PestBossPro Blog — Commercial Accounts

Pricing Monthly Commercial Pest Control Service From Your Own Service List

Residential pricing has a rhythm most owners settle into. A quarterly home is about the same job every time, and you know roughly what to charge for a house of a certain size. Commercial pricing is harder. A small office and a busy restaurant might have the same square footage and need completely different amounts of work. Price them the same and you will either lose the office or lose money on the restaurant.

Before You Send the Quote

Sending quotes for online approval was covered in Quoting Commercial Pest Control Work With Online Approval. This article is about the number on the quote: how to work out a monthly price you are happy with, and how to set it up so the next quote is faster.

Nothing here is a rule. Your market, your costs and your competition set your prices. These are the questions worth asking before you name a number.

Start With Time on Site

The biggest cost in commercial service is the tech's time. Before you price anything, estimate how long a normal monthly visit will take once the initial problem is under control:

• An office with a break room and exterior perimeter might be a short stop.
• A restaurant with a full kitchen, dish area, dry storage and dumpster area takes longer, and more if you pull equipment.
• A warehouse with two dozen exterior stations and interior devices takes time just to walk.
• An apartment complex exterior depends on how many buildings and how spread out they are.

Add drive time if the account is far from your other stops, and check-in time if there is security or a sign-in process. Then put a price on that time that covers wages, truck, product and overhead with a profit left over.

Use the Measurements

PestBossPro measures each property from the satellite map: building square feet and perimeter linear feet. Those measurements make your pricing consistent from one account to the next.

Perimeter linear feet is the most useful number for exterior work. It tells you how much wall gets treated and how many bait stations a rodent program needs. Building square feet helps for interior work, though it is a starting point rather than the whole answer. A 4,000-square-foot restaurant kitchen is a lot more work than a 4,000-square-foot office.

Because services and estimates price off property measurements, you can set a base rate and let the size of the building do the rest, then adjust for the things measurements cannot see.

Adjust for Pressure and Risk

Measurements tell you how big a building is. A few other things tell you how hard it is:

• Food. Kitchens, food storage and pet food raise the stakes and the visit time.
• Current activity. An account with an active German roach problem needs an initial cleanout, and maybe extra visits, before monthly service makes sense.
• Building condition. Old buildings with lots of gaps and voids take more work to keep clean.
• Expectations. An account that wants a detailed written report every month costs more to service than one that just wants you to show up.
• Timing. Before-opening or after-hours visits can cost you in overtime or awkward routing.

Separate the Initial From the Monthly

A common mistake is pricing the first visit the same as every other visit. The first one is usually the hardest: the most activity, the most product, the longest time. Price it as its own item, an initial service, then a lower monthly rate after.

As an example only, a restaurant might be quoted at $199 for the initial service and $110 a month after. An office might be $95 for the initial and $65 a month. Your own numbers will differ. The point is that splitting them lets you charge fairly for the cleanout without scaring the client with a high monthly rate.

Set It Up Once

Once you have worked out your approach, put it in your service list so you do not redo the math on every quote. Set up commercial services with their prices, and use the property measurements to size them. Add-ons like a rodent program, fly service or unit treatments are their own items.

Review your commercial prices once a year. Product costs change, wages change, and accounts change. If an account takes much longer than you quoted month after month, it is worth a conversation with the manager about the price or the scope. Reviewing accounts is covered in Keeping Commercial Pest Control Accounts Renewing Year After Year.

To see how pricing fits with the rest of running commercial accounts, visit the PestBossPro commercial pest control software page.