Christmas light route planning starts with one number: on our per-job P&L, every trip to a scattered house costs about $68 in drive time and truck, 2 people for 1 hour at $22 plus payroll and 25 miles at the IRS 76 cents, and a seasonal job makes that trip twice. Cluster the jobs by neighbourhood and a crew of 2 fits 2 two-storey installs a day and 8 to 10 takedowns. Below: the drive-cost table, crew day templates for 2 to 5 crews, and where the job board and crew app fit.
I run a permanent lighting company in Ottawa and I built GlowBid. The hours and wages on this page are the ones already worked line by line on our per-job P&L: 4 hours to install a two-storey, 1.5 to take it down, an hour of driving per day, a $22 wage and 12 percent payroll costs, both labelled as my assumptions there. The mileage rates are the IRS and CRA figures. The two competitor pages on this topic give installs-per-day numbers with no source; they are named below as theirs.
What does the drive cost per job?#
| Where the house is |
Drive per trip |
Trips per seasonal job |
Drive per job |
Crew-hours of driving per job |
| Scattered, 25 miles round trip |
$68.28 |
2 |
$136.56 |
4 |
| Scattered, 60 miles round trip |
$119.52 |
2 |
$239.04 |
6 |
| Second house on the same street |
$10.49 |
2 |
$20.98 |
0.7 |
| Clustered pair, cost per house |
$39.39 |
2 |
$78.77 |
2.3 |
The lines: a 25-mile trip is $44 of wages (2 people, 1 hour), $5.28 of payroll costs and $19 of truck at 76 cents a mile, $68.28. The 60-mile trip is 1.5 hours of driving for two people plus $45.60 of truck, which matches the P&L's note that at 60 miles the truck is $91 across the two trips, against $38 at 25, with two more crew-hours on top. The second house on the street is 10 minutes and 3 miles from the first: $7.33 of wages, $0.88 of payroll, $2.28 of truck. So a clustered pair shares one out-and-back and each house carries $39.39 a trip instead of $68.28, a saving of about $58 per job over install and takedown, and 1.7 crew-hours.
In Canadian dollars at the Bank of Canada's 1.3840, the scattered trip is about $94.50 CAD; an Ottawa shop would use the CRA's 73 cents a kilometre, $29.20 for a 40 km round trip, close to the IRS line converted.
The dollars are the smaller half. The crew-hours are the season: 1.7 hours saved per job is 136 hours at 80 jobs, which is 17 more install days for the same two people.
How do you cluster jobs by neighbourhood?#
Draw the zones before the first quote, then book every job into its zone's day. The map is the one you already gave Google: a service-area profile lists up to 20 areas within about 2 hours of the base, and those are the zones. Twenty is too many for one crew; group them into 5, one per weekday, so that a Kanata job is a Tuesday job and a Barrhaven job is a Thursday job whatever day the homeowner rang.
The booking conversation changes with it. "We are in your neighbourhood on Tuesdays; the next open Tuesday is the 17th" fills a cluster. "When would you like us?" scatters the map. Most homeowners take the day offered, and the one who cannot gets the following Tuesday, not a Wednesday trip across town.
Then sequence inside the day. Two houses on the same street are the ideal; two in the same zone is the rule; a job outside every zone carries the $68 trip and should either pay a travel line or wait until three neighbours sign. That is the number to say out loud when a lead 30 miles out, a 60-mile round trip, asks for a quote: on the default card the job nets $1,270, and the extra radius takes $102 and two crew-hours off it before the ladder is up.
What does a crew day look like?#
Four templates, each for a crew of 2, clock hours. The two-storey is the P&L house at 4 hours; the bungalow at 2.5 hours is an example assumption of mine, not a P&L line. The takedown visit is 30 to 45 minutes on the ladder, as our takedown scheduling page puts it, with the testing and binning done at the shop.
| Template |
The day |
Clock hours |
Jobs |
| A. Two-storey pair, same zone |
Drive out 0.5, install 4, move 0.25, install 4, drive back 0.5 |
9.25 |
2 installs |
| B. Bungalow triple, same street |
Drive out 0.5, three installs at 2.5 with 0.25 between, drive back 0.5 |
9 |
3 installs |
| C. Takedown run, same zone |
Drive out 0.5, 8 stops at 40 minutes with 10-minute moves, drive back 0.5 |
7.5 |
8 takedowns |
| D. Flex day |
One install plus the week's service calls and a weather make-up slot |
8 |
1 install plus calls |
Template A is the 80-job season: 2 a day, 5 days, 8 weeks. Template C at 10 stops is a 9-hour day and the top of the range; Jason Geiman's takedown post (December 16, 2024) says most residential takedowns run 10 to 15 minutes and a well-planned route does 10 to 15 a day, which is a smaller house than ours and a crew that installed with takedown in mind. He also makes the point that the limit on a takedown day is not the ladder but the bins: label them by route, and the truck holds a zone's worth.
Template D is the one that saves the season. Hold two spare install days in the calendar for weather, and give every crew one flex day a week in December for dark-run calls, so a service call does not pull a crew off a clustered install day.
