Published.

Most small operators treat the price as the last decision, arrived at by adding up the costs and putting a number on top. This is exactly backwards, and it is the single most expensive habit in the trade.

The price decides who calls you. Who calls you decides what work you do. What work you do decides what you get good at, and what you get good at decides what you can charge next year. A number chosen in the last five minutes of a Friday afternoon is therefore quietly choosing your next three years, which is more responsibility than most people realise they are handing to arithmetic.

There is a cost to working across several disciplines and it is worth naming plainly, because the people who advocate for range rarely do. The cost is that you will be beaten, in any single room, by somebody who only does that. You have to make peace with that or the whole approach curdles into defensiveness.

What you get in exchange is the ability to see the seam. Most things do not fail in the middle of a discipline. They fail at the joins, where the person who designed it has never built one and the person who built it was never told what it was for.