First I want to give a big thanks to everyone on this forum as you all are a huge help with the posted threads especially the most experienced. I started a small ADC business on the side just for extra income and to have the legal paperwork during the offseason of trapping because I was getting various calls on coon, groundhogs, etc. Thus far thankfully I have been able to handle everything thrown my way just based in my trapping experience and from what I have read of these threads. I want to charge a fair price but make a reasonable profit as well. I see there is countless ways you guys charge but is there a simple formula base I can use for most work?

This seems to be the one secret nobody will reveal, the responses always follow the same direction

1. How much you need to make per hour may be different

2. Your expenses have to be figured in

3. What is your time worth.

4. Depends on where you live and what your market will except

The question I think is like asking your neighbor. "So how much do you get paid at your job"

So I would like to see if everyone will help when the question is changed......

How many hours do you charge for to set a single raccoon trap?

How many hours do you charge for to remove and dispose of said raccoon?

I am trying to learn all of this too, I have operated a small remodeling company for 15 years and charge $50.00 hour per man hour and 1.3x for material mark up. This rate has givin me a com profitable living. As a pay $15-25.00 per hour to laborers depending on skill sets.

But knowing how to charge for set up has been tough for me , as I learn this industry it has dawned o me the travel cost are diffent as you are not going to a sight for 8 hrs and the time spent off site is not easy to know with out doing it for a while

So if you venterans could please tell us rookies no what you charge per hour but what formula we should use for set ups and captures we will then mutiply that by our needed wage

So it may phiscslly only take me a hour and a half to make sales call and set up trap, but I know it really is more than that as to how much time is envolved for that whole project. is: 1.5 hours to drive to house, meet customer, sign contract, set trap and leave. Plus 1 hour to go and pick up trap, return animal to shop and euthanize animal. So 2.5 hours X $50 = $125.00. Bu that is not enough to cover internal paper work, clean cage, additional checks to find no animal yet, the neighbor coming over and asking if you can trap for them, stop and get gas, repair damage traps, order supplies, spend time on trapperman.com learning more stuff., ect


So veterans. Not how much should I charge but how many hours should I charge for? Please help us newbies a little

Not that I know of.

My suggestion would be to keep track of the time, mileage and payment for each job and it will become clear rather quickly if you should be charging more or less.

I'll give it a shot but just remember that we charge by the animal not the hour, mileage, or how dangerous the neighborhood is.

Service Call: Between $100 and $300 depending on distance to customer and time of day. A 2:AM bat call is expensive.

Animal Prices: This is based on your area and the cost of living in it. New York and California are not going to be the same as

Louisiana and Wyoming. Let's just use some round numbers and start with cage caught chipmunk sized animals at $30 each. Then squirrel

size will be $35, raccoon size $45, canines $75 and $125, beaver size $95, small birds $40, large birds $50, snakes $35 to $150. Now

I can hear the screaming already. Those prices may be too high in some areas and too low in others. This is just to give you new

guys an idea of where to start. Adjust your prices accordingly. And if you're going to charge by the hour, charge what your local

electrician gets. After all, more people would rather do his job than yours. And always remember to have fun!

The pricing formula is expenses + salary + desired profit/billable hours. This is the only way to figure out what your costs will be. Since you are dividing by billable hours this is normally considered to be your hourly worth. If you have $100 in expenses and need to make $100 for your salary and you want the business to make 40% profit, the top of the formula would be (100+100+80) or $280. Now comes the tricky part as the billable hours you divide this number by will have a big effect on the outcome. For instance, if we divide 280 by 2 we get $140/hr but if we divide it by 10 we get $28/hr. This is why this formula is generally used on a yearly basis and not a project basis. That way we get a more constant number as a year would look more like $10,000 for expenses, $30,000 for salary, a business profit of $16,000 for a total of $56,000. Most full-time people work 2000 hours per year, but it will vary greatly for WCO's based on location and services offered. So if we use a billable hours number of 1,500, this means our hourly worth would be $37.33. Another way to look at it is you'd need to charge $37.33 for 1,500 hours to produce $56,000. If we were only able to work 500 hours for the year the hourly worth would increase to $112 in this example.

As I've said before, don't confuse costs with marketing as they are different. Cost is what you must pay to offer that particular service while marketing is how you sell that service. To stay in business, the only negotiation room you have is with the business profit margin as the expenses and salary (i.e., what you need to make to pay the bills not associated with the business) are a fixed cost.

The real problem for figuring an hourly rate is that each service is different, so you have to make assumptions for how long each will take even if you've been doing this for a while. There are some raccoon jobs that will take you longer to drive to than to remove the raccoon and there are other jobs you could walk to and be bashing your head into the wall wondering what the problem is 10 days later.

This is why I recommend determining your hourly worth and then use it with the estimated hours a job will take to determine a starting price. I say starting price, because it will depend on how you performed your calculations. Was travel time included with your billable hours or is billable hours only for time on-site because you charge a travel fee? There is no magic formula for figuring this out so you must be flexible and not afraid to change when necessary.

