The Owner's Wage Reality Check

Want to see how it works first? Load a worked example

What's the work you'd have to hire someone for if you stepped away? Required

Last year, start to finish

What the business brought in

What it cost to run - everything except paying yourself

Materials, staff, rent, tools, insurance, fuel, software - every real cost the business carried. Leave out only the money you took home for yourself; that's the next box.

You

What you actually paid yourself - salary plus any draws

Hours you work in a typical week

Everything you took out of the business for yourself over the year - paycheck plus any owner draws. The real number, not just the official salary.

What the job is worth

If you hired someone to do everything you do, what would you pay them for the year?

Not what you wish - what the market would actually charge you. A working foreman, a shop manager, a GM who sells and runs the place. The going rate to replace you.

Every box above is required, including the question. Nothing is optional, and every figure here needs a real number above zero.

Watch your "profit" become a paycheck:

What the business brought in—

Cost to run it (not your pay)—

What it made before paying you—

A fair wage for your job—

True return on the business—

owner's wage card

Before paying you

—

what the business cleared first

A fair wage for your job

—

the going rate to replace you

True business return

—

what's left - the part you could sell

Your real hourly

—

your take, at the hours you work

This is one instrument in your cockpit. The same gap - what the number says vs. what's actually there - is hiding in your cash runway, your customer mix, and the price you charge. Want me to look at the rest?

How to read this

What you are reading is arithmetic on the numbers you gave us. It is honest arithmetic, but it only knows what you typed — not your season, not the customer who always pays late, not the invoice landing next Tuesday. You know those things and this page does not. Use it to decide where to look, then check what you find against what you know.

Where we draw the line between comfortable and thin is our judgment, not a rule of accounting. Your bank, your accountant, or your own gut may draw it somewhere else.

What this is and isn’t · How to reach a person