Cost per Booked Job, by Source

The question

Cost of marketing for the whole company says whether the total is reasonable. It cannot say which vendor to keep, because every source is blended into one number. Cost per booked job by source is the same arithmetic run one row at a time: what each source cost over ninety days, divided by the jobs it produced. It is the only number that settles a vendor conversation, because it is the vendor’s own row.

Tagging the jobs

Every job needs a source before this works, and the source is captured at two points. The first is the phone: whoever answers asks “how did you hear about us” and picks from a fixed list, never a blank field. The second is the job record in the scheduling or invoicing software, where a “source” field carries the answer through to the invoice. Tracking phone numbers do the same job without asking, one number per source, all forwarded to the office, so the caller ID says where the call came from before anyone picks up.

The fixed list is short on purpose:

• Google search or the Google listing
• Website form
• Referral, neighbor, or repeat customer
• Truck, sign, or wrap
• Mail, radio, or television
• Lead seller (Angi, HomeAdvisor, Thumbtack, or a local one)
• Nobody knows

“Nobody knows” stays on the list because the size of that row is a finding. If it holds a third of the jobs, the fix is the intake question, not the marketing.

The worksheet

Ninety days is long enough to produce real counts and short enough to act on. For each source: what it cost in the window, how many jobs it produced, what those jobs billed, cost per booked job, and cost of marketing for that source.

The figures are illustrations at the scale of a shop doing roughly $3 million a year, not benchmarks. The pattern is the point: the source that felt busiest is the one costing five times the others per job, and the “nobody knows” row is large enough that the real ranking cannot be trusted yet.

Reading it

• Referrals are never free. The $3,000 in that row is the review requests, the thank-you cards, and the wrap on the truck that the neighbor saw. Cutting it to zero is how referral rows shrink two years later.
• A source with fewer than twenty jobs in the window is not a trend. Wait another ninety days before acting on it; that is an operating standard, not a rule from a book.
• Rented sources will always show the highest cost per job, because nothing accumulates. The question is whether the shop had the capacity to take those jobs at that price, not whether the price is high.
• The decision at the end is one row up and one row down. More money to the cheapest source that still has room to grow, less to the most expensive, and the same sheet again in ninety days.