Pricing water hygiene work without guessing

Ask a small water hygiene contractor how they set a price and the honest answer is often that they found out roughly what the firm down the road charges and came in a bit under. It wins some work. It also hands your margin to a competitor who might be mispricing, has a different cost base, and is certainly not looking at the site you are quoting. You can do better than that without a pricing consultant or a spreadsheet full of invented rates. Price from two things you actually know: your own economics, and the exact scope of the job in front of you.

We're not going to give you a day rate or a per-outlet figure. For a trade where one site can have four assets and the next has four hundred, anyone who quotes you a single number is guessing on your behalf. What follows is the structure that replaces the guess.

The survey before the quote is the quote

The biggest driver of what a site costs to service is simply what is on it. A building with two calorifiers, a dozen sentinel outlets and three TMVs is a different job from one with storage tanks on every floor and forty outlets, and no amount of competitor-matching tells you which one you are about to walk into. So the survey comes first. Walk the site, count the assets, and that count is most of your price already. Quote before you survey and you are not pricing the job, you are pricing a hopeful guess about it, which is the same mistake that poisons a badly mobilised contract.

Everything else sits on top of the asset count:

• Access. A plant room behind two locked doors that needs a facilities escort and a permit is slower than a cupboard off the corridor. Sites where every visit means signing in, being escorted and signing out cost more per visit than the asset list alone suggests.
• Frequency and cadence. A monthly monitoring regime under HSG274 is twelve visits a year; a quarterly one is four. The same site on two cadences is two different contracts. Price the programme, not the visit.
• Reporting and evidence. FM clients increasingly specify the evidence they expect and stop accepting paper once onboarding is done. If a contract wants timestamped records uploaded after every visit, that reporting is real labour and belongs in the price, not donated as goodwill.
• Lab analysis. When samples go to a lab it is a pass-through cost with its own margin question. Mark it up or pass it at cost, but decide, and bill it either way.
• Travel. A cluster of sites in one town and a lone site ninety minutes up the motorway are not the same money, however similar their asset lists.

Why itemised lines beat a lump sum

A single annual figure is easy to send and expensive to defend. Break the quote into lines, per asset, per task, per frequency, and the awkward conversations get easier.

Scope creep is the first of them. A site is never static. The client adds a wing, a TMV turns up that was not on the original survey, the outlet count drifts upward over eighteen months. Under a lump sum that drift is invisible and you absorb it. With itemised lines tied to real assets, the fortieth TMV that appeared mid-contract is a line you add and justify, because the client can see exactly what changed and when.

Disputes are the second. When a client queries the bill, "here are the assets we serviced and the frequency we agreed" tends to end the discussion. A lump sum invites the opposite question, "what exactly am I paying for?", and leaves you reconstructing the scope from memory while the client waits.

Renewals are the third, and this is where itemisation quietly earns its keep. A clean uplift is a defensible uplift. If your price is one number, raising it looks arbitrary and invites a fight. If it is forty lines, you raise the ones where your costs actually moved and leave the rest, and the client sees a considered adjustment rather than a round-number grab. That matters most once you have won an FM subcontract whose buyer scrutinises every increase.

What to do with other people's price guides

Some firms publish price guides for legionella risk assessments. They are worth reading, as context for how the work gets broken down and what clients are told to expect. They are not worth copying as your strategy, because their cost base is not yours and a published range is a marketing document, not your profit and loss. Read them the way you would read a competitor's brochure: useful intelligence about the market, never a formula for your own pricing.

Raising your rates without apologising

Rates have to move, because costs do. The mechanics that work are unglamorous. Give notice, name the date the new rate starts, and add one sentence of reason and no more. Something like: "From 1 September, monitoring visits move from X to Y. The increase covers higher lab and travel costs." That is the whole message. No essay and no apology.

And new clients get the new rate first, always. Your newest customer should never be subsidised by being quoted last year's number out of habit. The firms that dread rate rises are usually the ones who let an old rate run untouched for four years and then need a painful jump to catch up. Small, annual and announced beats large, rare and negotiated every time.

The quote that wins and loses money

There is an outcome worse than losing a quote, and it is winning the wrong one. A price pitched under cost still wins work. It just wins you work you now have to deliver at a loss, visit after visit, locked into a contract you priced wrong for its full term. Underpricing to win is a slower road to going broke than not winning at all, and it is slower precisely because it feels like success while it happens: the signed contract, the pipeline filling, every visit quietly costing more than it brings in.

If you do not know your cost per visit, you cannot tell whether you are doing this. That is the real reason the survey and the itemised lines matter. They are how you find out you are losing money on a site before a twelve-month contract finds out for you. And a good price you then invoice three weeks late is still a cash-flow problem, so the pricing only pays off if the billing keeps up.

BlueWave builds quotes as itemised lines tied to the real assets on a site and the frequency each one is serviced at, so the quote, the work and the invoice all point at the same list. When the fortieth TMV appears it is a line you add, not a margin you lose without noticing, and because the lines carry the frequencies, the renewal uplift becomes a set of specific, explainable adjustments instead of a round-number guess.

Two habits carry most of the weight: price from the survey rather than the competitor, and itemise every line so the number can be defended. Rate rises are the easy part once those two are in place. And if you cannot say what one visit to one site costs you to deliver, you are not pricing, you are hoping, and the contract will find out the truth before you do.