Side Quests · Small missions. Real progress.
Time: 15–20 minutes | Cost: Free | You’ll need: A notes app or spreadsheet, and memory of your last 3–5 jobs of the same type.
Most side hustlers price based on a gut feeling or what a competitor charges, then never check whether the number actually holds up once every minute of real work gets counted. The quoted price for a job and the price you actually earned per hour are often two very different stories — and the gap hides in prep time, cleanup, driving, messaging, and revisions that never made it onto an invoice.
This quest has you pick your single most common service — the one you sell over and over — and work backward from your last few real jobs to find your true hourly rate. No guessing, no new system, just an honest accounting of where the time actually went.
Your mission: Calculate the real hourly rate of your most frequent service by accounting for every phase of the job, not just the hands-on part, and decide if that number is one you’re comfortable repeating.
How to build it
- Pick one recurring service. Choose the job type you do most often — a haircut, a logo design, a lawn mow, a tutoring session, a custom order. Write its name at the top of a notes page or spreadsheet.
- List every phase of the job. Think beyond the visible work. Common phases include: initial messages/quoting, prep or shopping, travel time, the actual job, cleanup, invoicing, and any follow-up or revision requests. Write each phase as its own line.
- Estimate real minutes per phase. Using your last 3–5 jobs of this type as a memory check, jot down a realistic minute estimate for each phase. Be honest about the boring parts — the 20 minutes spent texting back and forth to schedule, or the drive across town, all count.
- Add it up and divide. Total the minutes, convert to hours, then divide your usual price for this service by that total. That result is your true hourly rate — not the number you quote, but the number you actually take home per hour worked.
- Compare it to your target rate. Write down what you’d consider a fair hourly rate for this work. If your true rate falls short, note one lever to pull: raise the price, cut a time-consuming phase, bundle in a faster process, or accept it as a loss-leader on purpose.
Quest complete when: You have one job type broken into real time phases, a calculated true hourly rate, and a one-line decision about whether that price stays, rises, or gets restructured.
