Your accountant will tell you exactly what each employee costs. He'll say it with confidence, point at a clean spreadsheet, and he'll be wrong. Not lying — wrong. And that gap between what he knows and what's actually true is where your profit quietly goes to die.
Let me tell you what he knows. He knows the salary. He knows the taxes. If he's thorough, he knows the insurance. Those are the comfortable numbers — the ones that sit neatly in a row, easy to add up, easy to put in a report. That's the job. I'm not blaming him for doing it.
But that number — salary plus taxes — is a fairy tale. It's the cost of an employee in a world where people work in a vacuum, sitting on nothing, using nothing, supported by no one. That world doesn't exist.
Here's the thing almost nobody accounts for properly. The man on the floor who actually produces — who lays the bricks, drives the route, runs the line — he isn't just carrying his own salary. Out of what he produces, the business also has to pay for everyone who doesn't produce.
The person in admin who handles the paperwork. The supervisor who never bills an hour but absolutely costs you one. The office, the equipment, the vehicles, the software, the electricity, the coffee, the parking. None of those things pay for themselves. They get paid for out of what the productive people generate. So the real cost of your producer isn't his wage — it's his wage plus his share of carrying everyone and everything that doesn't.
None of that appears on a payslip. All of it appears on your bank statement.
When I ran teams of 200-plus people across construction, facility management, logistics, I stopped asking the question everyone asks. "What does this person earn?" Useless question. I started asking the only one that matters:
"What does this person actually cost me per productive hour?"
Not per hour they're at work. Per hour they actually produce something that makes me money. Because a man at work eight hours doesn't produce eight hours of value — he produces during the hours he's actually building, after you subtract the meetings, the waiting, the setup, the cleanup, the "quick question" that ate forty minutes.
And here's where it gets useful. After enough years and enough businesses, I noticed something: the way the costs split up wasn't random. Across construction, pest control, facility management, logistics, food, automotive — wildly different industries — the proportions kept landing in patterns. How much of what a producer generates goes to carrying the non-producers. How much to overhead. How much is left as actual profit. I took every business I'd ever run, found those patterns, and turned them into the percentages I used to price every job after that.
I'm not going to hand you the formula here — it's the thing that took me twenty-five years and a lot of expensive mistakes to work out. But I'll tell you what it does. It takes the real number out of your hands and stops you lying to yourself.
The first time I applied it properly, the number made me sit back in my chair. It was higher than I expected. Not by a little. Sometimes 30% higher than the comfortable salary-plus-taxes number. Sometimes 50%. I've seen cases where the real cost per productive hour was nearly double what the owner had in his head when he signed the contract.
Now sit with what that means. You quote a job. You base the price on the comfortable number, because that's what your accountant gave you and you trust your accountant. You win the job. You feel good. And the entire time, your real cost is 40% higher than the number you built the price on.
You didn't win a contract. You bought yourself a loss and wrapped it in a celebration.
This is how good businesses bleed out slowly. Not one dramatic disaster. A hundred jobs, each one priced on a number that was never real, each one a little less profitable than it looked, until one day you're working harder than ever, there's nothing in the account, and you have no idea why.
And here's the part that should make you angry — not at yourself, at the situation: nobody is incentivized to tell you this. Your accountant's job is to record what happened, not to model what your people truly cost per productive hour. The payroll software shows salaries because salaries are what it was built to show. The whole system is designed to hand you the comfortable number and let you assume it's the true one.
It isn't. It never was. The true number is knowable — it just takes the right method and the honesty to use it.
So I built a tool around the method. You put in your own numbers — your salaries, your team, your hours. Nothing hidden, nothing invented, nothing added that you didn't enter. What it does is apply the same cost-splitting logic that worked for me across six industries, and hand you back the real cost per productive hour — and whether the job you're about to take actually makes money.
You don't have to take my word for any of it. Put in your own numbers and watch what comes out. It's free, it runs in your browser, no account, nothing to install. Most people go quiet for a minute after they see it — the same way I did, the first time.