more than home jobs. Hotel, drive, hauled water, and SH at storm prices are real money.

• Your helper costs $23.40 an hour, not $18.

• Every billable hour has to carry $14.53 of your monthly nut.

• $2,400 for that job left you $34 an hour. $3,000 leaves you $61.

• Write your storm price sheet before the storm, not in the driveway.