I would be between $400-$500 per truck
If you're doing 7 of these all total, about $400 per vehicle if they're all similar plus your travel time. No idea why you would go to 7 locations. Have them come to you.
$550.00. It's immaterial how many of these you get to do, it's still the same amount of work per truck.
Not true. You can spread the layout/artwork/billing/time with the customer over several jobs vs 1. Also doing 1 job will maybe take 1 hour vs doing 7 might drop to 40 minutes each, so while the work may be "the same", your efficiency will often increase. Lastly, there is often a reasonable expectation of an improvement of material yield when doing multiples vs a one off.
Rationalizations in tortured support of whatever it is you're supporting.
1 truck takes 2 hours then 2 trucks take 4 hours. Period. Trivial and potential material savings, if any, are lost in the grass. Artwork, in this case, is non-existent but if there were any it would be billed separately. Layout is what you do to produce a sign, no charge and trivial time. Billing? What sort of vampire charges for billing? Time with customer is what you do to get the job, if you want it. If you don't want it then don't spend any time getting it.
Moreover, no matter how long you've been doing this sort of thing and no matter how good you might be at doing it, there's a non-zero probability that you're going to screw up at least some part of the job. The more trucks you do the closer this probability gets to 1. Screw ups are on you, not the client. And no, the possibility is not factored into the price. Your supposed to be a professional ferchrissakes, act like it.
The whole benefit of doing production work is that you gain efficiency. Based on your simple rationalization that you should charge for your time, then by doing 7 of something vs 1 should result in cost savings simply down to the fact it will take less time to do 7 of the same job than 7 unique jobs. Are you arguing that 7 unique jobs takes the same amount of time as doing 7 of the same job? If that's the case, I question if you've ever done any production work.
Also, the probability of making a mistake is supposed to drop based on production work. Not increase. You're getting your math screwed up. Let's throw out some random numbers. Let's say on any unique job, there is a 25% chance of something going wrong. That means if I do 4 unique jobs a day, I'll screw up one. Sounds reasonable enough. Now if I sit there and do the same job 7 times, my probability of making a mistake per piece should drop down to let's just say 20%. That should also sound reasonable. That means I'll screw up about 1 out of 5 jobs doing production work. While this means I will likely screw up during this 7 piece job, that doesn't change the fact that my probability of making a mistake has dropped.
Lastly, if you're not factoring in all costs, including error and waste, then you're the one that's not a professional. You don't think every big industry in the world factors in waste and error into their pricing? When you make mistakes/errors/waste beyond the calculated amount is what you typically can't bill for. I say typically because we all know that there are circumstances beyond our control that result in error/mistakes/waste which cannot and should not be eaten and have to be passed on to the customer.
Rationalizations in tortured support of whatever it is you're supporting.
1 truck takes 2 hours then 2 trucks take 4 hours. Period. Trivial and potential material savings, if any, are lost in the grass. Artwork, in this case, is non-existent but if there were any it would be billed separately. Layout is what you do to produce a sign, no charge and trivial time. Billing? What sort of vampire charges for billing? Time with customer is what you do to get the job, if you want it. If you don't want it then don't spend any time getting it.
Moreover, no matter how long you've been doing this sort of thing and no matter how good you might be at doing it, there's a non-zero probability that you're going to screw up at least some part of the job. The more trucks you do the closer this probability gets to 1. Screw ups are on you, not the client. And no, the possibility is not factored into the price. Your supposed to be a professional ferchrissakes, act like it.
...multiple vehicles deserves a discount, and yes, you do get more efficient as you go...
...not to mention that you can get you materials cheaper as you might be getting a 50 yard roll as opposed to a 10 yard roll, or 2 ten yards rolls...