The Six-Job Price Sheet

The most expensive work you lose is the work you never hear about. A customer who likes you stands on your own patch of ground with money out and a deadline attached, and your business has no mechanism for taking it.

It never becomes a number. Not a quote, not a lead, not an invoice — so it appears nowhere in your accounts and you carry on believing you had a normal month. Nobody calls to tell you they tried to give you money and gave up. The fix is smaller and duller than it sounds: a written price for the handful of jobs you get asked about most, so somebody who is not you can answer, and one sentence for anyone who goes out to a customer. This instrument writes the first draft of both, for your trade.

This instrument will not tell you what to charge. It gives you the shape of each price and the unit it should be quoted in — per square foot with a spread for condition, per room, per visit — and the cost that goes missing when that job is priced from memory. The numbers are yours to put in, because they depend on your costs and your market, and a confident guess from a website would be worth less than nothing.

Questions owners ask before they run this

How do I stop losing jobs I never knew about?

Write down a price for the handful of jobs you get asked about most, so somebody who is not you can answer a customer. Most lost work in an owner-run business is not lost to a competitor or a bad review. It is lost because the only person who could price the job was not the person standing in front of the customer, and there was no way for the request to get passed on. It never became a quote, a lead or an invoice, so it appears nowhere in the accounts. A written price and one sentence for whoever goes out is the whole mechanism, and it costs an afternoon and a piece of paper.

Should I publish my prices?

You do not have to publish them to benefit from writing them down. The first job of a written price is internal — it lets somebody who is not you answer a customer in the moment, rather than promising to ask. If you do publish, a range is usually more honest than a single number, because it tells the truth about the thing that actually moves the price. A price per square foot with a spread in it for condition is more useful to a customer standing on the job than silence is, and far more useful than a number that turns out to be wrong.

Why does selling always fall off when I get busy?

Because doing the work has a deadline and selling the work does not. A customer is standing there, a job is half finished, rain is coming Thursday. Nobody is waiting in a driveway for you to write down what you charge. So on any given day the work wins, and it wins for the best reason available: it is the obvious thing that people are waiting for. Except the customers waiting on you are invisible, and the ones in front of you are not. That is structural rather than a discipline problem, which is why being told to be better at business development has never once worked.

Do I need more marketing, or better follow-up?

If requests are already evaporating before they become quotes, paying to generate more of them is a way of paying to lose slightly more. More marketing brings people to a door that still cannot answer them. Something that answers is a different category and worth separating out, because it usually gets lumped in with marketing and it is not marketing: a written price for the common jobs, or something on your website that will talk to a customer at nine at night and take down what they want. Those are not there to find you work. They are there to catch the work that already found you, on the evening you were on a roof.

Is this the same as speed to lead?

It is the small-business version, and it is worse. Speed to lead is the sales term for how fast a business gets back to someone who has raised their hand, and the known finding is that the odds drop fast within the first hour. That framing assumes somebody wrote the request down — that it exists as a lead going cold in a queue. In an owner-run business it often was never written down at all, because the person the customer spoke to had no way to price it and no route to pass it on. There is nothing to be slow about. The tooling sold to fix speed to lead — routing, alerts, automated follow-up — all starts from a captured lead, so none of it applies here.

Will this tell me what to charge?

No, and deliberately not. It will not give you a price, a range or an hourly rate, because it does not know your costs, your market or your region, and a confident invented figure would be worse than nothing. What it gives you is the shape of each price and the unit it should be quoted in, plus the cost that reliably goes missing when that job gets quoted on a call. You supply the numbers. That is the honest division of labour — and the shape is the part most owners have never actually written down.

An instrument from Clickbridge — built to be borrowed.