Book Description
The company billed you out at $140 an hour. You took home $22.
That gap is not a complaint. It is arithmetic. And once you have done that calculation, you cannot stop doing it.
The plumbing side of going solo is not the problem. You know the plumbing. The part that keeps skilled tradespeople employed at a shop they have long outgrown is the business side: the rate formula, the quarterly taxes, the insurance gaps, the paperwork your employer was always handling quietly in the background.
Kevin Dougherty is a licensed master plumber who left a PE-acquired shop in Columbus, Ohio in January 2018 with $9,200 in savings and no idea how to run the business side. He figured it out the hard way: a $13,800 tax bill he had not set aside, a bathroom rough-in underpriced by $1,600 in materials, and two slow Januaries. He still drives a truck and runs calls. This book is what he would have needed in 2018.
By month eighteen, his take-home exceeded what he ever made at the company. By 2020, his net income cleared six figures for the first time.
He wrote this book because no book written by an actual solo plumber existed. The most credible one on Amazon was published in 1993.
This is not inspiration. It is a sequence.
A solo plumbing operation runs $2,000 per month in overhead. A five-tech shop runs $35,000 to $50,000. That gap is why the math works in your direction once you stop generating revenue for someone else. This book shows you exactly how to capture it.
Inside this book
- The formula for your minimum viable hourly rate, with the 15.3% self-employment tax buffer built in before you price your first job
- LLC formation, EIN, and business bank account setup in the right sequence, before the first invoice goes out
- What insurance a one-person plumbing operation actually needs, at what limits and what monthly cost, with what to skip in year one
- Which software tools run a solo schedule, invoicing, and accounting for under $130 per month, and why the enterprise platforms are built for a company you are not running
- The quarterly tax calendar, with IRS form numbers, EFTPS setup, and the 28-30% deposit reserve that turns April 15 into a maintenance task instead of a crisis
- A zero-budget customer acquisition plan: 20 names, one personal message each, and the referral relationships that sustain a full schedule without paid advertising
- A complete 18-month financial model showing the January P&L ($4,302 available after overhead and tax reserve) and the September P&L ($9,428 available), so neither month arrives as a surprise
The person who opens this book is doing billing rate arithmetic in a truck. The person who closes it has a rate, a business structure, a tax calendar, and a full financial picture of the next eighteen months.
If you can read a schematic, you can read a P&L.