Pool service is priced per pool and costed per hour, and that mismatch is why a full route can stay busy without making money. The monthly rate a customer sees covers a visit; what the business actually spends is labour on the route — including every minute spent driving between stops, which no customer is billed for directly and most pricing leaves out entirely.
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Forty accounts, four visits a month, 35 minutes of service and 12 minutes of driving per visit is 125.33 route hours a month. At $28 an hour that is $3,509.33 of labour; $18 of chemicals per visit adds $2,880.00 and $12 of overhead per account adds $480.00, for a route cost of $6,869.33 — about $171.73 per account. At a 35% target margin the route needs $10,568.21 a month, or $264.21 per account. Two figures are worth sitting with: the drive alone is 32 of those 125 hours, and marking the same cost up by 35% instead would have priced each account at $231.84 and quietly delivered 26% margin.
Work out the route's monthly cost first, then divide. Add up service minutes and drive minutes per visit across every account and every visit in the month to get route hours, cost those hours at your loaded labour rate, add chemicals per visit and overhead per account, and that is what the route costs to run. Divide by your accounts for cost per account, then divide by one minus your target margin to get the monthly price each account has to carry. Pricing per pool without costing the drive is what makes a full route unprofitable.
Yes — it is paid time on the clock and often a third of the route. At 35 minutes of service and 12 minutes of driving per stop, roughly a quarter of every visit is spent getting there, so a price built only from service time under-recovers labour by that much on every account, every visit, all year. Drive time is also the figure that improves when a route tightens geographically, which is why it belongs in the model as its own input rather than buried in an hourly rate.
Usually because the price was set per pool against what competitors charge, while the cost is incurred per hour on the route. Adding an account that is fifteen minutes off the line adds far more cost than one on it, but both get quoted the same monthly rate, so a route can grow, fill the week, and earn less per hour than it did when it was smaller. Costing the whole route and dividing back out shows which accounts are carrying their drive and which are not.
Treat margin as a share of price, not a markup on cost: divide the cost per account by one minus the margin. At 35 percent, a cost of $171.73 needs a price of $264.21, not $231.84 — marking cost up by 35 percent yields about 26 percent margin, which is the most common arithmetic error in route pricing. Set the margin to cover what the cost lines do not: equipment replacement, callbacks, unpaid admin time, and the accounts that cancel.