Finding the Right Price: How Do You Charge Fairly While Still Making a Profit? As A Small Business
One of the biggest challenges for many small business owners is knowing how to set prices. You want to be fair to your customers while also making sure your business is profitable and sustainable. How do you determine what to charge for your services? Do you base your pricing on time, materials, competition, experience, or your desired profit margin? What advice would you give to a new business owner who is trying to find the right balance between being affordable and making sure they are not undercharging themselves?Are reviews more useful than a marketing agency?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. A good marketing agency can absolutely help a business. They can help with creative, targeting, campaigns, landing pages, reporting, and getting ads in front of the right people. But before you pay someone to write your message, it’s probably worth asking: Have you actually studied what your customers already said about you? Because your reviews may be one of the most useful marketing assets in your business. A lot of owners look at reviews as proof. 5 stars. Good testimonial. Nice thing to put on the website. That’s useful, but it’s only the surface. The better part is the language. Customers will tell you exactly why they hired you, what they were afraid of, what they noticed, what made them trust you, what almost stopped them from buying, and what made them stay. For us, reading through our reviews changed how I thought about our marketing. Customers kept repeating things like: “worth every penny” “one less thing to worry about” “like clockwork” “they text before they come” “they send a picture of the closed gate” “they take the waste with them” “I was embarrassed” “my last company left the gate open” “there aren’t enough hours in the day” That language is better than anything I could have guessed from sitting at my desk. It showed me the real buying triggers. Some people hired us because the yard got away from them over winter or they're busy families who didn’t have time. Others had health issues, pregnancy, injuries, or physical limitations. A small handful switched from cheaper competitors because they were tired of missed visits, poor communication, or gates being left open. Those details matter. If I only market the task, I sound like every other company. “We scoop dog poop.” That’s true, but it doesn’t explain why someone is willing to pay a premium. The reviews showed us what people actually valued: Communication. Reliability. Thoroughness. Gate safety. Waste hauled away. Professional scheduling. No judgment when the yard is bad. A clean yard without having to think about it. That becomes ad copy, website copy, quote follow-up language, sales training, social proof and also helps with pricing objections. When customers repeatedly say “worth every penny,” “more than fair,” or “I’d pay twice as much,” that tells me price is not the full story for the right buyer. It tells me I need to explain the value better, not panic and discount the service every time someone asks about price. A marketing agency can miss that if they don’t understand the business deeply enough. They may write clean copy, but clean copy doesn’t always match the customer’s internal conversation. Your reviews give you that conversation. They tell you what people were already thinking before they bought or what made them feel safe enough to hire you. They show you which parts of the experience matter more than you realized. For us, gate photos became a bigger marketing point because customers kept mentioning them. Hauling waste away became a bigger marketing point because customers kept comparing that to companies that leave it in their trash can. Communication became one of our strongest selling points because people brought it up over and over again. That’s the kind of information every business owner should be paying attention to. Before you rewrite your ads, rebuild your website or hire someone to "fix your marketing", read your reviews. Print them out. Tag the repeated phrases. Look for patterns. Group them by pain point, objection, trust factor, and reason they stayed. Then use the customer’s language in your marketing. Your best customers are often telling you exactly how to sell to more people like them. Have you ever gone through your reviews and pulled out the exact phrases customers keep repeating?Should you fire customers who only want the bare minimum service?
This is a hard one because those customers are still paying you. And when you’re growing, it feels wrong to turn away money. I’ve had to think about this a lot in my own business because the bare minimum customer can quietly become one of the hardest customers to serve profitably. In pet waste removal, this usually shows up with frequency. Someone has 3 or 4 dogs and wants every-other-week service. Or they want monthly service. From the customer’s point of view, they’re trying to save money. I get that. But from the operations side, that yard can become a completely different job. A weekly yard may take 10-15 minutes. That same customer on every-other-week or monthly service may turn into a 30, 40, or 45-minute cleanup. Now the technician is behind. The route gets pushed and is harder on the body. The customer is still expecting it to look great. Plus your business is making less money per hour. That’s where the bare minimum becomes a problem. They may technically be a paying customer, but the job no longer fits the way the business needs to operate. I used to be more flexible with this. I wanted to help people or to lose the sale. And assumed a lower frequency was better than no customer at all. Then I started paying attention to what those jobs were doing to the route. They were taking too long and wearing out the techs. At least from my experience, these types of accounts created more room for complaints. They were lowering the quality of the day for better-fit customers. Eventually, we made the decision to remove monthly service. We also made every-other-week service available only for customers with fewer than 2 dogs. If someone has 3 or more dogs, weekly service makes more sense for the customer, the yard, the technician, and the business. That boundary protects the operation. It also protects the customer experience. Because if the service frequency is too low for the amount of waste being produced, the customer may still blame the company when the yard doesn’t feel as clean as they expected. That creates a bad situation for everyone. And this can show up in other industries too. A customer wants the cheapest maintenance plan but expects premium response time. Or they want the smallest cleanup package but expects the full deep clean. Maybe they'll ask to skip recommended work and then gets upset when the result doesn’t hold up. A customer wants the lowest level of service but still wants the highest level of outcome. That mismatch creates tension. I don’t think every customer who wants a lower option is a bad customer. Some people truly need a temporary down-sell because of finances, travel, life changes, or seasonality. I’m willing to work with that when it still makes sense. But there’s a difference between a temporary adjustment and a customer who consistently wants the cheapest version of the service while expecting the business to absorb the consequences. Those customers can cost more than they pay. Sometimes the best move is to explain the standard clearly: “Based on the number of dogs and the amount of waste, weekly service is the lowest frequency we can offer and still provide the level of service we’re comfortable putting our name on.” That kind of policy may lose some customers. But it can also protect your route, your team, your quality, and your profit. Do you allow customers to choose the bare minimum service, even when you know it may create problems later? Or have you created minimum standards for who you will and won’t serve?Do employees fail because they’re bad, or because the owner never defined the standard?
