margin floor

walk-away number

priced change orders

fig. 00 · the contractor pricing agent · launch price $299

Busy since March.Broke in December.

A full schedule hides a bad number for about nine months. Miles is a pricing agent you buy once and keep. He interviews you about what your work actually costs, builds your cost profile, and prices every bid against it: the floor, the walk-away number, and the surprises priced before the customer signs. He prices. You quote.

One-time purchase: ~~$499~~ $299 at launch. Runs on your own machine. No subscription.

Get Miles · $299 paid back on bid one

fig. 01 · the reframe

More leads will not fix a bid that loses money. It just loses it faster.

Every owner I talk to opens the same way. He needs more work. Better customers. A closer who can hold a price. Then we open his last ten bids and find the same thing every time. The number was wrong before the customer ever saw it.

Nobody teaches this part. You learned to price by watching what the last guy charged and taking a little off, and that works right up until you have payroll, trucks, comp, a warranty you have to honor, and a December that does not care how busy you were.

The leak is in the arithmetic, and it has been there the whole time.

fig. 02 · the leak

The most expensive habit in this trade is a number you shaved before the customer ever asked.

Charging full markup feels like overcharging. So the discount starts with you, shaving your own number before the customer says a word.

The bid you win by being 20% under is usually the job the other three priced high on purpose. You got the one they were happy to lose.

The price that assumes the job goes right. No service budget, nothing for the callback, nothing for the surprise. One thing goes sideways and the job goes underwater.

Thin margins on the promise of volume, with the economies of scale hoped for. Busy since March. December says otherwise.

All four end in the same place. The company does not absorb any of it. You do. You are the last one paid and the first one short, and the year you worked hardest is the year you have the least to show for it.

Miles builds the cost profile that makes your full rate honest. When every dollar in the price traces to a cost you actually carry, charging it stops feeling like overcharging. Pricing it like a business is what he is for.

fig. 03 · where he comes from

I priced jobs the expensive way so you can skip that part.

Twenty years operating service businesses. One of them I helped take from a pickup truck to $250 million a year with 500 people on payroll, and I priced or oversaw the pricing of thousands of jobs on the way up.

That company paid for the lessons inside Miles. We priced every market on one market's math and found out in December which ones. We reserved nothing for warranties. We ignored the cost of capital. We paid commissions in full off the top while the company ate everything that went wrong.

I have been in the books of a lot of these companies since. The same leaks show up in a two-truck shop as in a five-hundred-person one. Different zeros, same math.

Miles is a $499 tool. I'm launching him at $299 because I want him in trucks before the testimonials do the talking. This is the discipline I learned the expensive way, minus the expensive part.

fig. 04 · the product

meet miles.

Miles builds your cost profile once. Every bid after that gets priced against it.

A spreadsheet adds up whatever you type into it. If the labor rate in your template is the wage on the paycheck and there is no overhead line, the spreadsheet prices the loss faster and neater than you could by hand. Same for the estimating software you already pay for. Those tools do arithmetic. They do not decide what belongs in the number.

Miles starts somewhere else. He interviews you for fifteen minutes and builds one thing: your cost profile. Crew cost with burden. What a month costs when nobody swings a hammer. Your own salary. Your margin floors and where they came from. Which kind of work gets priced which way.

That profile is the asset you are buying. Every bid you ever bring him gets priced against it, and every job you finish makes it sharper. It lives in plain files on your machine, in English, and you can read every line of it.

Get Miles · $299

fig. 05 · how it works

Drop him in. Talk for fifteen minutes. Bring him every bid.

step 01

Drop the folder into Claude Code

No accounts to make, no keys, no connections. Your numbers never leave your machine.

step 02

He interviews you and builds your cost profile

Crew rates, overhead, margin floors, salaries including your own, which pricing method fits which kind of work. Most owners find a number they have been guessing at for years.

step 03

Bring him every bid

He prices new work, tears down old bids, and keeps a log that gets smarter with every job.

