The five-competitor survey

Nobody can tell you what to charge. Not a forum, not a national average, not the guy on YouTube. Prices live in markets, and your market is the area where your clients would realistically hire someone: your town, your side of the city, the radius you are willing to drive. The only trustworthy data is what real competitors quote real customers, in that radius, this month.

So you are going to collect it yourself. The method is a mystery shop of five local competitors, and operators across every trade teach some version of it: call around, pose as a normal prospect, get the real quote. A caterer calls other caterers. A cleaner calls other cleaners. You will call whoever your clients would have called if you did not exist.

Why five

One competitor is an anecdote. Two is a coin flip. Five gives you a low, a middle, and a top, enough shape to see the actual range, and it costs you one afternoon. You could survey ten or more, and if your market is dense, a bigger sample is better. But five is the floor for an honest read, and five is small enough that you will actually do it. This is the same logic in every fieldwork-heavy trade: sample until the shape stops changing, and in a local service market, the shape usually stabilizes around five.

Picking your five

Choose businesses that are real, local, and currently operating. Five criteria, quickly checked:

• They actually serve your area, not a franchise three states away with a national call center.
• They are in business right now. Dead listings and stale websites are noise.
• They are the kind of operator your ideal client would realistically call. Include a mix: one or two established players, a couple of mid-size ones, one solo operator like you will be.
• They quote real jobs. A published price list is a lead, not a quote, and many of those lists are out of date. The number you want is the one a live prospect gets.
• Nobody gets identified by you as a competitor researcher. You are a normal prospect.

The shop

Contact each one the way a real client would: phone for most home services, email or a contact form for B2B and online services. Use a real, typical job, the job you actually intend to sell most often. A generic "how much do you charge" gets a generic brush-off. A specific job gets a specific number, and specificity is the entire point. Vary the contact method across your five so you hear how the market answers both ways.

Hi, I'm looking to get a quote for a standard job. [Describe the job in one sentence: the recurring visit, the standard package, the typical project you plan to sell.] It's in [your area]. What would that run, and what's included?

Then keep quiet and take notes. Everything that happens next is data.

What to record

The quoted number is maybe a third of what you are collecting. For each competitor, log:

• The quote itself, and whether it is hourly, flat, per visit, per project, or monthly.
• What is included. This is where surveys pay for themselves. Competitors include wildly different things in a "standard" job, and you will discover line items you never knew were billable: extras, minimums, trip charges, weekend rates.
• The minimum charge or booking floor, if any.
• Any frequency or bundle pricing for repeat work.
• How fast they responded, and how they treated the inquiry. Two days of silence is a market signal.
• The exact words they used to describe the work. You are hearing how your market talks, and you will quote with those words later.

Keep it in a grid, one row per competitor. The survey worksheet in the downloads section is that grid.

The conclusions you are not allowed to draw

The cheapest of your five is not "the market rate." The low outlier is usually the operator with no floor, the one whose number is a slow-motion exit from the industry. You computed your own floor in "Your Cost Floor"; now you know what a no-floor price looks like from the outside. Note it and move on.

The most expensive of your five is not a fantasy either. That number tells you what the top of your market currently tolerates, which is the ceiling you will test as you get good.

And do not average them. A market is not its average. A market is a range with reasons, and the reasons are the inclusions, the response times, and the positioning you just recorded. Five quotes plus the reasons behind them: that is what the afternoon bought you.

Doing this cleanly

You are collecting information any real customer could get by asking, which is fine. Keep it clean anyway: do not book fake appointments, do not no-show anyone, do not waste a competitor's site-visit time under false pretenses. Phone, email, one job, one quote, done. Five calls, one afternoon, and you will know your market better than most people who have operated in it for years.

What to ask changes by trade, and each business course covers its own version. What a route visit includes is the cleaning course's question. What a signing package includes is the loan signing course's. What a deliverable includes is the editing course's. The method never changes. Get the quote, get the inclusions, get the range.