This question gets uncomfortable fast. When an employee keeps making mistakes, it’s easy to label them as careless, lazy, or a bad fit. And sometimes they are. I’ve had employees or applicants where the issue was clearly attitude, lack of urgency, poor attention to detail, or an unwillingness to take feedback. You can train skill. It’s a lot harder to train someone to care. But I also think owners need to check themselves before they jump straight to blaming the employee. I’ve had moments in my own business where I was frustrated because someone didn’t do the job the way I expected. Then I had to ask myself a harder question: Did I actually teach that expectation clearly, or did I just assume they would pick it up? A lot of standards live in the owner’s head. The owner knows what a finished job should look like or which gate latch is weird. They know which customer is picky and where waste usually hides in a yard. That knowledge comes from repetition. A new employee doesn’t have that yet. If we throw someone into the field with loose instructions and expect owner-level judgment, we’re probably creating our own callback problem. Callbacks are expensive. They cost route time and frustrate customers. They make the owner lose confidence in the employee and the employee will feel like they’re constantly being corrected after the fact. That’s a bad way to train. For us, the better answer has been getting more specific before the mistake happens. What does the job flow look like? When should customer notes be checked? How should the yard be walked? What photos are required? What happens if the gate is locked? What happens if a dog is outside? What counts as complete? What should the technician do when something looks wrong? Those things can’t stay vague once you start hiring. They need to show up in training, ride-alongs, checklists, job forms, videos, quality checks, and repeated feedback. The bigger the business gets, the more dangerous it is for the standard to live only in the owner’s head. There does come a point where it becomes a people problem. If someone has been trained, shown the standard, corrected, given feedback, and still keeps making the same careless mistakes, then you may have the wrong person. But I think the order matters. Define the standard. Train to the standard. Inspect the standard. Correct against the standard. After that, if the person still refuses to meet it, you can make a cleaner decision. When an employee keeps missing the mark, how do you decide whether it’s a training issue, a standards issue, or the wrong person?How Fast Do You Pick Up a Phone Call or Call Someone Back After a Missed Call?
Curious how everyone here handles this, because a new Jobber survey of recent homebuyers turned up a stat that stuck with me: 15% had to follow up repeatedly just to get a response from a contractor 9% never heard back at all Losing potential business due to something that is not a pricing problem or a skill problem should be a wake up call. In a world where 75% of new homeowners hire a pro within their first two years of buying, being the one who calls back first might be the easiest job you win all week! So, what's your business standard? Do you answer within a certain time frame or let it go to voicemail and call back same day? Are there systems set up so nothing slips through the cracks? 👉 Recent Homebuyer Report: It's got homeowner quotes on what made them trust (or ditch) a contractor, plus a breakdown of how each generation actually finds a pro.How Often Should Home Service Businesses Market to Their Existing Customers?
I recently started a discussion asking: "What's one Jobber feature you wish you had started using sooner?" One response really stood out to me. The member mentioned that while many businesses use Jobber to manage jobs, schedules, quotes, and invoices, one feature that often gets overlooked is the Marketing Suite. The point they made was simple but powerful: Many of us do a great job serving customers, but we don't always stay connected with them after the work is done. Instead of only reaching out when it's time to sell something, sending regular educational emails and staying active on social media helps keep your business top of mind. When customers eventually need your services again, or know someone who does they're much more likely to remember you. They also shared that Jobber's upcoming Marketing Calendar will make planning emails and social posts much easier, especially for teams that collaborate on marketing. It got me thinking, How many of us already have a list of past customers but rarely communicate with them? A simple monthly email with seasonal tips, maintenance reminders, or homeowner advice could be enough to keep those relationships alive. I'm curious: How often do you market to your existing customers, and what's worked best for you? I'd love to hear what others are doing.What's one Jobber feature you wish you had started using sooner?
I've been exploring how different home service businesses use Jobber, and it's interesting that two companies can use the same software in completely different ways. What's one feature, workflow, or habit that made you think: "I wish I'd known about this six months ago." Whether it's scheduling, quoting, invoicing, client communication, reminders, or something else, I'd love to hear what's made the biggest difference for your business. Hopefully this thread helps newer members discover some hidden gems too.
