Local service ideas metrics: facts, examples and context

A local service business can be measured with a job sheet and a calendar. Nothing here needs software, and nothing here comes with a target, because the right number of jobs in a day for a plumber is the wrong number for a dog walker and both are wrong for a tutor. What the page gives is the list of things worth counting, the way to count each without fooling yourself, and what a change in each one means. They are arranged by the timescale on which they move: the day, the week, and the season.

What to take away

• The day's measures are about time: how much of it was paid, and how much was spent traveling, waiting or redoing.
• The week's measures are about the pipeline: enquiries, quotes, bookings and the gaps between them.
• The season's measures are about repetition and survival: who came back, what the quiet months look like, and whether the cash lasted through them.

The day

Paid hours against total hours. Write the start and end of every job, and the start and end of the working day. The difference between the two totals is travel, waiting, admin and redoing. This ratio is the central figure of any mobile trade, because it is the one the local service pillar calls route density, seen from inside a single day.

Journeys and distance. Note the mileage or the minutes between jobs. A week of these, plotted on a map or simply listed, shows whether the diary is a round or a scatter.

Redo time. Time spent returning to a job that was not right. Small, usually, and the earliest signal of a quality problem or a rushed quote.

The week

Enquiries, by source. Every call, message and referral, with a note of how they found you. This is the only way to learn which of the ways local demand finds you is actually working, and it costs one question per caller. It is also the cheapest form of the market research the SBA describes, run on your own customers rather than on a report about somebody else's.

Quotes given and quotes accepted. Two counts. The ratio between them is the health of your pricing and your quoting habit. A falling ratio means the price or the presentation has drifted; a ratio near total means the price is probably too low.

Time from enquiry to reply. Note when the enquiry arrived and when you answered. Local customers often book whoever replies first, and this figure tells you whether that is you. The part-time guide treats reply time as the trap that catches anyone running a service around another job, and the measure is how you find out if it has caught you.

Empty slots. Bookable time that went unsold, and why: no demand, a cancellation, a no-show, or travel that made the slot unreachable. The reason matters more than the count.

Cancellations and no-shows. Counted separately from empty slots, because they have a separate fix: terms agreed at booking.

The season

Repeat share. Of the jobs done this month, how many were for customers you had worked for before. Rising is the sign that a round is forming; flat means every month still starts from nothing.

Income by month, over a full year. Not to judge any single month, but to see the shape. A trade with a quiet quarter needs the cash to cross it, and the startup budget guide explains why that reserve, not the price of any tool, is what decides whether a seasonal business survives its first winter.

Reviews asked for and reviews received. Reputation compounds only when it is requested, so count the asks. Ask plainly, and never pay for or script one: the FTC's advertising rules for small businesses explain why a testimonial you arranged counts as your own claim. If the asks are few, that is the fix; if the asks are many and the reviews few, the moment of asking is wrong.

Radius actually served. Once a season, plot the addresses of the quarter's jobs. Compare the circle they fill with the circle you intended. Drift outward is normal and costly, and it is invisible without this check.

Keeping the record

One job sheet per day with times, addresses and outcomes. One line per enquiry with source and reply time. One page per month with the totals. That is the whole system, and it takes a few minutes per day if done on the day and hours if reconstructed on Sunday.

Read the day's ratio weekly, the week's counts monthly, and the season's shape once a quarter. Act on trends, not on single weeks; a bad week of no-shows is weather, a bad quarter is a terms problem.

The measure people skip

Your own hourly rate, calculated backwards: the month's income divided by the month's total hours, including travel and admin. It is often far below the rate on the quote, and the gap between the two is the sum of everything else on this page. Closing it is the job, and the skill-based guide is worth reading when the gap suggests the skill is fine and the shape of the service is what needs to change.

Common questions

How many jobs a day is right?

There is no general figure. The right number is the one where paid hours are most of the day and the quality holds, and the daily sheet tells you when you have found it.

Do I need to log every enquiry?

Yes. It is one line, and without it you will never know which of your efforts to be found are working.

What if I only work part of the week?

Measure the same things over the days you work. The ratios still hold; only the totals shrink.