Operator Cockpit
Know what your hour earns, and what is dragging it down
See which client, launch or offer is carrying you and which one is eating you. Four fields, fifteen minutes, and you never categorise a single expense.
For entrepreneurs ready to close the gap.
A Google Sheet, nine short lessons, and a prompt bank to adapt it to your own reality in your favourite AI.
Maybe one of these is you right now
One of your clients is paying you an “intern salary” and you do not know which one.
Imagine seeing for every client, every launch and business line, what you are really making and the gap between that and your minimum cost to keep operating.
Fifteen minutes and you have the rate and the gap. In one morning you see every client, launch and offer side by side. That is how you decide which one to stop, and which one to renegotiate, before it eats another month.
You might be "The Generous Service Provider"You told everyone “I am going to become an entrepreneur and will make an impact in the world”
It has been a year since you started building this. Today is the day you find out whether it pays.
Four fields, fifteen minutes, and you know how much your hour really earns and which part of the business is carrying the rest.
Then you decide with numbers instead of hope: double down, change the offer, or go get the job while this one is still standing.
You might be "The Solopreneur In Transition"You became the bottleneck in your own business. You know you need help. You do not know whether the business can pay for it.
Instead of another evening resenting it, one sheet: the minimum you need to sell each month to cover costs, your own draw, and the person you want to hire.
Fifteen minutes gives you your real rate and your minimum rate. One evening gives you which part is working, which is not, and whether the hire fits inside the gap.
You might be "The Busy Operator"Have you ever closed a project, felt good about it, and still had no idea whether it paid?
You know what came in. You know it ran longer than you said it would. You have never put those two numbers next to each other, because nothing you use puts them on the same screen.
That is how a year goes by feeling busy and leaving nothing.
I know because I did it. On day three of an engagement, a client sent me a link. "See if it helps you." It was a whole extra system to build, well outside what we agreed.
I did not send a revised price. I decided to absorb it, learn something new, and leave her a business that would not need to hire anyone after me. It felt like a generous call.
It might have been. I had no way to know what it cost, so I made the call blind. In the first month alone I logged 277 hours. That is nine hours a day, thirty days, weekends included, to have the minimum ready for her launch. In month two I finally measured. €2 an hour, and it was not finished.
Generosity is a decision. It should be a decision you make with the price in front of you.
What I went looking for, and what I found instead
I went looking for the thing that would have shown me that number in week one instead of month two.
I found two kinds of things:
1 Software sized for a company that employs a finance person.
2 And budget spreadsheets that track money in, money out, and stop there.
Neither one could tell me which of my offers was paying for the others.
So I built the Operator Cockpit
a Google Sheet with two working tabs, and nine short lessons that walk you through it field by field.
1 Tab one answers three questions. What does my hour earn right now. What does it have to earn to cover my costs and pay me. Which client, launch or offer is pulling it down.
2 Tab two answers one. What do I have to sell next month to close that gap, counted in units rather than euros, because "I need €4,000" is not a plan and "I need nine of these or two of those" is.
Every client, launch and offer sits side by side with a verdict on each one.
It also judges a launch and the offer behind it as one thing, because that is how the money moved. A launch that lost money on its own can still be the best decision you made that quarter, and you cannot see that on two separate lines.
It is not bookkeeping. It does not connect to your bank. It will never ask you to categorise an expense.
What go you get
1. The Cockpit
A Google Sheet with two working tabs. Yours the second you pay. Make a copy and it is on your Drive, not mine.
2. Nine short lessons.
Recorded, on screen, field by field. You can watch the first two and already have your number. Under 65 minutes you went through all nine lessons.
3. AI prompt bank.
Ready prompts to adapt the sheet to your own business in whichever AI you already use, plus the design tokens to put it in your own brand colours. Set it up once and you run it yourself every month.
Plus every update I make to the file, at no extra cost.
Your timeline
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First five minutes.
The Google Sheet lands in your account. Two working tabs. Make a copy and it lives on your Drive.
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After fifteen minutes of work.
Four fields filled and your real rate is on screen next to the minimum your rate has to be. Lessons 1 and 2.
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End of the full session
Lessons 3 to 9, walking the file field by field. Every client, launch and offer entered, every verdict visible, and next month's number in units rather than euros.
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Every month after.
A prompt bank to adapt the file to your own business in whichever AI you already use, design tokens to put it in your brand, and every future update to the file included.
What it costs to not know
One engagement.
277 hours in the first month.
€2 an hour.
