“Every project is different” is the most expensive sentence in service businesses. It forces every sale through a custom quote, every quote through your calendar, and every prospect through a week of silence while you do unpaid scoping.
What a service menu actually changes
- Speed: prospects self-qualify before the first call. The calls you do take are closing calls.
- Anchoring: a visible top tier makes the middle tier feel reasonable. Most buyers land there.
- Scope discipline: “that’s in the Signature package” is a kinder sentence than “that’ll be extra.”
Building yours in one afternoon
Pull your last twenty jobs. Cluster them into three shapes — the small one, the common one, the ambitious one. Price the middle at your current average, the small one high enough that you’re glad to do it, and the top one 2.5× the middle. Publish all three.
A price on the page is a filter. A “contact us for pricing” is a queue.
You’ll lose some tire-kickers the day you publish prices. You were losing them anyway — just slower, and with more of your time attached.
