Marketing
Marketing budget calculator
What you can afford to spend to win a job, and still make money on it.
What a typical job invoices at, materials included.
What is left after materials and the labor on that job — before overheads.
Out of every 10 people who call, how many book? Three would be 30%.
Start from the job, not the budget
Most trades pick a marketing budget by feel — a number that sounds tolerable, usually far too small to do anything, occasionally far too large. The number is not arbitrary. It falls out of what a job is worth to you and how many you want.
Work forward instead: this job earns me this much gross profit, so I can afford to spend that much winning it, and I want this many a month. The budget is the last number, not the first.
Why a third of gross profit
The break-even figure — spending your entire gross profit to win a job — is the ceiling, and a terrible target. Hit it and you have worked for nothing, with all the risk and none of the reward.
A third of gross profit is a common working limit. It leaves the job clearly worth doing after marketing, absorbs the leads that go nowhere, and still allows real spend on anything that works. Both figures are shown so you can see the gap you are operating in.
What this assumes
It assumes your conversion rate is honest. Most owners overestimate it, because the inquiries they remember are the ones that turned into work. Count a month properly before trusting the inquiry figures here.
It also treats every job as worth the average. If your work splits into small call-outs and occasional large installs, run it twice with different numbers rather than averaging them into a job that does not exist.
The cheapest marketing is not marketing
Before spending anything, the numbers above usually improve faster by raising conversion than by buying more inquiries. Answering the phone, quoting the same day and following up an unanswered quote all cost nothing and move the same lever.
Doubling conversion halves the inquiries you need, which halves the budget.
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