Christmas Light Business Mistakes: 14 Priced Per Job

Which pricing mistakes cost money before the ladder goes up?#

Four of them, and they all live on the rate card. Fix these first because they repeat on every quote you send.

1. One flat rate for every run type. Peaks are slower and more dangerous than eaves; ground runs are faster. On the default card roofline is $8 a foot, peaks $9 plus a 15 percent pitch premium and 10 percent per extra storey, ground $5, jumps $4 unlit. Our house has 48 ft of peaks on the second storey. At the peak rate with premiums that line is $540. At a flat $8 it is $384. The flat rate gives back $156 on the hardest feet of the house, and overcharges the walkway at the same time. The fix is a rate per run type, which is what the per-foot method is.

2. Quoting without measuring. Pacing the eave from the driveway reads short on any run that angles away from you. Twenty feet short on a 250 ft house is $160 of lit footage never billed, plus the cord and bulbs you still buy for it: 20 ft of C9 socket cord at $0.31 a foot ($305.10 per 1,000 ft spool) and 20 bulbs at $0.76 ($379.05 per 500) is $21. Call it $181 a house. The fix is to measure the roofline from your own photo with a known reference length, then confirm with a tape on install day. Photo measurements are estimates; the quote should say so.

3. Counting jumps as lit footage. A jump is unlit cord across a valley or over a door. Our house has 16 ft of them. Priced at $8 lit instead of $4 unlit the customer pays $64 for bulbs that do not exist, and the materials list orders 16 bulbs ($12) for sockets that are not there. Worse, the crew's bulb count is wrong on the work order. Type jumps as jumps and the footage, the price and the order all come from the same line.

4. No minimum job. A 60 ft bungalow roofline at $8 is $480. It needs the same drive, the same ladder set-up and the same January takedown trip as the $2,134 house. GlowBid's default minimum is $1,500, so that bungalow either books at $1,500 or does not book, which is $1,020 of difference for roughly the same day. Set the minimum where the smallest job you will drive to lives.

Price your own house through these four in the free roofline measuring tool; the drawn runs carry their type, so mistakes 1 to 3 cannot happen by accident.

Which paperwork mistakes turn into unpaid work?#

Three, and each one is a line or a clause you write once.

5. No deposit at signature. Once the socket cord is cut to the house it does not go back on the shelf. For our 250 ft job that is $76 of cord, $190 of bulbs, $38 of clips and $2 of plugs, about $306 at supplier prices, gone the day a customer cancels in November. The default deposit is 30 percent, which is $640.20 on $2,134, collected by card on the same screen as the signature. Our deposit and payment schedule guide covers what to do on cancellation.

6. Takedown not priced. Takedown is a second visit in January with a ladder, in the cold. On our per-job P&L it is 2.5 crew-hours plus a drive, about $150 of the $864 in costs on the job. Leave it out of the price and you do 40 of those trips for about $6,000 of nothing. Put takedown on the quote as its own line, and put a takedown window in the agreement so the customer knows when the lights come down. The contract template has the clause; takedown pricing has the numbers.

7. Card fees not in the price. Stripe charges 2.9 percent plus 30 cents on a domestic card, $62 on our job. Deposits collected through GlowBid go through Stripe Connect and carry Stripe processing plus a GlowBid platform margin under 1 percent, shown before you connect Stripe. Build the fee into the per-foot rate. A surcharge line on the invoice starts an argument you do not need in December.

What goes wrong on install day?#

8. No materials buffer. A run that measured 250 ft from the photo can tape at 262 ft on site. If you ordered exactly 250, someone drives back. Two people for an hour at $22 plus 12 percent payroll costs is $49, and a 20 mile round trip at the IRS rate of 76 cents is $15, so about $64 for the trip before you count the job it pushed. The $22 wage and the 20 miles are our assumptions. GlowBid's materials buffer defaults to 10 percent and the installer sets it; the quote shows it as the customer's choice too.

9. Texting without consent. A quote follow-up text is a commercial message. In Canada an inquiry gives implied consent for six months, and every message must identify you, give a contact and carry an opt-out; the penalties for getting it wrong run up to $1 million per violation for an individual and $10 million for a business. Nobody pays the maximum, but it is the number you are exposed to when you text from a personal phone with no record. This is not legal advice. Our 21-day follow-up sequence has the consent lines written in, and the CASL templates cover the rules.

