What lead generation actually costs a tradesperson
Most trades judge a lead source by what it charges a month. That is the wrong number. The number that matters is what you paid for every job you actually won, and almost nobody works it out.
There are broadly three ways of paying for work, and they fail in different places.
Paying a monthly subscription
You pay a fixed amount to be listed, whether the phone rings or not. In a busy month it can look like good value. In a quiet month, in January, or in the weeks after you have been off with a bad back, you are still paying. The cost does not flex with your workload, which means the months you can least afford it are the months it hurts most. These arrangements also tend to run on twelve-month terms that renew automatically, so the decision to stop is rarely as easy as the decision to start.
Paying per lead
Here you buy the conversation rather than the job. The problem is that the same lead is usually sold to several trades at once, so you are paying for the right to be one of four or five quotes. If you win one in four, your real cost per job is four times the lead price, before you have driven anywhere or priced anything. Worse, you pay exactly the same for the customer who was never going to go ahead as for the one who signs.
Paying a share of what you win
Nothing leaves your pocket until money comes in. Quiet month, no cost. Quote that goes nowhere, no cost. The risk sits with the platform rather than with you, which is the way round it ought to be for a sole trader with a van to run.
The cost nobody puts on the invoice
Then there is travel. A round trip to quote a job you do not win costs you fuel, wear and an hour or two you cannot bill. Do that three times a week and it quietly becomes one of the biggest line items in the business, and it never appears on any statement because you paid it in diesel and daylight rather than in subscription fees.
This is the reason InAJam sends work by live location rather than by postcode area. A directory that covers a twenty mile radius will happily send you across the county. Dispatching to whoever is genuinely nearest cuts the distance, which means more jobs in a day and less of your week spent behind the wheel.
How to work out your own number
It takes ten minutes. Take everything you spent on getting work last year, subscriptions, lead fees, advertising, the lot. Add a rough figure for the miles you drove to quotes that came to nothing. Divide the total by the number of jobs you actually won.
That figure is what a job really costs you before you have earned a penny. Once you have it, comparing one arrangement against another stops being guesswork.