YOU crew of four, I pay $38 an hour average

MILES $38 on the paycheck. Add payroll tax, workers' comp, and benefits and that crew costs you somewhere in the $48-to-$58 range walking onto the job, and we are about to find out exactly where. Most owners bid the $38. What are you paying in comp, roughly?

YOU honestly not sure. maybe 9%?

MILES We will call it 9% and mark it soft, first thing we tighten later. Next: what does a month cost you if nobody swings a hammer? Shop, trucks, insurance, office. And your own salary goes on this list, because you working for free is a bug.

YOU shop, trucks, insurance, office, and me. call it $11k a month

MILES $132,000 a year, and it has to come out of the hours your crew actually bills, not the hours they are on payroll. Four guys, call it 6,400 field hours. That is about $20.60 an hour riding on every hour worked before you make a dollar. You have been bidding $38.

he reacts like an estimator, because he is one

fig. 06 · what you get

Every job. Every time.

L-01

A pricing brief on every bidrecommended price, margin floor, walk-away number, and exactly how far you can come down before a discount goes underwater; all math shown, back in minutes, so bids stop eating your evenings

L-02

Overhead recovery on every jobthe line most contractors have never put in a bid, computed off your real monthly costs

L-03

Bid auditsa five-step teardown that starts by asking whether your books can be believed, then names the bleeding in dollars

L-04

Loaded labor ratesyour true crew cost with burden, so you never bid at wage rate again

L-05

A service budget on every bid3 to 5% for the callback and the comeback, plus a labor cushion sized to how sure you are about the estimate

L-06

Pre-priced change ordersthe likely surprises priced before the customer signs, so mid-job extras stop being donations

L-07

Walk-away protectiona red-flag score on every customer, and a polite decline script for when the math says run

L-08

Yours to changefloors, cushions, red flags, methods, even his name; every rule is a plain file you own, and you change it by telling him

Miles prices. You quote.

He never contacts a customer, never sends a number anywhere, never touches anything outside his folder. Every price gets your judgment before it goes out the door. Permanent, by design.

And you own him. Plain markdown on your machine. No subscription, no hosting, no monthly anything. Buy him once, run him forever, read every rule he follows, change any of them by telling him.

fig. 07 · a real teardown

The bid looked fine. It was a $1,840 loss.

BID AUDIT roof replacement, 24 squares, as bid: $18,500

	As bid	Re-priced
Direct costs (loaded labor, tear-off and disposal, current shingle pricing)	$14,100 · understated	$15,900
Overhead carried inside the price	$0	$6,360
Gross margin	14.1%	40% · the floor
Net after overhead	−$1,840	+$4,240
Price	$18,500	$26,500

Re-pricing a bid means finding out what the job actually costs. Some jobs re-price to a yes. Some do not, and those are the ones you were paying to work. If the customer only says yes at $18,500, walking away beats paying $1,840 to spend a week on a roof. Miles tells you which is which before you sign, and hands you the floor so you know exactly how far you can come down first.

from a sample audit, your numbers will be your own

His job is making sure you find out before you sign, instead of in December.

fig. 08 · the math

Paid back on thefirst bid.

~~$499~~ $299 at launch, plus the Claude account he runs on, about $20 a month. Under $550 for a full year, all in. The price goes to $499 when the first fifty owners are in and their numbers are on this page. Same product either way.

The audit above turned a $1,840 loss into $4,240 of profit. That is $6,080 of swing on one roof, eleven times a full year of Miles, on one job.

You price work every week. Two points of margin on one $15,000 bid is $300. That is the whole price of him, once, forever. One bad bid costs more than he does. You have already paid for him. You just paid the wrong person.

Get Miles · $299

fig. 09 · fit

If you price jobs with labor and materials, he's for you.

Roofers. Remodelers. Solar contractors. GCs. Electricians, plumbers, painters, home services. Crew of two or crew of forty. A company that only works when the owner works for free is a job, and an underpaid one. Miles prices your salary in from bid one.

A Claude account. The Pro plan, about $20 a month, is what powers Miles. He has no subscription of his own. That $20 goes to Anthropic and it is not mine to charge you for.

