How to Estimate a Paint Job | Benjamin Moore (2024)

Account for Your Overhead Costs

Overhead is a smaller portion of your budget—about 10% on average for trades, according to a survey by the National Association of Home Builders, cited by BuildingAdvisor.com. As you can see from our Overhead Checklist, it includes many of your essential “costs of doing business.” Unfortunately, it’s a category that many small business owners neglect to fully account for in their job estimates.

This calculation is necessarily a bit more complicated, as you’re not paying for these expenses out of one job but instead, trying to evenly distribute them among all the jobs you expect to handle over the year, which need to be accounted for if you want to make a profit. If you’re just starting out or don’t yet have a good enough grasp on your company’s annual expenses to average it out over your jobs, a good starting point is the 10% average.

Be Sure to Include Your Salary in the Equation

You also need to account for your own salary here as business owner. A common mistake new small-business owners make is neglecting to pay themselves a fair salary, expecting to take a cut of the profits they anticipate once their business is running smoothly. Not only does this add financial strain on a new business owner, but it also creates unrealistic expectations that your business can avoid paying bills when times get tough. Profit, as you’ll see below, has its own business purpose.