The business you are actually building

Nearly everyone who starts a pressure cleaning business starts the same way: buy a machine, print some flyers, undercut the guy on Facebook, work weekends. Two years later they are busy, tired, and earning slightly less than they would have as an employee — because they built a job with worse hours and no super.

The difference between a job and a business is one number: profit per hour of your time, and whether that number survives when you are not the one holding the wand.

The three numbers that decide everything

1. Average job value. A $220 driveway and a $900 house-plus-driveway-plus-gutters package take similar travel and setup. Same day, four times the revenue.
2. Jobs per week. Set by lead flow, not by how hard you work. Ten quotes and a 45% close rate is four and a half jobs.
3. Effective hourly rate. Revenue minus direct costs, divided by all the hours — travel, quoting, invoicing, the Sunday night spent on the phone.

Most beginners obsess over the first, ignore the second, and never calculate the third. That is why the $150 driveway feels fine right up until you total the year.

What "good" looks like in Australia

A solo operator running the system in this course should be clearing $120–$165 an hour of on-site time on residential work, and building toward $8,000–$12,000 months by month six to nine. A two-crew operation runs $30K–$45K months at a 20–30% net margin once wages, super and vehicles are paid.

Your job in this module

Do not buy equipment yet. Pick the suburb, pick the service you will lead with, and set the revenue target. Everything downstream — which machine, which chemicals, which ads — is decided by those three answers.