Maintenance rounds: pricing and scheduling repeat visits

A landscaping business earns twice from the same customer. The install is quoted line by line and argued over, and the maintenance that follows it is usually agreed in a sentence and never looked at again.

That second agreement is the one carrying the business through winter, so it deserves the same attention as the first.

A round is a promise about how often, not a list of jobs

A round is the set of properties one person visits on a repeating day: every Tuesday, or the first Monday of the month. The customer is buying the frequency, not the hours, and that is what makes it easy to underprice.

Price the visit you will really make in August, not the one you imagine in October. Growth stops, the visit gets shorter, and the temptation is to price the average of the two. Price the long one and keep the short ones as the margin that makes the round worth holding.

Three numbers decide whether a round pays

1. Time on site. Measured, not estimated. The first four visits tell you what the property really takes.
2. Drive time between stops. A twenty minute gap between two properties is twenty unpaid minutes, and it repeats every week for a year.
3. Green waste and tip runs. The trailer fills on somebody's time, and the tip fee belongs to the round that filled it.

The second number is the one most businesses leave out, and it is the one that decides which new customer you should take. A property fifteen minutes past your last stop costs more than a property on the way, at the same price.

Build the round geographically, then sell into the gaps

Once a Tuesday round exists, every new enquiry near it is worth more to you than the same job across town. You already pay for the drive, so the second property on a street is close to pure margin.

That turns a sales question into a map question. When somebody rings, the useful thing to know is which of your days already passes their street, and whether that day has room.

Set the schedule once

The work is repetitive, so the admin should not be. In Diract you set a job to repeat every few days, weeks or months, and each visit lands in your jobs table four weeks ahead with its customer, its site, who is doing it and its priced lines already attached.

Four weeks ahead matters more than it sounds. It means next month's work is visible now, so you can see the week somebody is on leave before it arrives rather than on the morning it does.

Each person's day then gets put in driving order with the drive times and a map, and sent to their phone. Planning the day's runs covers how that ordering works and what it does to a day with fourteen stops in it.

Charge the same way every month

A round billed per visit swings with the calendar: some months have four Tuesdays and some have five, and the customer notices the five. Billing the same amount monthly smooths that out and makes your own income predictable, which is the reason the round exists.

Work out the annual price from the visits you will actually make, then divide by twelve. Say in the agreement how many visits that buys, so a customer who asks for an extra visit in November is asking for something you can price rather than something they assume they already own.

Know which rounds are quietly losing

A round degrades slowly. A hedge gets bigger, a customer adds a bed, the visit stretches from fifty minutes to eighty, and the price stays where it was three years ago.

The only thing that catches this is a recorded time on site next to the price. Check in at the property, check out when you leave, and the comparison makes itself. Check in at the job, not the office is about what that record is for and how little it should cost the person doing the work.

What to do first

• Time four real visits at each property before you quote the round
• Add the drive from the previous stop to the cost of every new customer
• Group the round by street and sell into the days that already pass
• Set the repeat once so next month's visits exist before you need them
• Bill monthly and say how many visits the year buys
• Compare time on site against price once a year and reprice the ones that moved