TradeReady's guides are written to help independent tradespeople run the business side of their work - pricing jobs, setting a rate, marking up materials, writing estimates. This page explains who produces them and how, so you can judge the advice for yourself instead of taking it on trust.
Who writes them
The guides are written and maintained by the TradeReady team. TradeReady is built by its founder, Chad Rector, a software developer who builds tools for independent tradespeople - not a licensed plumber, electrician, or HVAC technician. We're deliberately upfront about that: these guides are the work of people who build software for the trades and study how trade businesses price their work, not a claim of hands-on trade credentials we don't hold.
That shapes what the guides do and don't do. They're strong on the arithmetic and the business method - billable hours, overhead, markup versus margin, what belongs in an estimate - because that math is the same whatever the trade. They don't tell you the going rate for a specific job in your town, because that depends on your costs and your local market, which only you can see.
How we research the numbers
Where a guide shows a figure, here's where it comes from and how to read it:
- Market ranges are our own estimates, not a survey. When a guide says something like "independent plumbers commonly charge around $75 to $150 an hour," that's a marketplace estimate we offer as a rough sanity-check - a sense of the territory, not a statistic from a formal study. We label these ranges as estimates wherever they appear. Treat them as a way to check you're in the right ballpark, never as the price you should charge.
- Occupational and wage context comes from primary sources. Where we point to what a trade earns as a reference point, we link to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook, which publishes employment and pay data by occupation. Note that BLS reports employee wages, which are a different thing from the hourly rate a self-employed tradesperson bills a customer - we're careful not to conflate the two.
- The methods are standard small-business math. The pricing formulas - cost rate from billable hours, markup-to-margin conversion, break-even, profit on top - are ordinary accounting arithmetic, worked through with plain examples. The example numbers in those walkthroughs are illustrative, chosen to make the method clear, not pulled from any one real business.
- Licensing, tax, and legal rules vary by place. Requirements for licensing, registration, tax, and contracts differ by country, state, and trade, and they change. Where a guide mentions them, we keep it general and point you to your own licensing board and tax authority for what actually applies to you.
How often we review them
Every guide carries a "Published" date and a "Last reviewed" date near its title. When we revisit a guide - to refresh a range, fix something, or update a reference - we update the "Last reviewed" date so you can see how current it is. If a date looks stale and a figure looks off, trust your own costs and your local market over our range.
Our editorial principles
- Plain English. No jargon for its own sake, and no padding. If a builder on a lunch break can't follow it, we've written it wrong.
- No invented numbers. We don't fabricate statistics, rates, or research to sound authoritative. If something is an estimate, we say so; if we don't know, we say that too.
- Method over magic numbers. We'd rather teach you to build your own number than hand you an average to copy, because the average is almost never right for your business.
- Honest about what we are. These guides are educational. They're a starting point for thinking clearly about your pricing - not legal, tax, or accounting advice, and not a substitute for a professional who knows your situation.
Corrections
If you spot something wrong or out of date in a guide, tell us at [email protected]. We'd genuinely rather fix it than leave a bad number standing.