Rebuild your price list from last season’s minutes

What should each service and each piece of equipment cost this year? If your crews ran clocks last season, the answer is arithmetic: your measured minutes per piece, times what an hour of your boat actually costs, plus the margin you choose. January is the month to run it, because the letter announcing the results should land before February.

Most price lists in this trade weren’t built — they accreted. A number inherited from whoever owned the company before, adjusted the years fuel spiked, matched to the shop across the lake once or twice. Rebuilding from minutes doesn’t mean changing everything; usually it confirms most of the list and contradicts it hard in two places. Those two places are worth the afternoon.

Start with the two inputs

First, minutes per piece by type and by service, from the clocks the crew ran — install and removal measured separately, because fall work in cold water and short daylight rarely runs at spring speed. Second, your loaded cost per hour on the water: crew, boat, fuel, insurance, and the overhead divided by the hours you actually bill, not the hours in a year. That second input is where most shops go wrong, and it’s covered properly in how much to charge for dock and lift work.

Then decide how each thing charges, not just what

A price list has a structure, and the structure matters as much as the numbers. There are four honest ways to charge for a piece of lake work, and each has a natural home:

• Per item — for work that’s the same every time it happens. A lift is a lift: rig it, float it, set it. One number per lift type, charged once per lift.
• Per section — for docks, where the work scales with length. A six-section dock is six units of carrying, setting and leveling, and pricing it per section means the four-section customer and the ten-section customer are both paying for exactly their dock.
• Hourly — for the unpredictable: repairs, relocations, the job nobody can scope from the office. Hourly is honest exactly where a flat number would be a guess.
• Flat — for a whole visit with a known scope, where one number reads simpler than a list of parts.

The common mistake is using one structure for everything. All-hourly makes every quote a shrug and punishes your fastest crew. All-flat quietly loses money on every long dock and overcharges every short one until the short ones notice.

Worked through: one dock rate

Say installs averaged 12 minutes per section across the season and your loaded cost is $210 an hour. A section costs you $42. At a 40% margin you’d charge $70; if the market on your lake holds $85, take $85 — the minutes set your floor, not your ceiling. Now the ten-section run that used to feel vaguely underpriced at a flat rate prices itself at $850, and you can see exactly what you’re earning on it.

Put it in the software once, and let jobs price themselves

In LakeOps the whole model is one list of rates: service, item type, amount, unit — per item, per section, per hour or flat. A per-section rate reads each dock’s own section count, so the six-section dock prices as six without anyone counting from the boat. Hourly rates bill the crew’s on-site minutes, rounded up to the quarter hour, which is the increment this trade actually bills in.

From there, completion runs the list over what was actually done and writes the number down. Nobody types a price on a job. A piece the crew skipped prices at nothing, with the reason attached — so the canopy that stayed in the yard can’t sneak onto a bill.

What the rebuild can’t break

A job snapshots its price when it completes. Retype the whole list in January and every job from last season keeps the number it was actually finished at — the history stays true, and “what did we charge them last fall” always has one answer. That’s what makes an annual rebuild safe enough to be a habit instead of a renovation.

The January sequence

Pull the minutes. Compute your floor per piece. Decide the structure — per section for docks, per item for lifts, hourly for repairs is the shape most shops land on. Set the two or three numbers the evidence says were wrong, and leave the rest alone. Then update the list, write the overrides for your exceptions, and send the letter. Done before February, it’s a price list you can defend line by line — because for once, every line came from your own water.