Short, specific writing about the business side of a trade — getting leads, answering them fast, pricing without guessing, hiring in March, and staying on the right side of the texting rules. No growth hacks. No listicles.
We are a small agency that builds and runs software for home-service contractors, so most of what is here comes out of a real conversation with a real fence builder or pressure washer who was losing money in a specific, fixable place. Every number we cite is sourced or labelled as our own assumption. Nothing here requires you to buy anything.
A blown-in price per square foot is really a bag count. Start from the target R-value for the customer's climate zone, read the bags per 1,000 square feet off the chart of the product you blow, then price air sealing, baffles, the hatch and removal as their own lines.
Per room, per square foot and per hour are three ways of saying one thing: hours times your rate, plus materials. How to measure the way the PCA's standards do, time your own production rates, and price prep, coats and color changes as their own lines.
How to work out how much your prices really need to rise, back it with the government's own price data, pick the date, write the letter to your regular customers, and handle the estimates already out the door.
Free estimates cost you drive time on every job you never win. When a paid estimate or design fee makes sense, how to credit it to the job, what the FTC's guide on "free" means for your ads, and how a price range online thins out the visits.
Each snow contract decides who carries the weather. Here are the contract types in the industry's own terms, how trigger depth sets the push count, how to price a season from NOAA snowfall normals for your town, and the cap and floor that keep a bad winter fair to both sides.
Switching a service business from time and materials to flat rate: build a price book from your own task times and loaded rate, choose between a trip charge and a diagnostic fee, and see where plumbing, HVAC and electrical differ.
Hourly, flat rate or by the square foot: each way of pricing a house cleaning puts the risk in a different place. Build all three from a timed walk-through by room, then price the first deep clean, the recurring visit and the add-ons separately.
One per-square-foot rate cannot price a driveway, a vinyl house and a shingle roof, because each takes a different method and pace. Build a rate card by surface, put chemicals and water on the job cost, and set a minimum that covers the drive and setup.
A mowing price is the minutes on the lawn plus the minutes in the truck between lawns. Measure the lot from the parcel map, time your cuts, price the drive, then turn the per-cut price into a season contract sized to your own frost dates.
In most states you may pass a credit card fee to the customer, but only on credit cards, only up to your real cost, with notice first, and never in states that ban it. Here are the rules and a cleaner alternative.
A lot of chasing starts with a payment schedule nobody wrote down. How to set the deposit, tie progress payments to work the customer can see, bill the same day, and take the ways people actually pay.
A 30% markup is not a 30% margin. The formula both ways, a conversion table, and a worked job that shows how mixing the two quietly under-prices everything you bid.
Six subjects, because those are the six places we watch contractors lose money.
Why traffic is not leads, and what has to be on the page before a homeowner will hand over a phone number.
The five-minute rule, missed calls, voicemail, and why a text beats a callback almost every time.
Getting the formula out of your head and onto paper so somebody — or something — else can run it.
Finding crew who are already employed, screening without resumes, and cutting interview no-shows.
TCPA and A2P 10DLC without the legalese, so you can text customers back without worrying.
Seasonality, margin by job type, and the winter decisions that decide how March goes.
If something on the business side of your trade is costing you money and nobody has written it down clearly, send it over. We would rather write the post you actually need than guess at a topic. No email capture required — just ask.
Or email support@tailgateoffice.com.
Step two takes about thirty minutes: instant quotes on your site, and every missed call logged and answered from one inbox. Free for 30 days, no card.
