Guide
Your backlog alone won't tell you what to do. Pair it with your win rate and you get a clear answer: spend, hold, raise prices, or hire.
"We're booked three weeks out" gets said by two very different businesses. One is underpriced and should put rates up next week. The other is genuinely short of hands and needs to hire. The backlog number alone can't tell you which. You need a second number: your win rate on quotes.
Backlog is simply how far out your next available slot sits. Win rate is the share of quotes you send that turn into booked jobs. Put them together and the decision gets a lot less fuzzy.
| Weeks booked out | Win rate | What it means | Action |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under 1 week | Any | You've got slack in the schedule | Spend on ads, chase leads |
| 1-2 weeks | Any | Healthy, steady demand | Maintain current spend and pricing |
| 3+ weeks | Above 60% | You're underpriced, not overworked | Raise prices 8-12% |
| 4+ weeks | 40-50% | Genuine capacity shortage | Hire, if you clear the revenue coverage test |
A long backlog with a high win rate (say 65-75%) means almost everyone who asks for a price says yes. That's not a demand problem, it's a pricing problem. You're too cheap for the queue you're generating. Customers aren't pushing back because they don't have to.
A long backlog with a win rate already sitting at 40-50% is different. Nearly half the people you quote are walking away, usually on price, and you're still full. That means the market has already pushed back and you're still overloaded. That's a real capacity ceiling, not a pricing gap. Check your hourly rate against local competitors before assuming either way.
When the phone won't stop ringing, the instinct is to switch off the ad spend. Don't, at least not first. Turning off a channel doesn't just stop new leads today. It costs you ranking position and review velocity, and both take 60-90 days to rebuild once you switch back on. Google Ads relevancy and Local Services rankings both reward consistent activity; pause for a quarter and you restart from behind.
A price rise carries none of that risk. You can implement it next week on new quotes, and you can walk it back just as fast if it goes wrong. It also does something a paused ad channel can't: it lifts your margin on the backlog you already have, starting immediately, without touching your marketing position at all.
Take a business quoting an average job at $500, doing 40 jobs a month, fully booked three weeks out, with a 68% win rate.
Current revenue: 40 jobs × $500 = $20,000/month.
Raise prices 8-12%. Take 10% as the middle of the range. New average job value: $550. If win rate settles from 68% down to the 45-55% band that a price rise typically produces (some quotes now say no), assume it lands at 50%, and quote volume stays roughly the same, so booked jobs drop to around 34-36 a month.
New revenue: 35 jobs × $550 = $19,250/month. Roughly flat on revenue, but you're doing 5 fewer jobs to get there. That's 5 jobs' worth of labour, fuel, and wear on your tools freed up, with margin per job up 10%. No new payroll, no new risk, reversible in a week if it overcorrects.
Now compare hiring. A $4,500/month employee (loaded cost, including payroll tax and any benefits — confirm exact figures with your accountant) needs to generate enough extra revenue to cover their cost plus a margin, not just break even on wages. At 65% utilisation (a realistic figure once you account for training, drive time, and slow ramp-up), that person works roughly 0.65 × their available hours on billable jobs.
If your average job takes 2.5 hours and bills at $550 material-inclusive, 65% utilisation across a 160-hour month gives roughly 104 billable hours, or about 41 jobs' worth of capacity. At an average margin of 40% per job, that's 41 × $550 × 0.40 = $9,020 in gross margin against a $4,500 cost. That clears the hire comfortably, but only if you actually have 41 jobs a month of genuine unmet demand waiting, not just a backlog that a price rise would thin out on its own.
Before hiring, work out whether the extra jobs you'd hand to a new employee generate enough margin to cover their full loaded cost, with headroom left over for the utilisation ramp-up in month one and two. As a rule of thumb:
Run the numbers properly with the hire calculator and check the underlying cost structure against your break-even calculator before you commit to payroll. A price rise you can undo by Friday. A hire you can't undo without redundancy costs and a hit to morale.
Backlog tells you demand exists. Win rate tells you whether you're priced right for it. Use both, and the raise-or-hire question mostly answers itself.
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