Which mistakes are specific to permanent lighting?#

Four that no seasonal list mentions, all on the default track card ($25 roofline, $28 peak, $12 per foot of jump, $250 controller).

10. Peaks and ridge lines at the roofline rate. On the two-gable house in our ridge, peak and jump pricing article, the ridge line, four peaks and three jumps are $2,313 of a $5,103 quote. Price those at the roofline rate and skip the jumps and the same work goes out at $4,605, $498 short. Peaks carry their own rate plus the 15 percent pitch premium because they are the slowest and most dangerous feet on the house.

11. Jumps left out of the channel order. Sixteen feet of jump cable at $12 is $192 you did not bill, and if the cable is not on the order it is also a trip back at about $64. Draw the jumps on the photo and the cable is on the list.

12. One controller for a house that needs two. Every controller and power supply has a maximum run length from its manufacturer. A long house or a detached garage past that length needs a second controller or a second power supply, and if it is not on the quote it comes out of your margin at $250 per controller on the default card, plus the trip. Check the run length against the manufacturer's limit before you price.

13. No warranty or service clause. A permanent install gets calls in year two: a node out, a controller that lost Wi-Fi, a section dark after an ice storm. With no clause, every call is the same $64 trip plus parts with nothing to bill against and no agreed response time. The permanent lighting agreement template has a warranty clause with a response window, and service call pricing covers what is warranty and what is billable.

What goes wrong after the season?#

14. No August re-book touch. Year two is where the money is: the lights are paid for, so the same house nets about $1,587 on a $2,089 re-install, 76 percent instead of 60, on our P&L. A customer who does not hear from you in August books whoever knocked in September. Put a renewal touchpoint on the calendar for every customer; a signed multi-year lease in GlowBid creates it, along with each season's install and takedown jobs. Year-two pricing covers the re-install quote.

Worked example: four mistakes on one $2,134 house#

Take the house above and make the four most common mistakes at once: a flat $8 rate, 20 ft read short from the driveway, no takedown line, card fees not in the price.

That is $549 on a $2,134 job, 26 percent of the ticket, or $21,960 over a 40-house season, and the customer never saw a discount. The same house priced by run type from a measured drawing, with takedown and fees on the card, sends at $2,134 and the P&L nets about $1,270. Draw your own house in the free tool and the run types, the footage and the price come from one drawing.

In what order should you fix them?#

Rate card first, agreement second, calendar third.

1. Rates by run type, a minimum and card fees in the price (mistakes 1, 4, 7). One evening.
2. Measure from a photo and confirm on site; type the jumps (2, 3). Habit from the next quote.
3. Deposit at signature, takedown line, takedown window, warranty clause (5, 6, 13). One template.
4. Materials buffer, controller zones, jumps on the channel order (8, 11, 12). On the drawing.
5. Consent lines on every text, renewal touchpoints for every customer (9, 14). Once, then automatic.

How this differs from the lists already published#

Strandr's twelve mistakes (Matt Staton, September 2026) are priced on a 60-job season with a $15 a foot reference job; the figures are Strandr's own, with no supplier or rate card behind them, and the takedown and permanent lighting items have no method. Jobber's ten tips (Seth Richtsmeier) are advice without numbers. Neither lists the permanent lighting mistakes (peaks at the roofline rate, jumps off the channel order, controller zones, no warranty clause) that cost the most per house.

Edge cases that change the numbers#

• Steep pitch on a bungalow. A 12/12 gable on one storey is slower than a 6/12 on two. Raise the peak rate or the flat per peak rather than faking a storey premium.
• Customer-owned lights. The deposit covers your time, not materials, so a smaller percent can make sense. Write into the quote that you do not warrant strands the customer supplied.
• Rush installs in the last week of November. The default rush premium is 20 percent on the runs and does not multiply add-ons. Without it, the rush job costs you the job you moved.
• Minus 20 install days. Adhesive clips and cold cord both misbehave. Price the reschedule into the agreement's weather clause rather than eating the return trip.
• Leased lights in the customer's garage. If you store them, the storage liability cap belongs in the agreement, or the first lost bin is your cost.

Every rate on this page lives on one rate card per company on GlowBid, and every quote is priced from the drawing. Founding pricing is $299 a year for Core on the pricing page, 7-day trial, no card, 100 founding places, full product open November 1, 2026.