Forum Discussion

mims01's avatar
mims01
Builder 1
1 month ago
Solved

Are You Pricing Jobs for Profit or Just to Win the Job?

Quoting can be one of the toughest parts of running a small business. It’s easy to lower your price to beat the competition, but that doesn’t always lead to a healthy business.

A good quote should cover your time, materials, expenses, and the value you provide. The goal isn’t to get every job, it’s to get the right jobs that allow your business to grow. 

What’s one thing that helped you improve your quoting process?

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  • travisshepherd's avatar
    travisshepherd
    1 month ago

    Man, this hits home. Winning every single bid usually just means you're the cheapest option in town, not the most profitable.

    ​A few quick shifts that make a massive difference:

    • ​Production Rate Templates: Moving away from "eyeballing" jobs and using set square-footage/hour rates takes the emotion out of quoting and stops under-bidding.
    • ​Factoring Windshield Time: Building setup, breakdown, and drive time right into the estimate so non-billable hours don't eat your margin.
    • ​Good / Better / Best Tiering: Giving clients options (like a standard wash vs. adding a sealant package) raises your average ticket without you having to hard-sell.
    • ​Post-Job Costing Audits: Checking actual site hours against what was estimated. If a "2-hour job" takes 3.5 hours, the pricing template gets fixed right away.

7 Replies

  • travisshepherd's avatar
    travisshepherd
    Verified Community Coach
    1 month ago

    Man, this hits home. Winning every single bid usually just means you're the cheapest option in town, not the most profitable.

    ​A few quick shifts that make a massive difference:

    • ​Production Rate Templates: Moving away from "eyeballing" jobs and using set square-footage/hour rates takes the emotion out of quoting and stops under-bidding.
    • ​Factoring Windshield Time: Building setup, breakdown, and drive time right into the estimate so non-billable hours don't eat your margin.
    • ​Good / Better / Best Tiering: Giving clients options (like a standard wash vs. adding a sealant package) raises your average ticket without you having to hard-sell.
    • ​Post-Job Costing Audits: Checking actual site hours against what was estimated. If a "2-hour job" takes 3.5 hours, the pricing template gets fixed right away.
    • mims01's avatar
      mims01
      Builder 1
      1 month ago

      Great points. I learned that being busy doesn't always mean being profitable. It's better to win the right jobs at the right price than every job at a discount.

  • roselvaggio's avatar
    roselvaggio
    Verified Community Coach
    1 month ago

    One of the biggest changes we made was separating pricing from emotion.

    Early on, I wanted every client to say yes. If someone hesitated, I’d immediately start questioning my pricing.

    As we grew, we stopped pricing to “win” and started pricing to build the business we actually wanted. We know our labor targets, overhead, benefits, payroll taxes, workers’ comp, marketing costs, and profit goals. The quote has to support all of that, not just today’s sale.

    Ironically, our close rate didn’t suffer nearly as much as I expected. We simply attracted clients who valued professionalism over finding the cheapest option.

    The biggest lesson? A “no” isn’t always a pricing problem. Sometimes it’s just the wrong client.

    • mims01's avatar
      mims01
      Builder 1
      1 month ago

      This is a mindset every business owner eventually has to develop. Pricing should reflect the value of your business, not the fear of losing a job. The right customers understand quality, reliability, and professionalism, and those are the relationships worth building.

  • JeremyM1's avatar
    JeremyM1
    Contributor 2
    19 days ago

    The single change that fixed quoting for me was tracking estimated hours vs. actual hours on every job for one quarter, then going back and recalculating what I actually earned per hour on each one. Half the jobs I was proudest of winning turned out to be my worst hourly. That data killed the guessing better than any pep talk about "know your worth."

     

    Two things fell out of it: I now quote in hours first and convert to a price at the end (never the other way around), and I added a line for the stuff that always went unbilled — access issues, parking/loading time, disposal, the callback. Those were quietly eating a chunk of every job.

     

    The other habit that helped: I set a walk-away number before I write the quote and then don't negotiate against it in my head while I'm standing in someone's kitchen. If they need to be lower, I shrink the scope instead of the price. Losing a job at a good number is a much cheaper mistake than winning one at a bad one.

  • Nikkikerb's avatar
    Nikkikerb
    Contributor 2
    9 days ago

    We are not the cheapest in town and we are not the most expensive in town. We stay competitive without hurting ourselves. We are rated 4.9 stars on Google and word of mouth in our area helps us a ton. We get a lot of customers that go with us because of our ratings, end and the fact that we are family owned and operated not to mention licensed. If we lowered our prices to win every job we would be out of business.