If I had seen that number in week one instead of month two, one conversation would have changed it, followed by one email about scope. That email was worth several thousand euros and I did not know how to send it, because I could not see what I was looking at.
The sheet costs less than one hour of the work you are underpricing.
(and 3 ways to answer this question)
1 - Ask someone.
An hour with a business consultant runs €150 to €300.
They will ask you for your numbers, which is the problem you came here with.
2 - Buy software
€25 to €115 a month, every month.
Built for a business with someone whose job is to keep it fed. You will stop updating it in week three.
3 - Buy the sheet. Once.
Four fields. Your own file on your own Drive, and nobody to keep paying.
And the day it comes for you to speak with an specialist, you know your numbers
Who this is for, and who it is not
It is for you
If you run the business yourself. One person, or one person plus a couple of others. Every price you charge and every euro you spend is your call, and there is currently no single screen where those two things meet. You are willing to type four fields into a Google Sheet and read what comes back.
if you do not want another subscription. The file is yours on your own Drive. It comes with prompts to adapt it in whichever AI you already use, so you change it yourself instead of waiting for me to.
It is not for you
if you want it automatic. It does not connect to your bank. Nothing updates itself. You enter what you collected and the hours it took, once a month.
if you have not sold anything yet. The sheet divides money by hours. With no money in, there is nothing to divide. Come back when you have three months of real sales.
if someone else already handles this. If you have software or a person producing these numbers for you, you have what this does and more. I would rather you skip it now (and buy something that fits, later) than refund you in two weeks.
Guarantee
Most files like this one are sold with no refund at all.
The ones that do offer it, usually ask you
to explain what went wrong
and
show you made an honest attempt first.
Here it is one email
Within 30 days of buying, write to me and I send the €47 back.
I do not ask why and I do not ask you to prove anything.
Thirty days rather than fourteen because you will not open this on the day you buy it.
You will open it on the first quiet evening you get, and I would rather that evening still be inside the window.
DELL .
King .
Microsoft .
DELL . King . Microsoft .
Who built this?
I am not a finance person. That is the whole reason this file is usable.
In corporate, my job was to look at something already running and find the part that was not paying for itself. 23 years in enterprise IT, the last 13 at Microsoft, Dell and King. Systems analyst, scrum master, team coach for fifty people. Not writing the code. Structuring and refining what the fifty of us worked on, in what order, and which piece of work to speed or stop.
Then I left, and I was the whole system. Solo, in Berlin, in a country whose language and rules I was still learning, with a toddler and no support network.
For the first time in my career I could not answer the question I had spent 23 years answering for other people, which was whether the thing I was running was working or not.
The questions came from mentors and they were not in any course I had taken: Is this offer profitable. What is running behind the launch. Your launch lost money, so what did the whole funnel do. What are you selling next month. I could not answer any of them from what I had.
Everything I found was built by people who already speak this language. Software for a company with a finance team. Spreadsheets that assume you know what to categorise and why. I needed something that would tell me one thing, in plain English, in fifteen minutes, and would still be used regularly three months later.
So I made the file I needed. Two tabs, no jargon, built by someone who had to have it explained first.
That file is what you are buying.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
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65 minutes total, across nine lessons. The longest is under twelve minutes. Lessons 1 and 2 are the ones that get you to your own €/hour, and together they run about eight minutes. -
No. You type into coloured cells and read what comes back. The formulas are already written and you never have to open one. If you can fill in an online form, you can run this file.
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What you actually collected, meaning what landed in your account, and roughly how many hours each piece of work took (but rest assured: the prompt banks help you with that too). That is it. No receipts, no categories, no statements to reconcile.
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No. All money is cleanly identifiable with the 2 decimal, AND you can use the prompt bank to customize not only the headlines but also the numbers to show in your currency.
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No. You make your own copy and it lives on your Drive. I have no access to it and no way to see anything you enter.
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You can watch the lessons on your phone.
The file itself wants a laptop, because you will be typing numbers into columns and reading a table.
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I build for Google Sheets, but you can save as .xlsx and open in Excel. And if you feel anything needs a review, there is a prompt on the AI Prompt Bank.
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The sheet is a copy on your own Drive from day one, so it is yours regardless. The lessons stay in your account for at least 2 years, and every update I make to the file is included at no extra cost.
If you are still hereFifteen minutes from now you could know what your hour earns, what it has to earn, and which client, launch or offer is the reason for the gap.
Or you could know it a year from now, the way I did.