Reclaiming Your Hours with AI.

Dave can price a job from the truck to within fifty dollars. He knows the cost of copper moved before his supplier does. Ask him what one hour of Dave is worth and you get "depends on the week."

It can't depend on the week. Every decision in this book leans on that number, so pin it down now. Two divisions, done tonight, on the back of whatever's in the truck.

Start with what the business pays you in a year. Salary, draws, the profit that's really wages in a costume: the honest total, not the tax return's version and not the dream. If the number's lumpy, use what a sane year looks like.

Divide it by 2,000. That's fifty weeks times a forty-hour week, and yes, you and I both know nobody who owns a business works forty. Use it anyway. It's a ruler, not a diary, and 2,000 keeps the math kind: knock off three zeros, divide by two.

Say the yearly number is $120,000. Then an hour of you earns about $60. At $200,000, about $100. Yours is yours. Write it down, in pen.

Now the strange step, and the whole trick. Take that hourly number and divide it by four.

If you came straight here from the front of the book, good. This is the right place to start building, and nothing in the five chapters you skipped is required tonight.

Right now you are the only person who knows how your business works. Not in a dramatic way. In a boring, Tuesday-afternoon way. Your pricing lives in your head and in a spreadsheet you'd have to explain. The reason you don't take jobs past Kanata is a thing you know, not a thing that's written anywhere. The way you talk to a customer who is upset versus a customer who is just checking in: that's twenty years of instinct, and it has never once been typed out.

This chapter fixes that once, and it's the only chapter in the book with no task to kill. It's the one that makes the other twenty killable. Thirty minutes answering questions about your own business, and at the end you'll have an assistant that already knows your pricing, your service area, your voice, and the four things you refuse to do. Do it properly and chapter 7 takes ten minutes, and chapter 7 usually pays the biggest single number in the book. Skip it and chapter 7 doesn't work.

Why it has to happen at all: every time you want help, you have to explain the business first. That's the tax. It's why hiring is slow, why handing anything off feels harder than just doing it, and why most people who try AI quit in the first week. They open a blank chat box, type "help me write a quote", get back something generic that could belong to any company in the country, and conclude the thing doesn't work.

Dave checks his email nine times a day, and eight of those times there's nothing in it for him.

He's an electrician in Moncton. Between the second job and the third one he's sitting in the truck with his phone, thumbing through forty new messages to find the one from the general contractor who actually needs an answer before noon. Supplier promotions. A newsletter he never signed up for. Two customers asking the same question his website already answers. And buried in the middle, one real quote request that's been sitting there since 7:40 this morning.

That's the job. Not writing email. Finding it. Reading everything to locate the four messages that matter, and then typing out the same six replies you've typed a thousand times: yes we service your area, here's roughly what that costs, I can come Thursday, send me a photo of the panel, we don't do that kind of work, thanks for the kind words.

You already know what you'd say. You've said it a thousand times. The tax is saying it again, one thumb, in a parking lot.

This chapter kills that job. Not by answering your email for you. By sorting it into four piles and handing you drafts, in your voice, that you approve before anything moves. You stay the sender. You stop being the typist.

Remember Dave's inbox in chapter 7? There was a quote request buried in it, sitting since 7:40 that morning. This chapter is about what happens after he finally finds it.

Because finding it was the easy part. Now he has to write the thing. And Dave, who can price a job from the truck to within fifty dollars, who knows the cost of copper moved before his supplier does, is going to sit at the kitchen table at nine at night rebuilding a document he has built two hundred times. Opening the last similar quote to copy from. Retyping the line items. Trying to remember what he charged the condo board on Mountain Road for almost exactly this. Fixing the date, fixing the name, hoping he caught everywhere the old customer's name was hiding.

Say the quiet part: the pricing takes him four minutes. The document takes him forty. You are not slow at quoting. You are slow at typing, formatting, and remembering, and none of those three is the part you're good at or the part the customer is paying for.

There's a second cost hiding in the pile. Somewhere in your phone is a job you priced in your head, told the customer "I'll send you something this week", and never did. Not because you didn't want the work. Because the document stood between you and sending it, and the document lost to supper, twice, and then it was awkward.

This chapter moves the document to the machine. You describe the job in three lines. It comes back as a full quote, in your numbers, in your words, with your terms attached. You check it, fix what's wrong, and send it. The pricing stays yours. The typing stops being.