Was That Market Worth It? How to Know If an Event Made Money

You get home from a market with a cash box that feels heavier than it did this morning, and the natural question is: was that worth it? The honest answer isn't the cash in the box. It's a short piece of math, and once you've run it a few times it changes which markets you say yes to.

The honest math

Worth-it has one formula. Start with what you sold, then take out everything it cost you to be there:

Profit = revenue − cost of goods sold − booth and gas − your hours

Walk through it with real numbers:

• Revenue. Everything you took in. Say it was $640.
• Cost of goods sold. What the items you actually sold cost you to make, in ingredients and packaging. Say $190.
• Booth and gas. The stall fee plus fuel to get there and back. Say $55.
• Your hours. The part most makers skip. Bake, pack, drive, set up, sell, tear down, drive home. Say that's 11 hours, and you value your time at $20 an hour, so $220.

That leaves $640 − $190 − $55 − $220, which is $175 of real profit. Good morning.

Why counting your time changes the answer

Here's the same market without the time counted. Revenue minus cost of goods minus booth and gas is $640 − $190 − $55, which is $395. That's the number a lot of makers stop at, and it feels great.

But you didn't get $395 for free. It took 11 hours. Once your time is in the math, the morning paid you $175 of profit on top of a fair wage for your hours, which is genuinely good. The point isn't to make the number smaller. It's to make it honest, so you can compare one market against another, and against the rest of your life, on equal footing.

Worth knowing

The single most useful number is profit per hour. Take your profit and divide by the hours you put in. $175 over 11 hours is about $16 an hour of profit, on top of the $20 you already paid yourself. That one number cuts through everything.

How to compare markets

Once every market gives you a profit-per-hour figure, the comparisons get easy and a little surprising:

• A busy market with a high booth fee can lose to a smaller, cheaper one once gas and the fee come out.
• A far-away market has to clear the extra drive time, which is real hours, not just gas.
• A slow market close to home sometimes wins on profit per hour precisely because it costs you so little to attend.

Run the numbers across a season and a pattern shows up: a couple of markets earn most of your profit, a few roughly break even, and one or two cost you more than they return. That's not a verdict on you. It's just where to spend your Saturdays.

Let the math run itself

Doing this by hand once is clarifying. Doing it after every market, while you're tired and unloading the car, is where it slips. The event profit calculator runs this for you: enter what you sold, your costs, and your hours, and it gives you the profit and the profit per hour, so the answer is sitting there before you've finished putting the tent away.

That's the heart of what Doughflow does. It knows the true cost of every recipe, so the cost-of-goods half of this math is already done, and it tells you which events actually paid. See how it works, or join the early-access list and start scoring your own markets.