The radius nobody writes down

How far should a contractor drive for an estimate?

Most contractors have a number in their head and no arithmetic behind it. Here is how to work out the real one, and why your quote radius should be tighter than your work radius.

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Your work radius and your quote radius are not the same number

Ask ten remodelers how far they travel and you get ten answers, all of them round. Twenty minutes. Thirty miles. Anything inside the county. Nobody can tell you where the number came from.

The reason it is soft is that it is doing two jobs at once. One is the radius you will work in. That one is easy, because the job pays for the drive. A three week bathroom absorbs a forty minute commute without blinking, and you can price it in if you want to.

The other is the radius you will drive to quote in. That trip has no job attached to it yet. It pays nothing on the day and it only pays later if you win, which you do not always. Those are different problems and they deserve different numbers. Almost every page written about travel radius treats them as one, which is why none of them help.

What one quote trip actually costs

Run it on your own figures. Take the round trip miles and multiply by what a mile really costs you, which is a full year of fuel, insurance, tires, servicing and depreciation divided by the miles you drove. Most people are surprised how high it lands once depreciation is in there.

Then add the time, and not just the driving. A quote trip is the drive out, the walk through, the ten minutes in the driveway hearing about the neighbor's addition, the drive back, and the write up that night.

Say a fifty mile round trip at sixty five cents a mile. That is about thirty three dollars of truck. Add ninety minutes driving, forty five on site and half an hour writing it up. At seventy five dollars an hour for your own time that is a little over two hundred. Call the trip two hundred and thirty.

Now the step almost nobody takes. Divide by your close rate. If you win one in four, every job you actually land cost you around nine hundred dollars in quote trips before you bought a single stick of lumber. That is the number your radius is really about, and it is the reason the quote radius has to be the tighter one.

Vehicle cost for the round trip, depreciation included
Drive time both ways, at your own rate
Time on site, including the part that is not measuring
The write up afterwards
Divided by your close rate, because the losses are paid for by the wins

Work out your own number

Price a mile

Total vehicle cost for last year divided by last year's miles. The real total, not the fuel receipts.

Price your hour

Not your billable rate on a job. What an hour of your own working time is worth when you could be selling, ordering or running a crew.

Add up one average quote trip

Miles out and back, drive time, site time, write up time. One number.

Divide by your close rate

One in three, one in four, whatever it honestly is. That gives you what quote trips cost per job won.

Hold it against your average margin

If trips cost nine hundred per win and your average small job carries eighteen hundred in margin, half the margin is spent getting there. That is where your line is.

Set it in minutes, not miles

Your cost is mostly time. Eight miles across town at five in the afternoon can cost more than twenty five on a highway at ten in the morning.

Why the line gets broken for the wrong jobs

Everybody breaks the radius. The trouble is what they break it for. The jobs that pull a contractor past his own line are almost always the ones that sounded big on the phone, and sounding big on the phone is not a signal of anything.

The call that gets a truck sent forty miles is the one where the homeowner says whole house, or gut, or money is not really the issue. A fair number of those are somebody who has not priced anything yet and wants to find out what a kitchen costs by making three people come and tell her.

Meanwhile the job that genuinely deserved the drive, a repeat client's rental two towns over, gets handed off because it was Tuesday and the truck was already out the other way.

A radius set by feel gets broken by feeling. A radius set by arithmetic gets broken on purpose, which is the only kind of exception worth making.

Three jobs worth breaking the radius for

Somebody who has already paid you

A past client closes at a rate nothing else on your list can match. The divide by close rate step barely applies, so the arithmetic comes out differently.

A job that keeps a crew busy for weeks

Travel spreads across the job. A three week run forty minutes out costs you one commute a day, not one quote trip per dollar of margin.

A scope you already know cold

If it is the same shower you have built eleven times, the visit is confirming rather than discovering. Short visit, high confidence, worth the miles.

The radius widens when the first look does not need the truck

All of the above assumes one thing: that finding out what the job is requires you to be standing in the room. For a long time that was simply true, and the whole radius is built on it.

It is also the only part of the arithmetic you can change. Cost per mile is what it is. Your hourly rate is what it is. Your close rate moves slowly. The number of trips is the variable.

ScanToScope works on that step. You send the homeowner a link. She opens it on her own phone with nothing to install. A recent iPhone Pro measures the room with its LiDAR sensor, and any other phone falls back to photos plus the room sizes she types in. A vision model reads what comes back and writes the scope brief, and the price is arithmetic against your own cost book, line by line.

That does not make a far job closer. It means the decision about whether to get in the truck happens after you know what the job is instead of before.

Common questions

Is there a standard radius for remodeling estimates?

No, and any number you read is somebody else's arithmetic. A one man outfit in a dense suburb and a crew of six in farm country have genuinely different answers. Thirty minutes is the figure most often repeated, which makes it a convention rather than an answer.

Should I charge for estimates outside my radius?

It is the usual advice and it does work, mostly by filtering out people who were never going to hire you. Know what it costs: some serious buyers will not pay on principle, and in a market where three competitors come free you are volunteering to be the one who did not. A charged visit is a decision about lead quality, not a way to recover the drive.

How do I turn down a job that is too far?

Fast, and in the first call. The damage is not the no, it is the three days of maybe while she books somebody else. Tell her where your line is, tell her why, and give her a name if you have one. Referrals out come back in.

Does traffic change the radius?

More than distance does, because your cost is mostly time. If your number is in miles it is measuring the wrong thing. Convert it to minutes and it will survive rush hour and winter.

What if I am booked out anyway?

Then the hourly figure in the arithmetic goes up, not down. An hour spent driving when you have more work than you can take is an hour taken from a job you already won. Being busy tightens the radius.