Most small business pricing rests on an estimate of how long the work takes, and that estimate usually comes from memory rather than measurement. Memory is a poor instrument for this, and it fails in a consistent direction. It records the job as the productive hours - the time actually spent doing the thing - and quietly omits everything around it: the travel, the phone calls, the trip to fetch the part that was missing, the half hour setting up, the quote that was revised twice, the conversation about something else entirely, the tidying, the invoicing afterwards. Every one of those is real time that the business cannot sell to anybody else, and none of them feels like part of the job.
The result is that a business can be busy, working properly, charging what seems like a fair rate, and earning considerably less per hour than it believes. Because the gap is invisible, the response when money is tight is usually to work more hours, which reproduces the problem at greater volume. And it distorts the choice of work: the jobs that look most profitable on paper are often the ones with the most unrecorded overhead around them, so a business can systematically steer toward its worst work while believing the opposite.
Measuring it does not require a system and should not become a project, because a project will not be finished. Take two or three weeks and write down, for each job, the time from starting anything connected with it to finishing everything connected with it - including the travel, the calls and the paperwork. Honest rather than precise: to the nearest quarter of an hour is plenty. Two or three weeks is enough because the discrepancies that matter are large. Most people who do this find that jobs take between a quarter and a half again as long as they thought, and that one category of work is far worse than the others.
What to do with the finding is a separate decision and it is not automatically to raise prices. It might be to price that category differently, or to charge separately for something currently absorbed, or to reduce the overhead - fewer trips, better preparation, a deposit that filters out the enquiries that never convert. It might be to stop taking a kind of work. It might be to change nothing, having decided the job is worth doing anyway. All of those are legitimate. What is not legitimate is continuing to price from a number that has never been checked, because that is not a decision at all - it is just the number you happened to start with, several years ago.