The Second Job Is Already Priced

Most service businesses chase repeat work with a phone call.

They finish a job, wait a few months, then start dialing and hope somebody still remembers them.

Lone Star Total Wash put the second job on the price page before the first one is even booked.

What is actually on the page

The prices page publishes two rate tables for concrete and flat work, sitting side by side. One is for a one time wash. The other is for a recurring contract, monthly, quarterly or semi annual. Both are quoted in cents per square foot, same unit, same three size tiers.

One time wash:

• under 30,000 sq ft, 15 cents
• 30,000 to 100,000 sq ft, 12 cents
• over 100,000 sq ft, 10 cents

Recurring contract:

• under 30,000 sq ft, 12 cents
• 30,000 to 100,000 sq ft, 10 cents
• over 100,000 sq ft, 8 cents

Read the two tables against each other

Line them up and something falls out of them.

The recurring rate at every tier is the same number as the one time rate at the next tier up.

Sign a contract on a 20,000 square foot lot and you pay 12 cents, which is exactly what a 50,000 square foot lot pays for a single wash. Sign on a 50,000 foot lot and you pay 10 cents, which is what a lot over 100,000 feet pays one time.

Signing moves you up one volume tier. You get the big customer price without being the big customer.

And the largest recurring rate, 8 cents, is a number that does not appear anywhere on the one time table at all. There is no way to buy it with a single job, no matter how big your lot is. It only exists on the other side of a signature.

One thing I am not going to round off

The discount is not a flat percentage and I am not going to write it like one.

Under 30,000 feet, 15 cents down to 12 is 20 percent off. Over 100,000 feet, 10 down to 8 is 20 percent off. But the middle tier, 12 down to 10, works out to about 16.7 percent off.

So the middle customer gets a slightly smaller break than the customer above him or the customer below him. That is what the published table says.

I am telling you instead of smoothing it into one clean headline number, because the second somebody checks my math and finds a rounded claim, everything else I wrote stops counting.

The follow up lesson

Here is the part that transfers to your business, whatever it is you sell.

Follow up usually gets treated as a behavior. Call them back. Send the email. Set a reminder on your phone.

Behavior depends on a person remembering, on a good week, to go do an uncomfortable thing.

Lone Star made follow up a structure instead. The next job is priced, published and visible before the first invoice ever goes out. The page states that recurring rates apply with a signed service contract, which means the repeat is a document the customer signs, not a conversation somebody has to work up the nerve to start.

That flips who is doing the work. The customer becomes the one deciding whether to leave money on the table.

The rest of the machine is the same shape

The quote page does the same thing at the front end. It asks for name, phone, email, job address, city, what needs washed and a description of the job, and it tells the visitor exactly what happens next. They get contacted, the job gets looked at, an estimate gets sent, no obligation.

And the site itself states that all invoices are sent through Square, and that all services rendered come with terms and conditions and a contractor service agreement.

Intake, estimate, agreement, invoice, recurring contract. That is a complete loop, and it lives on four pages.

What this is

This is a client system. I build these.

Not a brochure. A working loop, running in accounts the client owns, with the offer, the price, the intake and the payment all pointed at the same place.

The second job should already be priced.

Otherwise you are going to spend next spring calling people who already hired somebody else.