Isaac Horneman –
Kalinda Constructions

Underpriced, underconfident, and doing everything himself. Here’s what changed.

He was running a small building business, doing good work, but the numbers weren’t stacking up. He suspected his hourly rates were too low but felt pressure to stay competitive. Every time he thought about putting prices up, there was a voice saying you can’t charge that.

On top of that, he was carrying the whole back office himself — payroll, admin, invoicing — all of it bleeding into his evenings and weekends. The business was running him.

What we worked on

The first thing we did was get into the actual numbers. Isaac pulled his overheads out of Xero and we put them through the Big Numbers Tracker to work out what he should genuinely be charging versus what he was charging.

The gap was around $10–$15 per hour. He’d been undercharging that much, across every job.

• True cost of labour — getting the real number, not a guess
• Overhead recovery — understanding what it actually costs to run the business
• Pricing confidence — backing himself when quoting, not folding under client pressure
• Proposal process — sitting down with clients properly rather than pricing on the fly
• Back office systems — bookkeeper, payroll process, admin off his plate
• Team growth — hiring the right people into the right roles so Isaac could step back

What happened

Isaac put his rates up by $10–$15 an hour. He got almost no pushback — which he admits was a bit frustrating in retrospect, because he could have done it years earlier.

Over the following 12 months, the business turned around by $140,000–$150,000 in profit. That number came from a combination of better pricing, better systems, and no longer haemorrhaging money on undercosted jobs.

The team went from 3 people to more than 7. Payroll that used to eat half an evening is now two button clicks.

The business isn’t where Isaac wants it to end up — but the trajectory is clear and he knows it.

“Jon gave me the confidence to back myself — that self-worth for us and our tradesmen. You’ve got the hard numbers and facts right there, and nobody can talk you around.”

— Isaac Horneman, Kalinda Constructions

What made the difference

The numbers gave Isaac the confidence the pep talks never could. When you can point to a spreadsheet and say this is what it costs, it stops being an opinion. It’s just facts.

The other shift was getting out of his own back office. Not because the work didn’t matter — it did — but because Isaac doing payroll at 9pm wasn’t good for him or the business. Getting the right people doing the right tasks freed him up to actually run things.

And the third thing, which doesn’t show up on a P&L, is perspective. It’s easy to look at where you are now and feel like you’re not moving fast enough. Sometimes you need someone to point back at where you started and show you the $150,000 turnaround you’ve already made.

If your pricing feels off but you’re not sure by how much, that’s exactly where we start.