How do 2 to 5 crews share the map?#
Each crew owns its zones. Nobody shares a neighbourhood, and a job is booked to the crew whose zone it is in, on that zone's day.
| Crews |
Zones per crew |
Season capacity, 8 weeks at Template A |
Takedown days in January at 8 a day |
| 1 |
5 |
80 |
10 |
| 2 |
5 each, the map split in half |
160 |
10 per crew |
| 3 |
5 each |
240 |
10 per crew |
| 5 |
5 each, 25 zones |
400 |
10 per crew |
The capacity column is why the second crew comes when the booked calendar passes 80, not at a revenue figure. Strandr's scaling guide puts the first hire at $150,000 of revenue with no source. On the default card that is about 70 two-storey jobs, and 80 jobs is $170,736, so for this house the two rules land in the same place; on a smaller ticket the revenue rule would have one crew trying to install more houses than 8 weeks hold. Count houses, not dollars. LightQuoter's route page (August 3, 2026) says 3 to 5 installs a day clustered and 120 to 150 per crew per season, also unsourced, on an $850 average ticket; at that ticket the house is a fraction of our two-storey and the numbers are not in conflict, they describe a smaller job. Count your own hours per house. Hiring and paying installers covers what the second crew costs.
Takedown is the same map in January. A crew's 80 houses at 8 a day is 10 working days, so two crews clear 160 houses inside the January 2 to February 28 window the lease clause sets, with room for freezing rain. The takedown route is also the re-book route: the January visit is when the customer is asked for next season.
Where do the job board and crew app fit?#
GlowBid does not draw routes. What it does is put every signed job on a board where clustering is a drag, not a spreadsheet.
On Pro, the pipeline has a Takedown stage and a Re-book stage, so the January list is the Takedown column sorted by zone, and a signed multi-year lease creates each season's install job and takedown job on its own. On Ultimate, the production board runs Signed, Booked, In Progress and Finished. Booked is where the route is made: you assign the installer and the day, and the day you pick is the zone's day. The crew side shows the crew what it needs for the house, the drawing with footage by run, the product, a photo-gated checklist and the homeowner's sign-off at the end, and never the price or the customer's personal details. Twilio sends the appointment reminder and the on-the-way text, so the homeowner is home and the gate is open when the truck arrives.
The route itself goes into Google Maps, which takes "up to 9 stops, which includes the final destination". That fits a takedown day exactly and an install day twice over. Build the day on the board, put the 8 addresses in the map in street order, done.
Worked example: one Tuesday, two crews#
Two crews, 4 two-storey installs, on the default rate card. The scattered version is what happens when the calendar was filled by the homeowner's preference; the clustered version is the zone rule.
|
Scattered |
Clustered by zone |
| Crew 1 |
Kanata, then Orleans (across the city) |
Two houses on the same Kanata street |
| Crew 2 |
Barrhaven, then Rockcliffe |
Two houses in Barrhaven, 3 miles apart |
| Trips at $68.28 |
4 |
2 |
| Second-house moves |
0 |
2 at $10.49 |
| Drive cost, install day |
$273.12 |
$157.54 |
| Same again on takedown day |
$273.12 |
$157.54 |
| Drive cost, 4 jobs, both visits |
$546.24 |
$315.08 |
| Crew-hours of driving, both visits |
16 |
9.3 |
| Clock hours, install day, per crew |
10 or more |
9.25 |
| Revenue, 4 jobs |
$8,536.80 |
$8,536.80 |
| Profit at $1,270 a job before the drive difference |
$5,081.84 |
$5,081.84 |
| Saved by clustering |
|
$231.16 and 6.7 crew-hours |
Across an 80-job season the same arithmetic saves about $4,640 and 136 crew-hours, and the hours are the 17 extra install days. The free roofline tool is where each of those four quotes started: the runs drawn on the homeowner's own photo, the footage from the drawing, the price from the rate card, and the disclaimer that photo measurements are estimates confirmed on site.
Mistakes that scatter a season#
- Booking the day the customer asks for. Offer the zone's day. Most take it.
- Two crews in one neighbourhood. They pass each other on the road and neither learns the streets.
- A 60-mile round trip at the normal price. It carries $102 more drive and two more crew-hours; add a travel line or wait for neighbours.
- No flex day. The first dark-run call in December pulls a crew off a clustered install, and the two houses that were booked that day become two scattered trips later.
- Takedown by phone call. January routes are booked at signing, by zone, the same as install. A customer who calls to ask when you are coming is a customer whose date was never set.
- Bins by customer name only. Label by zone and date as well, so a takedown day's bins load together and unload together.
- Believing a jobs-per-day number from a page with no hours in it. Three to five a day is true of a small house and false of a two-storey with peaks. Time your own crew on your own houses for a week.
The route is the job board sorted by neighbourhood. GlowBid gives you the board, the assignment, the crew's work order with the drawing on it and the texts that get the homeowner to the door. Ultimate is $699 a year at the founding price, Pro with the Takedown and Re-book pipeline is $499, 7-day trial, no card, full product open November 1, 2026, 100 founding places.
