Franchise location guide
Review your pricing before your first lead
Your estimator launched on brand template pricing. Here is how to make it yours, in about twenty minutes, without going through every question by hand.
Open your estimator, click Edit, then the Pricing Lab tab. It tests every possible combination of answers and shows you a budget, baseline and premium figure for every service. Check the budget column against what you would actually charge. Where it is wrong, describe the problem in plain English and the Lab will suggest the specific changes for you to review.
Template pricing is not your pricing. It was set without knowing your labour rate, your material costs, or what your market bears. Two locations an hour apart can be genuinely 20 percent apart, and both can be right.
Before you open anything
Have two numbers to hand. Without them you are guessing, and guessing is how the template got wrong in the first place.
- What you charge per hour, all in.
- What your main material actually costs you right now, not last year.
Then think of the last three jobs you did and what you charged for them. Those are your reality check.
The review
Open the Pricing Lab
Your estimator, Edit, then the Pricing Lab tab.
Run the analysis
It scans every scenario for things that look wrong: prices that seem too low, unusually wide ranges, services returning $0. You get an All Clear or a short list of flags.
Read the Price Range Summary against your own jobs
Every service, with budget, baseline and premium. This is the important bit.
Take your last three jobs and find where they should sit in this table. If a job you charged $4,000 for shows a premium figure of $2,800, your pricing is going to cost you money on every single lead this estimator produces.
Check the budget column hardest. It is the cheapest number your estimator can produce, and it is the one a customer will hold you to.
Describe what is wrong, in your own words
At the bottom of the Pricing Lab there is a Pricing expectations box. You do not need to know which answer option is causing a problem. Describe it:
Examples that work"Our labour rate is $95 an hour, the template looks like it assumes about $70."
"Gutter cleaning is too cheap for this market, especially the largest house size."
"Increase the bathroom renovation service by 20 percent."
Click Run Analysis and you get back specific suggested changes, each naming the exact service, question and answer option, with the old and new price side by side.
Apply the ones you agree with
Click Apply fix on any card you are happy with. This stages the change. Nothing reaches a customer yet.
Ignore any you disagree with. You know your market better than it does.
Review, then publish
Open the Questions tab and use the Jump to change links to check each staged edit reads properly. Then Save & Publish.
What good looks like: you re-run the analysis afterwards and every budget figure is a price you would genuinely honour.
Do it again when your costs move
Twice a year, and any time your labour rate or material costs change. An estimator quoting last year's costs loses you money quietly on every job, and you will not notice until margins look wrong.
Full walkthrough with screenshots: the Pricing Lab guide.
I cannot edit my pricing
Some brands manage it centrally. Ask your brand contact. If they do and the numbers are wrong for your market, tell them with your own figures attached, because that is an argument they can act on.
What if I am cheaper than the template?
Then bring it down. An estimator that overprices your market loses you leads before you ever speak to them.
Should my prices match other locations?
No. Different costs, different markets. Matching a location two states away is how you end up wrong.
Does applying a fix change what customers see immediately?
No. It stages the change for your review and only goes live when you publish.
What if a customer already got a wrong price?
Estimates already sent keep the numbers the customer saw. Talk to them honestly. See your numbers look wrong.
Would rather we did this for you? Send us a few of your recent real quotes with your location code and we will configure your pricing to match, free. How it works →
Send us your hourly rate and material costs at [email protected] and we will tell you what to change.