I had what looked like a great week on paper. Booked solid, three jobs a day, Monday through Friday. I remember feeling like I'd figured something out.
Then I tracked my actual hours. Jobs, drive time, setup, cleanup, admin. My effective hourly rate was about $14. I was making less than I had at my last job and working harder to do it. The problem wasn't the prices on the jobs. It was everything between the jobs.
Your pricing assumes the shop model
When most detailers set their prices, they look at what the shop down the street charges. Or what other mobile operators in the area are posting. That's a reasonable starting point, except for one thing: a shop doesn't drive anywhere. Customers come to them. They set up once and run jobs all day from the same spot.
Mobile operators are different. You're paying for every minute of travel in time, fuel, and wear on your vehicle. If you're pricing like you're stationary, you're giving that cost away.
The real math of a mobile day
Take a realistic day. You have 8 working hours. Jobs run 1.5 to 2 hours each. Drive time between jobs: 20 to 30 minutes each way, sometimes more depending on how your day is routed. On a good day you fit 3 solid jobs. On a bad day, 2 jobs and a lot of windshield time.
If each job is 30 minutes from the last, you're burning 2+ hours of unpaid driving in an 8-hour day. At $150 a job, that's real money per hour you're effectively working for free. The math only gets worse as your jobs spread out across the city.
Geographic clustering is worth more than an extra job
This was the thing that changed how I thought about my schedule. A fourth job that requires 45 minutes of driving to reach might actually pay less than doing 3 jobs in a tight radius. The revenue looks higher on paper. The hourly rate doesn't lie.
I started mapping my week before I confirmed bookings. If someone was 40 minutes outside my natural work area, I started factoring that in before saying yes. Some of those jobs I turned down. My revenue stayed roughly the same. My hours dropped.
How to bake drive time into your pricing
There are two approaches. One is a travel fee — you charge extra for jobs beyond a certain radius from your home base. That's transparent and easy to explain. The other is to price slightly higher across the board to cover average travel, and just not take jobs that are wildly out of range. The second is cleaner for the customer experience.
I went with a soft version of the travel fee. Within 10 miles of my home zip code, standard pricing. Outside that, I'd add $15 to $25 depending on how far. Most customers were fine with it when I explained it upfront. The ones who pushed back weren't the customers I wanted to build a route around anyway.
The scheduling side of the same problem
Even after you get your pricing right, a badly ordered day costs you. Two correctly-priced jobs on opposite sides of town still eat your margin if you accepted them on the same morning with no drive buffer.
That gap between pricing and scheduling is part of why I built DayHold. It factors drive time between jobs into your available slots before customers can book them. So a customer booking at 1pm can only see slots that actually work given where your previous job is. No more accepting jobs that look fine on a calendar until you plot them on a map.
Pricing is usually about knowing your costs. For mobile operators, the biggest cost is the one that never shows up on an invoice — the time it takes to get between jobs.