What's your approach to pricing complex or uncertain jobs?

in my experience the only way is to stop pretending you know when you don't.

we do "diagnostic plus proposal" now. flat rate for the first 2 hours to figure out what's actually wrong, then quote the real work. customers hate it at first but the ones who stick around are the ones who weren't going to stiff you on scope creep anyway.

used to eat hours constantly trying to "be competitive" on jobs we couldn't scope. never again.

We've moved to a tiered estimate model that has helped significantly with this.

Good: Known scope, fixed price
Better: Known scope with identified risk factors, fixed price plus 15% contingency line item
Best: Unclear scope, time-and-materials with hourly rate bands and daily cost maximums

The key is front-loading the conversation about uncertainty. Our sales team has scripts for this now. "Based on what we can see, here's what we know, here's what we don't, and here's how we protect you from runaway costs."

We've also started requiring site visits for anything over $5K estimated. Sounds expensive but we recover that in reduced write-offs.

Need to implement this. Our team quotes sight unseen and we're eating margin on 30% of jobs.

Who owns the site visit scheduling in your workflow? Sales or dispatch?

Dispatched as a paid diagnostic. Sales sets expectation, ops executes. Clean handoff.

okay so basically what we started doing is this thing where like if its commercial we just dont do fixed anymore for anything over i want to say 3k? and for residential we have these good better best options but the best one is basically time and materials with a soft cap that we discuss up front

had a job last month where we quoted 4k and ended up at 11k because of how the building was wired. customer was mad but we had the emails where they declined the t&m option so. lesson learned for them i guess

pro tip: always get it in writing which option they picked and make them initial it. saved us on that one

Another way to think about this is separating the pricing conversation from the trust conversation. We've found that customers who push back hardest on open-ended pricing are often the ones who've been burned by other contractors.

We address this with transparency tools: live photo sharing from the diagnostic, video walkthroughs of the problem, and clear documentation of why the scope changed. The investment in communication pays for itself in reduced disputes.

From a governance perspective, we now require documented customer acknowledgment of pricing methodology before any work begins. This has streamlined our collections process considerably.

We struggled with this until we reframed it for the team: quoting with confidence doesn't mean quoting with certainty.

Our approach now:

1. Maximum exposure pricing — "Worst case, this costs X. If we find it's simpler, you'll pay less."

2. Go/no-go checkpoints — Customer approves each phase before we proceed

3. Discovery credit — If they proceed with the full project, we credit the diagnostic fee

The team was skeptical but our close rate actually improved. Customers appreciate having guardrails.

Keiko — the sales-operations tension you mentioned is real. We resolved it by giving sales a "complex job playbook" with pre-approved language and escalation triggers. They're not guessing anymore.

The maximum exposure framing is particularly useful. Do you find customers anchor to that number, or do they remain open to the lower actuals?

Early on we saw some anchoring, but we trained the team to emphasize the "if simpler" language repeatedly. Now it's rare — maybe 10% of cases. The clarity outweighs the risk.

Stops being a pricing problem when you start saying no to bad jobs.

We now decline anything where the customer won't pay for a proper diagnostic. Lost some revenue initially. Margin is up 40%.

Your call.