Claude Code on your computer. Free, installs in about two minutes, Mac or Windows.

Fifteen minutes for the setup interview.

If you can text, you can run Miles. The setup guide assumes zero technical background, and he sets himself up on first launch.

fig. 10 · the guarantee

Run the interview. Audit one bid.

If Miles does not find more than $299 in that first audit, email me and I will refund the $299. You keep the download. That is the whole policy.

fig. 11 · not ready yet

Not ready. Want the worksheet.

The Loaded Labor Worksheet is the first four minutes of what Miles does, on one free page you fill in with a pen. Nine lines, base wage to true hourly, about ten minutes with a paycheck and an insurance bill in front of you. Line 9 is usually the uncomfortable one.

Drop your email and it's on the way. one worksheet, then a short series on the math · unsubscribe any time

On its way. Check your inbox, and the spam folder the first time.

Here you go: grab the worksheet. The email series follows.

That didn't send. Email help@scalabletrades.ai and I'll get it to you by hand.

fig. 12 · questions owners actually ask

What if I price this way and lose the job?

Then you found out for free instead of six weeks in. Miles gives you a negotiation floor on every bid, so you know how far you can come down before the discount goes underwater. You will still let some jobs go. Those are the ones that were going to cost you.

I already have an estimating spreadsheet.

Spreadsheets add up what you tell them to add up. If the labor rate in the template is the wage and there is no overhead line, the spreadsheet prices the loss faster and neater. Miles is the part that decides what belongs in the number. Once he has, send it however you like.

My market is cheap. That number will never fly here.

Your market sets what customers will pay. It does not set what the job costs you. Miles prices the cost first, then shows you the gap. Sometimes the answer is that the work is worth doing at a lower margin. Sometimes the answer is that half your competitors are going out of business next year and you should let them have it.

How long does a bid take once I'm set up?

Minutes. You describe the job the way you would describe it to a foreman and the brief comes back. The setup interview is the only fifteen-minute part, and you do it once.

I've been doing this twenty years. I know what my jobs cost.

Most owners who say that are right about materials and wrong about burden and overhead. That is the whole gap, and it takes about four minutes to find out which one you are.

My numbers are a mess.

That is what the interview is for. Miles builds your cost profile from what you know, crew rates, monthly bills, your gut on margins, and marks anything soft so you can tighten it later. Messy numbers in his hands beat clean numbers nobody looks at.

I'm not technical. Really.

Neither are most of his buyers. You download a folder, open one app, and say hey. He does the rest by conversation. There is nothing to configure and nothing to code.

My computer can't install anything.

There is a no-install path. The download includes a ten-minute guide for running Miles in your browser on claude.ai instead, same estimator, same interview, with a two-minute file-saving habit he walks you through. Full power lives in the desktop version, and nobody gets stranded either way.

Is this a subscription?

The $299 is one time. Miles runs on your Claude account, about $20 a month, which you may already have. I take no cut of anything ongoing.

Where do his numbers come from?

Yours. Miles never invents a number. Every figure in a brief traces to a cost you gave him. Where industry data backs him up he cites it, NAHB cost studies, Michael Stone's 8% net survival floor, and your own numbers always outrank a benchmark.

Can my estimator use him too?

It is your folder and your company. Put it on whoever's machine prices work. What I ask is that you do not hand it to another contractor.

What if a Claude update changes something?

Everything Miles knows lives in plain files you own. If anything ever drifts, you tell him what is off and he tightens his own rules. You are never stranded on a version.

fig. 13 · six months from now

You'll have priced a season of work one of two ways.

With every bid carrying its overhead, its floor, and its pre-priced surprises. Or the way it has always been done, with the December math waiting. One of those costs $299. You have been paying for the other one for years.

Get Miles · $299

P.S. If you have ever sat in the truck after winning a job and felt a little sick instead of happy, you already know your pricing has a leak. That instinct is right. The number was wrong before you ever met the customer, and it is fixable in an afternoon. Bring Miles your next bid and find out what it actually costs.

Abby Buchmiller