How are you paid?
If the honest answer is "whatever's left over at the end of the month," you're in the majority. It's also the reason the majority of contractors can work for decades and never feel rich for a single week.
Leftovers have a fatal flaw: the business eats them. The slow month, the extra materials run, the truck repair that waited a year. Whatever the business needs, it takes, and the owner takes what survives. Over years, the person who owns everything is paid like an afterthought.
01
A pay plan has three parts
- An amount. A number, decided in advance, that you would pay someone else to do your job.
- A date. The same day every month, paid before discretionary spending, not after.
- A separate place. A different account. Money that has left the business, on purpose, on schedule.
That's it. No complicated spreadsheets, no profit-sharing formula. The plan's power isn't the amount. It's that the amount was decided before the month had opinions.
02
The Leftovers Simulator
Move the sliders. Nothing here touches your saved numbers.
Save your standing invoice in Lesson 1 and your debt service in Lesson 5, and your real monthly floor shows here.
What the owner took each month
- Jan$9,000
- Feb$9,000
- Mar$9,000
- Apr$6,300bad month
- May$9,000
- Jun$9,000
- Jul$9,000
- Aug$6,300bad month
- Sep$9,000
- Oct$9,000
- Nov$9,000
- Dec$6,300bad month
- Months the owner took zero
- 0
- Total for the year
- $99,900
Move a slider or switch the pay mode and watch the twelve months.
03
The question the amount answers
What would you pay a hired general manager to do your job? Wage, plus the value of the risks you carry. Whatever number you say out loud is the number you're currently donating to your own company. Paying yourself on purpose doesn't cost the business that money. It reveals it.
MIKE'S EXAMPLE
Mike · General contractor, 43
Mike paid himself in leftovers from the day he opened his own company. Then he set a plan.
- The amount: $6,500 per month. What he'd have to pay a capable manager to run the place without him.
- The date: the 1st and the 15th, same as his crew. Half and half.
- The place: a personal account the business does not touch.
The first year, the business found the money twice and he took the draw anyway. The second year, the business stopped needing to. The reason wasn't discipline. It was that a fixed draw made the company's real monthly floor visible for the first time: $9,600 standing invoice plus $2,100 of debt service from Lesson 5 plus $6,500 of draw is $18,200 a month, and every bid now carries it. The company didn't shrink. It got honest.
And from this lesson forward, the standing invoice itself is $16,100 a month: the old $9,600 plus his own pay, finally priced in. One more number, and later lessons lean on it: $6,500 a month is $78,000 a year, and across a 2,080-hour work year that is $37.50 an hour. The value of Mike's hour, priced by his own pay plan. Lesson 8 uses it. Lesson 9 uses it. Remember where it came from.
04
Name Your Number
Three questions, one answer each, in writing. What would you pay a hired manager to do your job? What day of the month does your draw land? Which account receives it? If any of the three answers is "depends," the plan doesn't exist yet. "Depends" is how leftovers talk.
05
Check Yourself
Answered 0 of 3
06
Enter Your Number
Your owner's monthly draw: three fields, the amount, the day, the account. Lesson 7 turns to where the money comes from: how work flows through the day.
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07
Put This Lesson to Work
Set the draw against your real floor with the tools at the Meridian Shift tools hub. The number that survives is the number that matters.
08
Next
Lesson 7: the money side is handled. Now the work itself. What a crew produces in a day decides how long any of this lasts.