Most owners price the same way they learned on day one. Add up the materials, add up the hours, tack on a bit, send the quote. It feels safe and fair, and it quietly caps what you will ever earn.
Because your customer is not buying your costs. They never were. They are buying the result, and the result is almost always worth far more than your materials and your time.
Cost-plus prices the wrong thing
When you price off your costs, you have anchored the whole deal to the least interesting thing about the job: what it costs you to do it. You have made the conversation about your inputs instead of their outcome.
The customer does not care that the material was cheap or the job was quick for you. They care that the problem is gone, the building is sound, the system works, the thing they were stressed about is now handled. That outcome has a value to them that has nothing to do with your hourly rate. Price to your costs and you leave most of that value on the table, every single time.
Two contractors can do identical work. The one who prices to the value earns double, because he understood what the customer was actually buying.
The value is in the result, and in you
What is the result actually worth to them. A roof that does not leak protects everything under it. A mechanical system that runs reliably saves a business from downtime that costs real money. Work done right the first time saves them the nightmare of doing it twice. That is the value, and it is large.
And part of the value is you. The trust, the reliability, the experience that means it gets done right and they never have to worry. That is worth a premium, and the customers worth having will gladly pay it. The ones who only want the cheapest number were never your customers anyway.
Getting paid before you give it all away
There is a discipline that comes with this, and it starts before the job. Your expertise has value the moment you apply it, including in the estimate.
If you are doing detailed takeoffs, site visits, and real problem-solving to produce a quote, that is work, and giving it all away for free trains customers to treat your knowledge as worthless. Charge for the serious estimate, or build it into how you sell, so that the people getting your thinking are people who are actually going to hire you. Look for the customer who says yes to you before they have said yes to the number, because they are buying you, not shopping a price.
Price to the worth of the work, not the cost of the work. It is not greed. It is finally charging for the thing you were actually delivering all along.