We ran our junk removal company for a year just guessing prices. Fixing that added a couple hundred bucks to almost every week. Here's what we changed.
My brother and I run a junk removal company out of Farmington, MN. For the first stretch we priced every job the same way most guys do: stand in the customer's garage, look at the pile, sweat, and throw out a number.
Some weeks that worked. But when we started writing down what we actually charged vs. what the job actually took, the pattern was ugly:
- Two nearly identical half-load jobs, quoted $110 apart, because one customer sounded more price-sensitive on the phone
- Hot tub removals we did for basically free because we forgot to account for dump fees and 3 hours of sledgehammer work
- Jobs 25 minutes away priced the same as jobs 5 minutes away
The fix wasn't complicated, it was just discipline. We sat down and built actual cost-based pricing:
Load tiers with a real floor — min load, quarter, half, full truck, each with a low/high range based on our actual dump fees and time
Flat surcharges for the items that always burn you — mattresses, fridges, pianos, hot tubs, tires. The stuff that's a pain to dispose of gets its own line, every time, no mercy pricing
Drive time priced in — miles x 2 x a per-mile rate. Sounds obvious. We weren't doing it.
A markup % we picked once, on purpose — instead of re-negotiating with ourselves on every lawn
The part I didn't expect: quoting got faster, not slower. Customer calls, we ask three questions, number comes out consistent every time. Close rate went up too — turns out confident numbers close better than nervous ones.
Eventually I got sick of doing the math on my phone calculator standing on lawns, so I built it into an app for us (and got carried away — it does photo quotes with AI now, which honestly works better than my own eyeballs on garage jobs). A few other operators use it now. Not trying to pitch it here — happy to share how the pricing structure works either way, most of the value is in the discipline, not the software.
If you're running any service business off gut-feel pricing: track quoted vs. charged for two weeks. The gap will make you sick, and then it'll make you money.
Happy to answer anything about junk removal pricing, what we charge for specific items, or the dumb mistakes we made.