Guy on YouTube said he was booked out two years. The best thing in that whole comment section was the reply under it: "Booked up for 2 years is crazy, at 1 year i would 100% be looking at raising prices."
He's right. And he just talked a contractor out of buying marketing.
So am I.
If your calendar is full past your season, you don't have a lead problem. You've got a price problem. More leads won't fix a price problem. More leads make it worse.
What a full calendar is actually telling you
A backlog is information. It says people keep saying yes at the number you're asking.
That's not a compliment on your work. It's data about your price.
Whatever you're charging right now got set at some point in the past. Probably when you were hungrier. Maybe when you had one truck instead of three, or when you were still trying to prove you could do the job at all. Then you got good, and the number stayed put.
The gap between how good you are now and what you charged back then is the whole story. That's not a marketing gap. No website fixes it.
Why buying leads makes it worse
Say you buy anyway. Here's what actually happens.
- You take work you don't want. When the calendar's already full, the next job is the one you'd have passed on. The weird one. The one 45 minutes out. The guy who's already fired two contractors.
- You quote it at your old price. Because that's your price. So now you've added a job you didn't want at a number you set when you were desperate.
- Your lead time stretches. More people call, hear "October," and go somewhere else. You paid for that call.
- Your good customers wait behind strangers. The repeat guy who always pays and never argues is now sixth in line.
You spent money to make your own life harder. That's a sh*t trade, and nobody selling you a retainer is going to be the one to point it out.
The move is a price increase. New quotes only.
Not the jobs already on the books. Not anything you've already quoted. New quotes, starting whenever you decide.
Pick a number. Ten percent is where most guys land because it feels survivable. Fifteen if you're out past six months. Twenty if you're a year deep and turning people away every week.
Then just quote it. No announcement. No email explaining your new pricing structure. Nobody's tracking your rates but you.
The part you're actually scared of
It isn't the math. You can do the math.
You're scared everybody says no.
So here's the honest version of that risk. Your close rate will drop. That's not a maybe, that's the point. If you raise your price and close the exact same percentage, you didn't raise it enough.
But look at what you're trading. You're already turning work away. Losing a job you had no room for isn't a loss. It's a Tuesday.
Run it for ten quotes. If you were closing eight out of ten at the old number and you close six at the new one, you just made more money on fewer jobs and got two weekends back. If you close zero out of ten, you went too far, come down a little and try again.
Ten quotes isn't a bet-the-company experiment. It's a month.
"My area won't pay that"
This is the second thing every guy says, and it's worth taking seriously for about thirty seconds.
Your area is already paying it. Somebody in your town is charging more than you for the same work right now. Not better work necessarily. Just more. You've probably met him and thought he was overpriced.
The other thing hiding in that sentence is that most price increases are smaller than they feel. Ten percent on a four thousand dollar job is four hundred bucks. On a quote that size, four hundred dollars is inside the range where two contractors bidding the same job land anyway. The customer isn't going to gasp. He's going to compare you to the other guy, same as always, and the other guy's number moves around by more than that depending on how busy he is.
You're not repricing the market. You're catching up to where you already are.
The other lever, since we're here
The guy who runs that channel had a second answer worth stealing. Turn twelve months of jobs into three and keep selling. Meaning sub some of it out.
That's a real option and it's harder than it sounds. You're putting your name on somebody else's work, and you already know whether your trade survives that. Some do. Some don't.
But if the only thing standing between you and double the volume is hands, hands are buyable. Price is just faster and it costs nothing to try.
When to come back and buy marketing
When your calendar has holes in it. That's the whole trigger.
Specifically: when you can look at the next four to six weeks and see days nobody's claimed, and that keeps being true for a month or two running. That's a lead problem. That's when a site that ranks and a phone that rings changes something real.
If you're there now and you're deciding where to start, the honest breakdown is in ads versus organic, and which one to do first. Short version, it depends on how fast you need the phone to ring.
But if you're booked past your season, none of that is your move. Anything I could sell you today is a worse deal than the free thing you can do this afternoon, which is add ten percent to the next quote you write.
And so what if that feels weird. It should. That's just the old number arguing with you.
When the holes show up, here's what I charge and what it actually gets you. No hurry. Your calendar will tell you when.