Should you take a customer outside your current route?

It’s 8pm and a quote request just came in. Two dogs, weekly service, friendly message. One catch: the address is across town. Getting there and back would add about a 30-minute detour to your route. Nice customer, wrong place. Do you take the job?

This article gives you a way to decide in about two minutes, with a real price at the end of it — not a feeling.

The cost you never invoice#

You get paid for the yard. You don’t get paid for the drive. So every minute between stops is a cost that never appears on any invoice — it just quietly shortens your day.

In the operator discussions we studied while building this site, drive time was the cost owners kept discovering too late. One operator worked out that around 80% of his working day was spent driving. He didn’t have a scooping problem. He had a route problem.

Count the minutes the customer adds — not the distance#

One correction to the way most people size this up. What matters is not how far the customer looks on the map. It is how many minutes they add to your full route. A yard 15 minutes out means 15 minutes back too — a 30-minute detour. A yard that happens to sit between two stops you already drive past might add five.

So the math is: take what the visit pays. Divide it by the job time plus the added drive time. Multiply by 60. That is the stop’s gross route revenue per field hour — gross meaning before fuel, supplies, card fees, taxes and everything else that comes out of it. It is not profit. It is the number that lets you compare two stops fairly.

Say the cleanup pays $22 and takes 10 minutes. Example numbers — use your own.

Same yard, same price — and the detour version earns about a third of the close one. That is the whole reason the yard that fits your route can be worth more than the one across town, even if the far one pays a few dollars more per visit.

Turn it into a price, not a feeling#

Here is the complete decision, in four steps.

• 1. Pick your minimum rate. Decide the lowest gross field-hour rate you will work for. A fair starting point is what your current route already earns per hour — the far stop should not drag that down.
• 2. Count the added minutes. Job time, plus the driving this customer adds to the route, there and back.
• 3. Calculate the minimum price. Target rate × added minutes ÷ 60. Our example stop adds 40 minutes. At a $60-an-hour target, the minimum visit price is $40. At an $80 target, it’s about $53.
• 4. Quote that price. If the customer accepts, the drive is paid for and the yes is easy. If not, offer the waitlist below, or politely decline.

For what visit prices look like in general — the ranges operators report are here.

When a far yard is worth a yes anyway#

A rule with no exceptions costs you money, so here are the honest ones. Say yes if you already drive past that area on the way to somewhere else — then the added minutes are small, whatever the map says. Say yes if the job is big enough to pay for its own drive at your target rate; an HOA or a multi-dog property often is. That is exactly what the step-three formula checks.

What the math protects you from is the quiet middle case: the single, ordinary, far-away yard at a normal price that turns a tight Tuesday into a long one.

What this means for where you grow#

Flip the same logic around and it tells you where your next customer should come from: as close as possible to the ones you already have. A referral on the next street adds almost no drive time. Door hangers on the block around a job cost you ten minutes while the truck is already parked.

Growth that lands near your current stops makes every route day shorter. Growth that lands across town makes every route day longer. Same number of customers, very different business.