How do businesses handle different tax rates when working in multiple areas?
What does everyone do to make sure they are using the right tax rate when you are **bleep** business all over the place. We use QuickBooks that does it for us so when it integrates its all messed up if I don't stop and look it up but if Im going to do that I mind as well just use QuickBooks.
Seeking Advice: Building a Pricing Strategy and Ideal Customer Avatar for MTAC Plumbing
Hi Everyone, This is Markus from MTAC Plumbing, based in Kitchener, Ontario. After 2.5 years in business, I’m reaching out to fellow plumbing companies for advice and insights. As a relatively new business, we’ve been saying "yes" to all types of customers and work. We’ve worked with small general contractors on home renovations, direct service calls with homeowners, small commercial fit-outs, reworks, and even a few custom new construction homes. One challenge I’m facing is narrowing down my ideal customer avatar. Without that focus, I’ve struggled to create a solid pricing strategy and price book tailored to specific types of work. I’ve consumed a lot of content—coaching programs, podcasts, and even paid for some trades business coaching—but I’m constantly torn between different approaches. Should I stick to flat rate/lump sum pricing, or go with time and materials transparency? Overhead recovery is another area I need to lock down, along with deciding whether to lean into truck/service charges or a higher hourly rate with minimum-hour strategies. Currently, my price book in Jobber feels clunky and difficult to use. It’s challenging to organize by service types (e.g., Service, Renovation, Commercial), and there’s no way to create subfolders, making navigation harder. From my experience, homeowners in my area often see flat-rate pricing as a dealbreaker. I’ve trained our admin to explain that a plumber needs to assess the job on-site because of plumbing’s many variables. For common issues, I’m considering building out flat-rate pricing for simplicity, but most clients still want an upfront range or at least a disclosed hourly rate before scheduling. I’m looking for advice from this community: How do you structure your pricing and organize your price books? Do you use flat rate, lump sum, or time and materials strategies, and how do they work for you? What’s the best way to build confidence and efficiency in pricing to ramp up billables while keeping processes streamlined? I appreciate any insights or feedback! Best regards, Markus MTAC PlumbingHow to do a pest control estimate?
Hello everyone, Daniel here from Pest Free Canada. I am wondering if there are any other pest control companies on here who have any new or interesting ways to provide a estimate to a potential client? Or even to add value to a current customer? My company focuses on solving a customers immediate and ongoing issues, but also doing exclusion work to prevent it from happening again. I also like to look for other small jobs that a client may need and offer that service to them. I feel like this strategy adds the most value to every stop I make and lets the customer know that I care about really solving their issues.What affects pest control pricing the most?
Wondering if there are any other pest controllers out there that have any input into something I may not be thinking about when pricing my service? I take into account time, fuel, products, parking and working conditions. By conditions I mainly am referring to sanitation of the space I will be working. Are there any other areas I am missing?
How to grow a landscaping business stuck at “owner + one crew” stage
TLDR: My spouse and I run a small landscaping business that’s stable but stuck at the owner + one crew stage. We still have to work in the field daily because we haven’t been able to develop reliable crew leaders, and hiring more staff feels unmanageable. Our maintenance model works well in a dense service area but doesn’t scale easily to nearby towns, and clients mainly see us as a maintenance company rather than landscapers. We’d like to move toward higher-value work and build a business that doesn’t rely on our physical labor long-term. For those who’ve grown service businesses: how do you break past this stage and start working on the business instead of just in it? My spouse and I run a small landscaping business that we somewhat fell into unexpectedly, and we’re looking for advice from people who have grown service businesses past this stage. The business started informally in a neighbourhood about 20 minutes outside a nearby town. Over time, several gated communities were developed nearby, adding a few hundred homes. Many are vacation properties and many residents are snowbirds, so there’s strong demand for property maintenance. Right now we operate with one truck / crew (2–4 people including us), and season that runs roughly March–December. We do have another truck and a few other trailers so have had short stints of running two crews. The business is financially stable. We pay ourselves modestly, have an accountant/bookkeeper, and use QuickBooks and Jobber. However, we feel stuck at this size. Main challenges We’re still on the tools every day. Most hires are entry-level and turnover is high, so we don’t have anyone who can reliably run a crew, quote jobs, train others, or solve problems independently. Crew leads aren’t long-term. Even when someone steps up, they still require constant support. Growth feels unmanageable. Hiring more staff means more work to manage, which already feels like full capacity. Our model relies on a dense service area. Maintenance works well in the clustered neighbourhoods we serve, but expanding into nearby towns becomes inefficient (plus there is a lot of more established competition outside our main service area). We’re stuck between models. Clients mostly see us as a maintenance company, but we’re not big enough to run separate maintenance and landscaping crews. Goals/Ideas We've Thought Of Move toward higher-end design and installation work Reduce dependence on daily physical labor Build a business that is sustainable and potentially sellable For context, I handle marketing (website, social media, Google reviews) and have a graphic design background. One of us also has an irrigation technician certificate, but we haven’t added irrigation services yet due to limited experience. Each winter we plan to work on business development, but the time usually goes toward preparing for the next season. Questions How do service businesses break past the “owner + one crew” stage? How do you develop reliable long-term crew leaders or managers? Is it better to scale maintenance crews or pivot toward higher-value landscaping work? How do you make time to work on the business when operations already take everything? Where do you start to work on the business? We’re approaching middle age and don’t want to rely on physical labor forever. I’d love to build something more sustainable than just owning a job. Neither of us have "dream" careers, but owning a landscaping business wouldn't have been on the list of contenders. We want to know how to make this work and how to figure out what to do in the future whether that is with the current business or doing something completely unrelated. If anyone has gone through this stage in a landscaping or service business, or just as a middle-aged person who still doesn't know what they want to be when they grow up, I’d really appreciate hearing what helped you gain clarity / move forward!
Plumbing Bids
I just started a plumbing business and I get the concept of bidding but somehow always end up under estimating. I even doubled my last bid and still somehow ended up an impactful amount of hours over. I don't know if I visualize my objective wrong or I'm really that much slower than I anticipate (If that makes sense). The materials I buy are marked price + 30% and hourly is pretty straightforward, I charge from the moment I leave the office to the moment I return. Change orders are a weak point for me and I know the consequences of doing free labor. Is there any special courses to perfect bidding?
