How to find consistent work when you're also offering free services?
Hello. I have been struggling to find jobs. Any ideas? I am trying to get enough jobs so I can continue to give free services to the elderly and so I can invest into the next generation of blue collar workers. We have a career tech center for construction trades. The rate at which they actually go into a trades job is slim now. I want to hire some of them and teach and invest into them. When they graduate they would be gifted with their own company and I help them keep growing their companies and teaching them. My goal is to have the next generation of the trades to have their own companies and to become Jack of All Trades. I would pay for all their certifications if they choose that. But finding jobs to start this has been difficult. Any ideas?What's Standard Gross Profit for Your Industry?
I once listened to Tom Reber preach about 50% gross profit and how if you aren't aiming for that, you are going to hurt yourself short/ longer term. He was basically saying, for every dollar you make, you need to make two. This has been super impactful for me and my business but I'm noticing on my really big projects, it's so hard to keep that. I have one $120k exterior BBQ that has definitely had some inefficiencies but we are probably looking at 35% end of day. But that's 35% of a large $$ so that is kind of ok. For those of you who do a good job tracking this (btw Jobber's gross profit calculator is objectively amazing for this btw)- what is your gross profit and what do you usually shoot for?
Do you know your actual effective hourly rate per client — once travel time is included?
Hi everyone — I'm a developer, not a cleaning business owner, so I'll be upfront about that. I'm doing early research before building anything. I've been spending time in this community and something keeps catching my eye. There are a lot of conversations about pricing, undercharging, and knowing your numbers — but the specific gap I keep noticing is this: Jobber shows you revenue per job, but it doesn't tell you your real effective hourly rate per client once you factor in drive time and how long a job actually ran versus what you quoted. For a residential cleaning business with recurring clients, that seems like it could matter a lot. The client who pays $200 but takes 45 minutes to drive to might look identical in Jobber to a client who pays $180 and is 5 minutes away. My question, specifically for cleaning business owners using Jobber: is this actually a problem you run into? Are you tracking profitability per client in any way right now — spreadsheet, gut feel, something else? And if you're not tracking it, is that because it's genuinely not a priority, or because there's no easy way to do it inside Jobber? Not selling anything — I haven't built anything yet. I'd genuinely love to have a 15-minute conversation with a few people who manage recurring residential clients in Jobber. Happy to share what I learn with anyone who's interested. Drop a comment or DM me.What services can I offer during winter to keep income coming in?
I am currently working a full-time job while running my company. How do I earn income in the “winter” months in Kentucky? We may have one snow a year, grass doesn’t grow, to cold to pressure wash. Everyone kinda goes hermit, thanks in advanceHow Is My Pricing Sheet?
So before I started my company, I've had 16+ years in Property Management and Construction, so I know how the day to day operations and such go. I decided to make a dedicated pricing sheet for my walk in introductions with communities. Do you guys see anything that I should adjust or change?How do you stay profitable when your schedule is fully booked?
Early on, I thought the goal was simple: fill the schedule. More customers = more money. But I hit a point where my days were completely packed—15+ stops, driving all over my service area—and I still felt like I wasn’t getting ahead. Long days, constant movement, but nothing to show for it at the end of the month. So I finally broke it down. I looked at: Time per yard (from the moment I parked to when I left for the next house, not just scooping) Average yards per hour $ per minute - (if I was in someone's yard for 10 minutes and I charged them $20, I made $2 a minute) Labor cost per hour (real cost, not just hourly wage. I had to treat myself as an employee if I was ever going to hire someone) What I realized was brutal: Some of my “full” days were actually my least profitable days. Too much windshield time. Underpriced customers locked into old rates. Routes that made no sense geographically. Fixing that didn’t come from adding more leads. It came from: Raising prices on the right customers Letting go of the wrong ones Tightening routes so stops actually made sense together That shift did more for profit than any marketing I had done up to that point. Question: If you had to guess right now... what’s hurting your profitability more: Pricing Route inefficiency Labor cost Something else And what makes you say that?
How do contractors price jobs based on actual business costs instead of competitor rates?
We run a contracting business in Juneau, Alaska. It’s a remote town with no roads in or out, so our market does not work like most places. Lead generation is not our problem. The work is there. Our bigger challenge is filtering demand, choosing the right jobs, and pricing from the actual cost of running the business instead of just asking, “what does everyone else charge?” That has changed how we look at pricing. Two companies can do the same job with completely different numbers behind it: equipment payments, fuel, insurance, payroll, repairs, debt, admin time, material costs, disposal, taxes, and risk. Competitor pricing matters, but only to a point. If our cost structure is different, their price can’t be our whole pricing strategy. We have a CPA and bookkeeper we trust, so the books are not something we’re guessing on. What we’re working on now is turning the P&L and balance sheet into real-world pricing decisions: what the equipment needs to bill, what materials need to carry, what minimums make sense, and which jobs are actually worth putting on the schedule. We’ve also been using AI to organize that information into pricing structures, quote templates, equipment rates, per-ton pricing, material pricing, and job-type frameworks. To be clear, we’re not using AI to tell us what to charge. We’re using it to organize what we already know, pressure-test assumptions, run simulations, and find holes before they show up in the bank account. The more we work through it, the more we wonder how often underpricing comes from not having a clear link between pricing and the actual cost of running the business. Curious how others think about this. When you price work, do you start with your own numbers first, the market first, or a mix of both? For those using AI, have you used it for pricing, estimating, job costing, or financial review beyond emails and marketing content?