To use the raccoon example again, if we estimate it will take 1/2 hour to drive to, an hour on site each trip, and three days to complete that gives us 3 hours drive time and 3 hours of service time for a total of 6 hours (or 2 hours a day). If our hourly minimum is $37.33, then this job would cost us $223.98 to offer. If our hourly rate is $112 then the service would be $672. Again, how this is marketed to the client is a different matter. We could offer a flat rate program for $225 (because I like working in round numbers) or $675 for three day but some may not take that and would insist on a 5, 7, or 10 day program instead. Now you can either take the risk that you will be done in 3 days (if client is doing trap checks) or you can add additional hours into the program to cover it. I can't say this enough as now we're talking about sales. If we add two more days to the equation making it 10 hours this now changes our cost to $373.30 for the cheaper rate and $1,120 for the higher rate. Again, you'll have to decide if you want to take a risk and drop estimated time off the cost or not.

Another way to sell the job is to break it down into a service fee and per animal fee. Generally, this would be done by taking the cost and dividing it in such a manner that it would cover additional trips to the client. So for this we'd be looking at a daily cost of $74.66 which I'll round up to $75 and call the per animal fee. We already know that our cost is $225 for a three day program, I can take $225 and subtract off $75 to get my service which would be $150. Now I would sell the job with a service fee of $150 and a per animal fee of $75. If the client has me pull equipment before my estimated 3 days I made extra, and if I catch 1 animal in 3 days I break even and if I catch more than 1 animal at any time I made extra. My only loss is if I don't catch anything in the 3 day limit as now I lost $75.

When it comes to marketing/selling of jobs there are multiple ways of presenting the cost to the client but before you can sell a job, you need to know how much it is going to cost in the first place.

My hourly rate is too cheap then lol. Electricians are 80-100/hr here
No way anyone will pay that for my trapping here. Everyone seems to think what we do is easy. If they do I'll let them know that can take care of the problem themself then lmao

Kind of irrelevant. You're not an electrician. Most people can figure out how to catch a squirrel or raccoon. Most can figure out how to solve an electrical issue if they have a mind to. But whereas any 18yo can get a wco license, what does it take to get an electricians license?



This is the most important and variable thing in pricing in my humble opinion. It really doesn't matter what you think your time is worth. What matters is how much are the people in your service area willing to pay.

The richer and more urban the customer, the more you can charge and the more your service will be needed.

I live in a suburban/sub rural area and I'd hate to try supporting a family on what people are willing to pay around here. I can make a descent part-time income though and fortunately that's all I'm looking for.

Steve (sqs) added one very important bit of truth to this Prices??? question. You are going to make an awful lot less money in the

slums of Chicago than you are in the mansions of Beverly Hills. Steve is very content doing what he is doing and there is a lot to be

said for that aspect of the job. I grew up where our office is and I'm quite happy here because I know a lot of people. Moving just

to follow the money may not be in everyone's best interest.

It took me 4yrs of an apprenticeship and passing a state electrical exam to become an electrician.
I was just kidding about what Paul said about charging what electricians do.

Very good write up WCT

And thank you to Paul also

Hopefully you don't want those kinds of requirements imposed to be able to work as a wco.

Price accordingly.

Figure out the margin you want...and calculate backwards to the price.

Now you tell me........

It's up to ya'll....but I always thought a hourly wage was like trading some minutes of your life. What would you pay to get them back on your last day on this earth? Businesses have an element of risk, and you ought to be compensated to take that risk. Don't undervalue yourself.

Dave, business is a risk but so is employment. Just different ways to accomplish the same thing.

Some risks are greater than others. For example, I just started a new branch. We spent countless hours of work, probably $40K in capital....and don't have a single customer. We could easily not get them either!

On the other hand, I have a wildlife specialist opening available in another location. It pays upwards of $60K/year. We provide all the equipment, training and work.

What is less risk?

For the tech it is more risky to take your job seeing how he has nothing to do with the decisions you have made lol

I don't make much money off of my trapping, I consider it a lead generator to the restoration work. I also don't pursue animals where restoration work isn't likely. I don't do beaver or coyote work, not going to catch a chipmunk in your yard. Love raccoons and bats. If its not in your attic I am not that interested. I probably catch in a year what some guys catch in a quarter, but that's my business model. Unless your business model was similar my actual numbers aren't going to help you much.

sqs, I know what your point was and I suppose in most cases you would be right. I believe Dave uses very nearly the same method

of payment for his employees as we do. We have two new employees who never worked in this type of job before. They are probably two

of our best wage earners. They ask questions, correct their mistakes and seem to be great with customers. One of them is getting

married and was just given a brand new charcoal grill by one of his customers who is moving. Dave and I pay our technicians well and

we are proud of that fact. There is just one catch. They have to work to make that kind of money.