Most coaching for tradespeople pushes the same fantasy — scale to seven figures, build an empire, hustle through the burnout. The math doesn't agree. ETA teaches a different standard: build a business that supports your actual life, gives you breathing room, funds your retirement, and runs on systems that let you step away.
The number is BASE — Basic Amount Survival Expenses. The minimum the business has to clear every month to fund the life you're actually living. Your mortgage, your groceries, your insurance, the savings you should have been building all along.
Every pricing decision, every job you accept, every owner draw you take is measured against it. Without BASE, you're guessing. With it, you have a standard — one honest question every month:
That single question replaces a hundred dashboards. It's the only question that matters until the answer becomes a reliable yes — and the only question that matters after that, too.
Every line. Mortgage, food, insurance, utilities, transportation, kids, debt service, savings, giving. The number you actually live on — not the number you wish you lived on.
This is the share the business has to fund. If you're solo, it's the whole number.
You need roughly $2 of business revenue to take home $1. Self-employment tax, business overhead, and operating reserve eat the rest. This is your monthly business floor.
Annual BASE × 12 months × 2× gross margin assumption. That's the revenue the business has to generate every year to keep funding the life you live.
Your billable days = 365 minus weekends, holidays, sick days, vacation, weather. Anything below your hourly floor is a job that costs you money. ETA's tools do this calculation for you on your real numbers.
Once BASE is hit consistently, you graduate. BALL — Basic Amount Living Large — is a 3–5% annual raise to your BASE, but only if you earn it. It's how a contracting business compounds without collapsing under its own weight.
Annual revenue target met. The business produced the money it needed to.
Ten or more months of the year where the household floor was funded. Not a perfect year — but a reliable one.
You're not the foreman, the dispatcher, and the bookkeeper. The crew runs jobs without your hand on every decision.
The hours you put into the business are decreasing year over year. The leverage is real, not theoretical.
The majority of construction and service businesses in America never break $1M in annual revenue. Most run between $250K and $750K. Pushing every contractor toward "scale to $5M" is not coaching — it's marketing. The contractor who chases that dream usually loses the business they already had.
What ETA teaches is different. The math has to work first. After that, you can build whatever size of business actually fits your market, your trade, your stage of life, and the kind of work you want to do every day.