Dustin The Plumber

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Dustin The Plumber

🔧 Fixing Pipes + Breaking Stereotypes
😂 Confessions, Leaks and Lags

17/07/2026

For about nine years I priced against other plumbers.

I would hear what someone else charged, land just below it, and call that my rate. Felt smart. Felt competitive.

What I never did was add up what my own business actually cost per month.

The workshop I rented but barely used. The bookkeeper I needed but resented paying. The phone and data plan. The cordless drill that vanished on a job in Randburg. The insurance I renewed every year without reading. The small stuff that does not feel like cost until you add it all up.

When I finally did add it up, I was sitting on about R 28 000 a month in overhead before I paid a single wage or bought a litre of diesel.

I was billing roughly 120 hours a month.

That is R 233 of pure overhead sitting in every hour I sent to a client. Not profit. Not labour. Just the cost of the business existing.

And I had not put it anywhere near my rate.

So where was it going? Out of whatever was left at month end. Some months there was enough. Some months there was not. I told myself it was a slow month. It was not a slow month. It was a rate that did not cover what it needed to cover.

When I built the formula that eventually became PlumbTrack, the first thing it asked was total monthly overhead. Not turnover. Not what the other guys charge. Just: what does it cost you to open the doors this month?

Divide that by your real billable hours and you have a floor. You cannot price below it without losing money, no matter how busy you are.

For my business, that floor works out to R 1 380 an hour. That is not a target. That is the number where I stop going backwards.

If you do not know yours, the formula will work it out for you in about ten minutes.

It is called the Golden Ratio Formula. Free at plumbtrack.co.za.

16/07/2026

The quote came in R 1600 under the next guy. The client picked you on the spot. That felt good.

Diary full. Van busy. Bank account doing something strange.

Here is what I did not know at the time. I did not know what my own hour cost to run. I knew what diesel cost. I knew what the apprentice earned. But I had never sat down and added the van repayments, the insurance, the tools that break, the call-outs that go long, the hours I spend quoting and chasing and not billing. I had never divided all of that by the hours I could actually sell in a month.

So when I priced that job, I priced it off what I thought the client would accept. I shaved R 1600 off a competitor number I had heard somewhere. I won the job.

I also paid to do it.

Not in a dramatic way. No single job sank us. It was quieter than that. Month end came and the invoices looked fine and the account still felt thin. I blamed slow payments. I blamed a quiet patch the month before. I did not blame the number I put on that quote, because that number had won me work.

The winning was the problem.

Every cheap job I landed kept the diary full enough that I never had to stop and ask the real question. Full diaries feel like a healthy business. Sometimes they are just a reason not to look.

The Golden Ratio Formula is the calculation I built to fix that. It takes your real fixed costs, your real hours, your margins, and gives you one number you can stand behind. Free at plumbtrack.co.za.

06/07/2026

The busiest month I ever had in the business, I lost R 11 000.

Not because the work was bad. Not because clients did not pay. Because the rate I was charging was under what the hour actually cost me, and I had enough jobs that month to turn a small leak into a flood.

That is the thing about volume. It does not fix a broken rate. It scales it. Twenty jobs at a rate that loses R 80 an hour loses R 1 600 a day. A full month of that and the bank account tells a story your diary cannot explain.

The part that caught me was the delay. The money from a busy March arrives in April. The damage shows in May. By then you are already deep into the next month and the busy feeling has long since covered the evidence.

I priced the way most of us do. I knew what the other guys were charging. I knew roughly what materials cost. I had never actually sat down and added up diesel, the bakkie payment, insurance, tyres, my own wage as an owner, and divided the total by real billable hours. When I did it, the number I got was not the number I had been quoting.

The Golden Ratio Formula is the calculation I built to find that number. It is free. You put your actual costs in, it gives you your real cost per hour, and you decide what to do with it. That is all it does.

It is called the Golden Ratio Formula. Free at plumbtrack.co.za.

05/07/2026

For years I priced off three things.

First was the competitor number. I knew what the guy two suburbs over was charging. R 450 a call-out, R 550 an hour, something like that. I matched it or beat it. The problem is his bakkie is paid off, his wife does his books for free, and he has been in the same house for eleven years. His costs are not my costs. I just did not know mine.

Second was the gut number. I had a rate in my head from maybe 2019. I bumped it once when diesel jumped, but mostly it sat there. Costs do not sit. Insurance went up. The apprentice came on. The van needed tyres. The rate did not move to match any of it.

Third was the win-the-job number. Quote comes in, feels competitive, I shave R 2000 off because I want the work. Some months I was fully booked on those jobs. At the end of the month I was also fully broke. Busy and losing is a particular kind of exhausting.

I used one of those three guesses every single time I quoted. I thought I was pricing. I was just choosing which guess felt least wrong that day.

The formula I built is not complicated. It takes your actual fixed costs, your actual hours on the tools, your actual materials markup, and it tells you the number that covers your real business. One number, built from your own maths, not your competitor's.

It is called the Golden Ratio Formula. Free at plumbtrack.co.za.

04/07/2026

For a long time I priced as if I sold eight hours a day. I did not sit down and decide that. I just looked at what other guys charged, added a little, and called it my rate.

The problem is that eight hours and eight billable hours are not the same thing.

Drive to the first job. Drop a quote on the way. Sit in the queue at the merchant because the fitting you need is not on the van. Take the callback from yesterday's geyser. By the time you are actually billing, the morning is half done.

Five billable hours is closer to the truth for most working days. Some days it is four.

If your rate is built on eight, you are recovering maybe sixty-three cents of every rand you need. The rest comes from somewhere. Usually it comes from you not paying yourself properly, or from not replacing equipment on time, or from that slow drain on the account you cannot quite explain.

I built the Golden Ratio Formula to do one thing: take your real costs and your real billable hours and tell you what your floor actually is. Not a guess. A number.

It is free. It does not ask you to buy anything.

It is called the Golden Ratio Formula. Free at plumbtrack.co.za.

23/10/2025

If they do they are lying 😆

18/10/2025

AI’s got code.
We’ve got callouses, caffeine, and conduit.
😎💪🏼

17/10/2025

You might look past the mess, but poor work is an accident waiting to happen.

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http://plumbtrack.co.za/

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