Your Pricing Isn't Inconsistent — Your Rules Are Unwritten

So here's what happened when my dad went into the hospital in spring 2020.

Mike had been quoting plumbing jobs from memory for 36 years. Drain snake? He knew. Water heater swap? He knew. Sewer line spot repair under a side yard with a mature oak? He knew, more or less, and he'd adjust it in his head on the drive over. The number lived in Mike's head, and Mike's head was in a hospital bed in Parma, and I was at a card table in the garage with Hank climbing on me, trying to answer the shop phone.

I had no idea what we charged for anything.

Not because I was dumb. Not because I hadn't worked this shop. Because the pricing system at Whittaker Plumbing wasn't a system. It was one man's accumulated gut. And when that gut went offline, I was taking calls and genuinely guessing. I pulled old invoices. I called a couple of longtime customers — awkward conversations — and asked what they'd paid the last time out. That's how I reverse-engineered the closest thing we had to a price list.

I just did it badly, in a crisis, with a toddler on my lap. That's what writing a pricing document looks like when you wait too long.

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The Price You Quoted Depends on When You Woke Up

Same job, two different quotes, two different days. Same tech, same zip code, different customer, different number. Full schedule in August — you're tighter on price because you don't need the work. Dead week in February — you're softer because you do.

That's drift. Not chaos. Drift.

The gap where this really kills you is the call that changes scope. Say Dom gets out to a slow tub drain — $89 snake call. Runs the cable, nothing clears. We scope it. Sixty feet out, under the side yard, collapsed clay, roots, a chunk of pipe sitting in the dirt. 1925 Cleveland house, clay line, not a surprise to me but a surprise to the customer. That $89 call just became an $8,000 conversation.

If I've got written rules, I can walk her from the diagnostic to the scope to the spot repair. She can follow the math even if she doesn't love it. The numbers connect and I can show her why.

If I'm making up the $8,000 while I'm standing in her kitchen, she can tell. She cannot tell you exactly what's wrong. But she can tell something is wrong.

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You Don't Have a Pricing System — You Have a Mood

The number in your head feels like experience. After ten or fifteen years of doing this work, you walk into a job and you just know what it costs, right?

But the number is also responding to things that have nothing to do with cost. How busy you are. Whether you already drove forty minutes and don't want to leave empty.

That last one's real. Cleveland prices are not Columbus prices and they're sure as hell not Cincinnati prices. But within Cleveland, there's a thing that happens where you pull up to a house and you unconsciously shade the number down before you've even looked at the job. Not because the work costs less. Because you've decided the customer can't pay what the job actually costs. That's not market awareness. That's guessing at someone else's bank account. You're probably wrong. And you're losing money.

I would've quoted that sewer repair at $4,200 three years ago. Lost money on it. Not because the conditions justified $4,200 — the hand-dig around the root system, the permit, the inspection, the restoration. The real number was $6,800. I was scared to say $6,800 to a 70-year-old woman in a 1925 house on the west side.

That's flinching. Flinching costs you real money on real jobs.

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Flat-Rate Books Don't Fix This Either

I know what you're gonna say. Get a flat-rate book. Get the software. Buy the system.

I'm not against flat-rate. We use it. But flat-rate codifies someone else's rules. If you haven't written your own rules first, you'll override the book every single time a job gets complicated or a customer pushes back.

Which is exactly what you were doing before.

Dom's not going to hold a price he doesn't understand. First time a customer says "the other guy quoted me $400 less," Dom's going to soften. He's going to say "let me call my boss." Or he's going to make a promise in the driveway he doesn't have the authority to make. The flat-rate book doesn't fix that. Dom understanding the math behind the number — that fixes it.

Here's the other version of this: the home warranty companies. American Home Shield, Choice, all of them. Very written rules. 60 cents on the dollar, 90 days to pay, argue every ticket. I knew this. Kept accepting their work anyway because it felt like volume. Their rules were designed to benefit them, not me.

I dropped them in 2022. Did the math on net after I stopped. Should've done it sooner. The flat-rate book is the same problem — written for some average market that probably isn't yours. You need your rules, not theirs.

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What 'Writing Down the Rules' Actually Looks Like

When I came back to this shop in 2019 after six years at Crestwood Plumbing of Cleveland, I thought I understood small-shop operations. Grew up in one. Worked in one.

What I didn't account for was how much of it lives entirely in the owner's head.

At Crestwood — 30 trucks, real dispatch, a CSR team — everything had to be written down because it had to survive the owner not being in the room. Price books, job templates, markup tables. You can't run 30 trucks on one man's memory.

At a three-truck shop, the owner is usually in the room. Or thinks he is. What actually happens is the rules exist in his head and everyone else is guessing. Works okay until the owner isn't available. Then you get spring 2020 — a shop that couldn't quote a job without calling Mike.

Writing it down doesn't mean a binder. It means taking the decisions you're already making in your head and putting them somewhere else can see them.

