Maintenance rounds: pricing and scheduling repeat visits

A landscaping business earns twice from the same customer. The install gets a line by line quote, and an argument to match. The maintenance that follows usually gets agreed in a sentence and never revisited.

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. The long one carries the price, and the short ones become 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 beats 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 a job repeats every few days, weeks or months. Each visit lands in the jobs table four weeks ahead, carrying its customer, site, person and priced lines.

Four weeks ahead matters more than it sounds. Next month's work is visible now, so the week somebody takes leave appears in advance rather than on the morning.

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. The agreement says how many visits that buys. A customer asking for an extra visit in November is then asking for something priceable, rather than something they assume they own.

Know which rounds are quietly losing

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

The only thing that catches this is a recorded time on site next to the price. A check in at the property and a check out on leaving make the comparison themselves. The purpose of that record sits in check in at the job, not the office. So does the small cost it carries for the person doing the work.

What to do first

• Time four real visits at each property before you quote the round
• The drive from the previous stop joins the cost of every new customer
• The round groups by street, and the selling follows the days that already pass
• The repeat gets set once, so next month's visits exist before anybody needs them
• Billing runs monthly, and the agreement says how many visits the year buys
• Compare time on site against price once a year and reprice the ones that moved