Your body is the business

Every asset your company owns can be replaced except one. The truck can be financed again, the tools re-bought, the customer list rebuilt — but the business runs on one back, two knees and two shoulders, and there is no line of credit for those.

The way you would for any asset

Run the arithmetic the way you would for any asset. If your rate is $120 an hour and a torn rotator cuff takes you off the tools for eight weeks, that is roughly $120 × 25 billable hours × 8 weeks — $24,000 — plus the customers who found somebody else while you healed. A $24,000 event deserves the maintenance schedule you'd give a $24,000 machine.

The maintenance

The maintenance isn't complicated. There's just nothing glamorous about it. Sleep is when your body puts itself back together. Trade it for one more quoted job and you're borrowing against the only back you've got.

Lifting like you have help, even when help costs twenty minutes of waiting, is cheaper than the surgery.

Water and food on long days are fuel decisions, not comfort decisions. And a nagging pain that has lasted three weeks is a business problem — book the appointment the way you'd book a truck repair, before it quits on you.

None of this is health advice; see an actual doctor for that. This is maintenance on the one asset you can't replace.

WORKSHEET 1. Compute YOUR eight-week number: rate × your weekly billable hours × 8. Write it where you plan your week. 2. Name your body's current warning light — the shoulder, the knee, the back. If it has lasted three weeks, book the appointment today. 3. Pick the one repair habit you will keep this month: a sleep floor, a lifting rule, or the appointment. One, kept, beats three intended.