Break-Even
Break-even is the point where your revenue exactly covers your costs — no profit, no loss. Knowing your break-even number, in jobs or in dollars, tells you the minimum you need before anything you earn is actually profit.
What it means
Every business has fixed costs that show up whether you work or not — insurance, a van payment, software subscriptions. Break-even is the revenue, or the number of jobs, needed to cover those fixed costs plus the variable cost of doing the work itself, before a single dollar counts as profit.
It’s a genuinely useful number to actually calculate, not just a concept — once you know you need $2,400 a month in revenue just to break even, you know instantly whether a slow week is “fine, I’m still ahead for the month” or “I need to book something, now.”
Your fixed monthly costs — van, insurance, software — come to $900. Your average job nets $150 after materials. You need six jobs a month just to break even; the seventh job onward is where profit actually starts.
Never calculating an actual break-even number and instead going by feel — which makes it hard to tell a genuinely slow month from a normal one until the bank balance already says so.
See also
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