Where we go, and what a mile actually costs
A mobile business is its radius. Everything else — the pricing, the schedule, what we can afford to say no to — comes out of how far the van drove that morning, so here is the whole arithmetic rather than a map with a friendly circle drawn on it.
St. Petersburg, Clearwater, Gulfport, Pinellas Park, Ridgecrest, Largo, Belleair, St. Pete Beach, west and downtown Seminole, Indian Rocks Beach, Kenneth City, Treasure Island, Dunedin, Safety Harbor, Palm Harbor. This is where both vans live, and it is the only ring where travel is genuinely free rather than quietly folded into the repair price.
Tampa, Temple Terrace, Carrollwood, Oldsmar, Safety Harbor, Dunedin, Palm Harbor, Tarpon Springs, Ozona, Crystal Beach, Bardmoor, Feather Sound. The charge disappears if there are two or more vehicles at the same address, because the drive is the same drive either way and billing it twice would be dishonest.
Brandon, Riverview, Valrico, Lutz, Land O' Lakes, Wesley Chapel, Plant City, Zephyrhills. We do not send a van out on a two and a half hour round trip for one small job, so ring 3 gets grouped — usually the far end of a day that already has work in that direction. That can mean waiting until the following week, and we will say so rather than inventing a slot.
Past about seventy miles a single car cannot carry the day, and any price that pretends otherwise has the drive hidden inside it. Six units or more at one site and the numbers work again. How a fleet visit runs →
A van covering seventy miles each way spends about two and a half hours of a working day on the road, plus fuel, plus the tires and the servicing that nobody puts on an invoice. That time has to come from somewhere. There are three places it can come from: a line on your estimate that says what it is, a quietly higher price on the repair itself, or a rushed job at the other end so the van can get back.
The second and third are what “free mobile service, we come to you” usually means. We would rather print a number. If the number makes the job not worth doing for you, that is a good outcome for both of us and it costs nothing to find out.
Clearance is the one that catches people out
The van stands about nine feet four with the rack and ladder on it. A parking structure with a six-foot-eight bar across the entrance is not a place we can work, and neither is the lower deck of most office garages. That is not a small inconvenience — it is the difference between a job happening and a wasted round trip — which is why we ask for a photograph of where the car will be parked before anything is scheduled. Street level, the top deck, or a corner of the surface lot all work fine.
Office parking lots
Most property managers are relaxed about a van doing an hour’s work in a marked bay, and some absolutely are not. We check first, and if a building says no we will tell you rather than turning up and getting moved on with your door card off. Nothing gets done in a fire lane, across two bays, or anywhere it blocks a live traffic aisle.
Driveways, and the association question
A driveway is the easiest place in the world to do this work. Some associations have rules about commercial vehicles or about work being carried out on a property, and those rules are yours to know rather than ours — but it is worth a thirty second check before you book, because the letter arrives weeks later and it is never fun.
Sun
Shade is not a comfort. Reading a shallow dent means watching a straight reflection bend across a panel, and in overhead Florida sun there is no reflection to read, only glare. Hail work in particular needs a garage, a covered bay or the canopy off the side of the van, and if there is nowhere shaded at all we will move the job to early morning rather than guess at it.
You get a two hour window, not a time. A job in front of yours occasionally turns out to be two jobs, and the only ways to protect an exact time are to rush the car in front or to leave enormous gaps and charge everybody for them. If the van is going to miss the window you get a phone call before it does, not after.
Mornings tend to run west of the yard and afternoons east, which is why the answer to “can you come Thursday” sometimes depends on which side of town you are on.
The frame above is built at the size and shape the real picture will be, and its caption names the photograph that belongs in it. A real site carries the company's own — their vans, their techs, their panels. None have been generated for this demonstration. There is no before-and-after frame here and there is not going to be one: in this trade that pair is the result, so an invented one would be a fabricated repair rather than a placeholder.
If your suburb is not in a list above, call (656) 236-2374 and ask. The answer is a ring number and a figure, and it takes about ten seconds.