These guides are written for owners and office managers of Richmond trade businesses: plumbers, electricians, roofers, drainage crews, renovators, painters and landscapers. Each one answers a question we hear often, with numbers and steps you can apply yourself. You don't need to hire anyone to use them.
We are a marketing and consulting service, not a contractor, so the guides are about winning and pricing work, not about how to do it.
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Cost per booked job: the one number that should run your marketing
Your cost-per-booked-job ceiling is the most you can spend to win one job and still make the profit you want. Work it out from ticket size, margin and close rate, then judge every marketing channel against it.
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A 12-month marketing calendar for Richmond trades
Richmond's mild, wet winters and drier summers give trade demand a yearly rhythm. Prepare for each season about six weeks before it arrives, promote planned work in quiet months, and budget across the year rather than month by month.
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Planning a Richmond service area around bridges, the tunnel and drive time
Richmond is an island, so every job off it carries a crossing cost. Decide your service area from drive time and job value, set Google service areas within the rules, and point ads only at the trips that pay.
Cost per booked job: the number that decides your marketing
Read the cost per booked job guide.
Most trades judge marketing by how busy the phone feels. This guide replaces that with one number: what you can afford to pay to win one booked job. It walks through ticket size, gross margin, close rate and conversion rate, with a worked Richmond example for a plumber and one for a roofer, and shows how to use the result to decide whether a channel is worth keeping.
You'll learn:
- how to calculate a ceiling per booked job, per call and per click
- why cost per lead is a misleading number
- the three levers to pull when a channel is over the ceiling
- a simple monthly tracking sheet you can keep in a spreadsheet
Planning a Richmond service area around bridges and the tunnel
Richmond is an island, and that changes the economics of every job off it. This guide shows how to decide which parts of Richmond and which neighbouring cities to target, based on drive time, job value and your shop's location. It covers how to set up Google Business Profile service areas correctly and how to match ad geography to the trips that pay.
You'll learn:
- how to work out the real cost of a bridge trip
- how to set Google service areas within the rules
- why listing all of Metro Vancouver usually backfires
- how to sort Richmond planning areas into core, secondary and opportunistic
A 12-month marketing calendar for Richmond trades
Read the seasonal calendar guide.
Richmond's mild, wet winters and dry summers create a yearly rhythm for trade demand. This guide lays out what customers tend to search for in each season, when to start pushing each service, and when to pull back ad spend. It includes notes for roofing, drainage, plumbing, electrical, painting and landscaping.
You'll learn:
- when rain-season demand starts and how early to prepare for it
- what to promote during quiet months to keep crews busy
- when to schedule review requests and content updates
- how to plan budget across the year instead of month by month
Who wrote them
The guides are written by Richmond Marketing, part of the Sedighi.ca and SAZ.ca group, with the approach set by Ali Sedighi, MBA. They draw on methods used in our HVAC work and adapt them to the trades and the geography of Richmond. Where a guide refers to an official source, such as Google's help pages or the City of Richmond's planning maps, it links to it and lists it under the sources with the date we checked.
They're not legal, tax or regulatory advice. For margins, talk to your accountant. For licensing and permits, check with the regulator for your trade. We stick to what we know: how trades win, price and track their work.
How to use these guides
Start with the cost per booked job guide. Every other decision depends on knowing what a job is worth. Then use the service area guide to decide where to spend, and the seasonal calendar to decide when.
If you'd like help applying them to your numbers, our services put these methods into practice, and the pricing page shows what that costs. The areas page has more on each part of Richmond. Questions are welcome by call, text or email through the contact page.
Frequently asked questions
Are the guides free to use?
Yes. Read them, use the worksheets and share them with your office manager. They're written to be useful on their own.
Do the guides apply outside Richmond?
The maths in the cost-per-job guide works anywhere. The service-area and seasonal guides are written specifically for Richmond and its neighbours.
Will you add more guides?
We may, when we have something genuinely useful to say. We'd rather keep three strong guides than publish thin ones.