What amount do you actually need to pay yourself?

Not what you’d ‘like’ to make. What your life costs and what your business has to pay you to cover it.

Often pricing starts with the question: what do you want to make? Pick a number that sounds good, work backward, hope it holds. Guessing isn’t math.

So I start deeper. The mortgage. The groceries. The health insurance. The phone and the car your business pays for (the things you’d be covering yourself if you stepped away tomorrow.) Add it all up and you get a different kind of number: the salary your business has to pay you. Before profit goals. Before growth plans.

Most owners I work with have never calculated it at all. They pay themselves last, out of whatever’s left, and call that leftover amount a salary.

The Need Number walks you through the math in about ten minutes. Your real cost of living. The irregular costs that ambush you every March. The parts of your life the business covers without you noticing. It ends with one number, baseline and sustainable, and that number changes how you look at everything.

It’s free. The math runs entirely in your browser, so your numbers never leave your device. Enter your email, get your number, and I’ll send you what to do with it next.

This is your own math reflected back at you, not financial or tax advice. How is this different than a budget? A budget shrinks what you spend. This is a target your business has to hit. A budget asks what you can cut. The Need Number tells you what the business needs to cover for the life you’re already living. Get clear on it quickly and easily: