Why fall is the season you’re underpricing

Removal season feels busier than install season and earns less, and at most shops the reason is one quiet assumption on the price list: that a removal is an install run backward, so it gets the same number. It isn’t, and it shouldn’t.

The minutes aren’t mirrors. The same six-section dock that floated in on a warm May morning comes out in October against cold water, short days, and a bank it has to be carried up. If both directions carry one price, spring is quietly subsidizing fall — and fall is the season with the hard deadline, the higher risk, and the crew earning every dollar of it. The good news: this is the most fixable pricing problem in the trade, because the evidence for the right number is already sitting in your own season.

The same lift is not the same job in October

Walk through where the extra minutes come from. Cold water slows every movement — thicker gloves, more care, no one lingering waist-deep to wrestle a bracket. Daylight shrinks all month, so the day holds fewer stops even when the crew moves at the same pace. Wind days cluster in fall, which doesn’t change the minutes at a stop but changes what a week of them costs you.

Then there’s the half of the job that has no spring equivalent: the carry. In May the sections go from the trailer to the water, downhill. In October they go from the water to wherever they winter — sometimes sixty feet up a bank behind a shed — then get stacked, blocked, and covered. A canopy comes off, gets folded wet, and has to go on the rack the right way or it’s a problem in April. None of that is on the install ticket.

Measure it instead of arguing about it

You don’t have to take any of this on feel. If the crew runs the clock at each stop, you have on-site minutes for every piece, in both seasons. Pull the spring’s minutes and the fall’s minutes for the same items and put them side by side — every report takes a date range, so the comparison is two queries, not a project.

Run the arithmetic on one dock

Put numbers on it — yours, not these. Say your timers show a six-section dock takes a three-person crew 90 minutes to set in May and 130 minutes to pull, carry and stack in October. That’s 45% more crew time for the same money if both directions carry one price — which means every fall dock quietly runs at a margin you’d never accept if it were written down. Multiply by a hundred properties and the “busier but earning less” feeling stops being a feeling.

The wind compounds it. A killed afternoon doesn’t change the minutes at a stop, but it spreads the week’s fixed costs — wages, fuel, the payment on the barge — across fewer finished stops. Fall carries more of those days than spring, so a fall stop bears more overhead even before the cold water slows anyone down. That belongs in the price too.

Price the seasons separately

Removal is its own service on your price list, which means it carries its own number — per item, per section, or hourly, whichever fits how you charge. Setting it doesn’t touch what install costs, and it doesn’t touch anything already finished: a job keeps the price it completed at, forever, so repricing fall never rewrites spring’s bills.

If you bill hourly, the season prices itself — cold-water minutes cost more because there are more of them, counted from the crew’s own timers and rounded up to the next quarter hour, which is the increment this trade actually bills in. If you bill per piece, the fall number needs to carry the carry, the stack, and the shorter day. Either way, the number should come from your own measured minutes, not from what the shop across the lake charges — that’s the whole argument of how much to charge for dock installation and removal.

What to tell customers

One honest sentence: removal is heavier work in harder conditions, and it’s priced as its own service. Customers who’ve watched a fall crew carry sections up their bank in a north wind rarely need it explained twice. Announce it before the season, not on the bill — a price is a term of trade, and terms travel best in advance.

How the clock works on the water · How your price list works