ROUTE DENSITY AND THE WINDSHIELD TAX.
Drive time is the biggest uncosted expense in most service businesses. A technician paid for eight hours who bills six has two hours of cost with no revenue against it, and in most books those two hours sit inside a labor total with nothing to attach them to. Route density is what decides how many of the paid eight convert to billable work, which puts it upstream of the rate card and makes it a larger lever on margin than pricing is. Once drive time carries its own cost code, whether to serve an outlying area stops being a sales opinion and becomes arithmetic anybody in the office can run.
We don't publish service business margin benchmarks, and you should be suspicious of anyone who does. Labor rates, drive time, competitive density, and what a market will pay for a recurring agreement vary more between two metros than between two trades, so an average built somewhere else was never true where you operate. Every figure in your route math comes out of your own book: your wage rates, your windshield hours, your stop times, your addresses. That's a slower answer than a benchmark, and it's the only one worth pricing against.
WHAT IT MEANS.
Route density is how many billable stops one technician or crew can complete in a day without leaving the service radius. Drive time is the paid, unbilled time between those stops, and in most service books it's the largest cost that never gets coded to anything.
A service business has none of the instruments a project business hides a cost problem inside. There's no schedule of values, no retainage, no pay application, and no WIP schedule. That sounds like an advantage right up until you go looking for where a bad week went, because there's also no job to code the wasted hour to. The work order closes at the price on the agreement, the technician gets paid for the full day, and the difference disappears into a labor total nobody reads by crew.
This is why service owners so often describe the same thing: the schedule is full, the crews are busy, the invoices go out, and the bank account doesn't agree. The revenue is real and the hours are real. What's missing is any record of how much of the paid day was spent producing revenue versus getting to it. Josh calls the difference the windshield tax, and it's the one expense line most service businesses have never seen a number for.
WHERE THE DAY GOES.
Drive time has no cost code, so it has no cost
Almost every service book codes labor to the work order and stops there. The paid day is eight hours, the work orders on it account for six, and the remaining two have nothing to attach to. The cost is fully real and fully paid out, it just never appears anywhere a person would look for it. An expense with no code is an expense with no owner, no trend, and no place in your pricing.
Route density decides margin before pricing gets a say
Two technicians on the same wage, selling the same service at the same published price, can return completely different margins on the same week. The one running a tight route bills more of the paid day than the one crossing town between calls. Density is the input that sets how much of the day converts to revenue, which puts it ahead of the rate card in the order of operations. Raising price on a loose route recovers part of the loss and leaves the cause running.
The outlying customer gets priced like a local one
A customer forty minutes past the last stop on the route pays the same published rate as the one four minutes away, because the price list has no line for distance. That one account can consume most of a technician's morning to deliver a short service call, which means it can be unprofitable at any price you could reasonably charge for the work itself. Sales says yes because revenue is revenue, and nobody ran the round trip against the day it will sit on.
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE IN DOLLARS.
A technician paid for eight hours who bills six is at 75 percent utilization, and the two unbilled hours are cost with nothing earned against them. Put a fully burdened labor cost of $45 an hour on it, a figure chosen here only to make the arithmetic visible, and those two hours are $90 a day, or about $22,500 across a 250 day work year for one technician. Five technicians on the same illustration is roughly $112,500 a year that never had a cost code.
Take one crew, six stops, and a 45 minute service at each: that's 4.5 billable hours regardless of how the route runs. On a tight route with 15 minutes between stops, the five drives between them add 1.25 hours and the day finishes inside 6 hours. Stretch the same six stops so those drives run 35 minutes each and the drive time becomes nearly 3 hours, pushing the day past 7.4 hours for the identical six invoices. Same revenue, same wage, and the second day costs close to 30 percent more to produce. This is a constructed example, built to show the arithmetic.
One account sits 40 minutes past the last stop on the route. Serving it's 80 minutes of paid driving to deliver a 45 minute call, so 2 hours and 5 minutes of the paid day produces 45 minutes of billable work. For that visit to earn at the same hourly rate the 45 minutes earns, it would have to be priced at nearly three times a standard call. Again, an illustration: the point is that this is a calculation to run before the account gets added, not after the route stops making money.
HOW THE ROUTE GETS PRICED.
The first change is a cost code for windshield time sitting alongside the service codes, so the hours between stops get captured instead of absorbed. Once it exists, every technician week reports two totals: hours sold and hours driven. The number is almost always larger than the owner guessed. That's the point, because it's the first time the windshield tax is visible enough to argue about.
A work order priced at the counter looks profitable in isolation, because it only carries the minutes spent on site. Costing the whole crew day tells you what the day produced against what the day cost, driving included. That's the unit a service business earns in, and it's the one that shows which routes carry the business and which ones get carried.
Instead of a rate card that treats every address alike, the radius gets drawn from your own drive data, with a defined zone outside it that carries a trip charge, a minimum visit size, a single scheduled day of the week, or a polite decline. All four of those are legitimate answers and we have set up all four. What isn't legitimate is having no answer and letting the dispatch board decide it one call at a time.
When a request comes in from outside the radius, the questions are what the round trip does to the day it falls on, whether the nearby stops can absorb it, and whether enough demand exists out there to build a second density cluster instead of one long detour. One customer past the line is a cost. Twelve customers past the line, scheduled together, is a route. The arithmetic tells you which one you have, and we run it with you before the quote goes out.
THE OUTPUTS, NAMED.
FLAT MONTHLY FEE. NO SURPRISES.
Three tiers, priced by your trailing twelve month revenue. Which one you're in depends on how much of the work you want off your desk. No hourly billing, no payroll, and no add-ons.
Pricing
| Last 12 months revenue | Monthly fee |
|---|---|
| Up to $1M | $1,900 to $2,900 |
| $1M to $3.5M | $2,600 to $3,900 |
| $3.5M to $6.5M | $3,800 to $5,700 |
| $6.5M to $9.5M | $5,100 to $7,100 |
| $9.5M to $12.5M | $6,100 to $8,500 |
| $12.5M to $15.5M | $7,400 to $11,000 |
| $15.5M to $18.5M | $9,400 to $13,500 |
| $18.5M+ | Quoted individually |
Range reflects the three tiers below. Which one you're in depends on how much of the work you want off your desk. No payroll. No hidden line items.
You stop guessing.
You get the CFO work. Job costing built against the way you estimate, a 13 week cash forecast, monthly WIP, and a meeting every month that ends in decisions rather than a report.
Your bookkeeper keeps doing the books.
You stop touching the books.
Everything in Core, and we run the bookkeeping and the controllership as well. Nobody in your office is answering coding questions or chasing a reconciliation at month end.
We do the books. No payroll.
Every job shows its margin while it's still running.
Everything in Executive, plus the job costing and WIP platform set up, loaded with your cost codes, and managed for you every month. You never have to learn it.
We do the job costing.
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