What do we charge for a water heater swap, 40-gallon natural gas, standard install, no code upgrades? Write it down. What's the trigger for going from diagnostic to scope? Write it down. What's our markup on copper? Write it down. What do we say when a customer calls back with a cheaper quote? Write that down too — because that answer should not depend on who picks up the phone.

I did this over maybe a week of evenings. Me, old invoices, a legal pad. That was it.

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The Part Nobody Writes About: Making Your Guys Follow It

You can write perfect rules and your techs will still soft-quote in the driveway.

They'll say "let me call my boss" when the sheet's in their truck. They'll undercut the number because the customer seems upset or she's about to say no. They'll promise something on a Tuesday that Becca finds out about Thursday when the invoice comes back wrong.

This is not a character flaw. Guys coming up aren't being trained on this — by guys like me who don't got time. And the pricing conversation is part of training. Not a separate topic you get to once the kid's been with you two years. It's the job.

What that looks like practically: Dom calls me from the driveway. He's already scoped the line. He knows what he's looking at. And he's sitting outside because he doesn't know what to say when he walks back in.

The rule has to exist before that call, not during it. He needs to know the language for presenting a scope change, the minimum number for a spot repair in these conditions, what to say if she wants to think about it. He needs to know this because I wrote it down, walked through it with him, and he understood the math. That's training. It starts with the written rule.

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What You Do Monday Morning

Pull your last couple dozen invoices. Look at your water heater swaps. If they're ranging from $1,100 to $1,900 on the same unit in similar conditions, that's not a pricing problem. That's a documentation problem. Now you can see it, which means you can fix it.

Write down the number the invoices actually support. Real costs, real margin. Do that for two or three job types you do constantly. That's your draft price list. One page.

Then fix it at the phone, not at the door. Becca running the office two days a week did more for this shop than adding the fifth truck. I tracked it. Because she's quoting before the truck rolls. If she doesn't have a written number, she's guessing low — because she's trying to be nice and she doesn't want the customer to call somebody else. That's not her fault. That's mine for not giving her the page.

Give her the page. Walk through it with her. Tell her what's negotiable and what isn't. If you don't tell her, she'll decide herself. And you can't be mad when she's wrong.

One page, based on your own invoices, in the hands of the person answering your phone. Everything else is details.

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FAQ

If I raise my prices to match my written rules, won't I lose jobs to the guy down the street who's still guessing low?

Some. The customers who call three shops and pick the cheapest number — those aren't your best customers. The ones who ask whether you pull permits, whether you're licensed, what your warranty looks like — those people aren't automatically going with the cheapest number. They want a reason to feel good about who they hired. A clear, confident price does that. The guy down the street who's guessing low will either figure it out eventually or won't be around in five years. Either way, not your problem.

How do I handle a tech who's been quoting out of his head for three years and thinks he knows better than the sheet?

Don't make it a fight about the sheet being right and him being wrong. Sit down with his last six months of jobs. Show him the actual numbers on the ones where he went off-script. What did those jobs actually cost us versus what he quoted. Let him do the math. If he's genuinely profitable and actually knows his costs, talk about putting his knowledge into the written rules — because that's what the rules are supposed to be, the accumulated knowledge of the shop, not just mine. If he's just digging in because he doesn't like being told what to do, that's a different conversation.

What's the right way to build in material cost swings — especially when copper and PEX prices are all over the place?

Don't try to hold a material price past a quarter. What I do: the price sheet uses a baseline tied to what we're actually paying right now, and we look at it every 90 days. When copper goes sideways — and it will — the sheet changes. The other thing: put it in writing on every estimate that material costs can change before job start. Most customers don't blink. The ones who do, you want to know before you've ordered anything.

Should the flat-rate price be the same whether the job is in Parma or in a Westlake kitchen with marble floors?

Labor rate should be the same. Total job price probably won't be. A water heater swap in a finished basement with marble tile and no clear path to the drain — your protection materials cost more, your time is longer, and your exposure if something goes wrong is real. That's a different scope, not a different neighborhood. Write a rule for it. "Finished space premium: add X to base labor." That's defensible. "I charged her more because the house looked expensive" is not.

How do I explain a price increase to a customer who called last year and got a different number?

Don't apologize for it. "Material and labor costs have gone up and we've updated our pricing" is true, and most people know it because they've bought groceries. Say it plainly, say it once, give them the number. If you start hedging, they start negotiating. The customers who've been with you a while mostly accept it. The ones who walk over it — they were looking for a reason.

When does it make sense to quote off the sheet versus build a custom number on a complicated job?

Sheet for anything that looks like something you've done 20 times in similar conditions. Custom for anything with real unknowns — access problems, old construction, situations where you genuinely can't tell what you'll find until you open something up. The way I think about it: if I'd be uncomfortable holding that price after I actually see the job, it's not a sheet job. Build the number, show your work, explain what could change it. On a complicated job, a detailed quote tells the customer you know what you're looking at. That's not a weakness.