Why a quarterly plan is priced one stop at a time
Customers buy pest control as a monthly or yearly plan, but every dollar of cost lands on the day the tech pulls up. If one quarterly stop does not pay for itself, four of them a year will not either.
The example stop is 57 minutes. Roughly three quarters of that is the treatment itself: walking the perimeter, spraying the foundation, doors and windows, sweeping the eaves, spreading granular and checking the inside monitors. The rest is the time around it that owners skip when they quote, like mixing and loading at the truck, writing up the visit and waiting at a gate for the dog to be put away.
Time a normal stop from parking to pulling away. Do not time the initial service, which runs much longer and has its own price in the spreadsheet.
The drive can cost more than the product
At a $60 break-even rate, each minute of driving costs a dollar before profit. The example's 12-minute drive is $12 of labour, more than the $10.86 of product and markup at the home.
Move the same home 30 minutes off the route and the service goes from $102.67 to $124.27. That is why a scattered quarterly route earns less than the price list suggests. Use the minutes from the previous stop, not from the shop, and charge the outliers what they cost.
Quarterly, every 2 months or monthly: what one home brings in a year
The calculator multiplies the service price by the visits in a month: 0.33 for quarterly, 0.5 for every 2 months and 1 for monthly. The example home is $33.88 a month quarterly, $51.33 every 2 months and $102.67 monthly.
Over a year the quarterly plan is $406.56. A monthly stop is usually lighter work, so shorten the minutes before you compare. At 45 minutes the example hits the $95 floor, which is still $1,140 a year from the same house.
What the quick pest price leaves out
The $60 rate is the example company's break-even, not yours. Yours depends on your truck, insurance, licence, product storage and the hours your techs are actually treating. Work it out with the true hourly rate calculator.
The 18% markup on product is small next to the labour, and the 20% profit is on top of cost, a margin of about 16.7%. The markup vs margin guide explains the difference.
The spreadsheet adds a safety cushion, prices each sprayer and spreader by its own running cost, sets a separate initial service, tracks callbacks and prints a customer quote. Its version of this home is $107.68 a service. The pest control pricing guide walks through that number.