Good, Better, Best: Three Options on a Drainage Proposal

You quoted $11,200 for 120 feet of French drain, three catch basins, two cleanouts and a daylight outfall. The homeowner calls two days later and says it's more than they were expecting. You take $900 off to keep the job alive.

That $900 didn't come out of the trench. It came out of the only part of the number that was yours.

Knocking $900 off costs you more than $900

Run it. Say your direct cost on that job — labour, stone, pipe, fabric, basins, haul-off, machine time, and your share of overhead — comes to $7,840. At $11,200 you're holding $3,360 of gross margin, which is 30 percent.

Drop the price to $10,300 and the cost doesn't move. Margin goes to $2,460. That's 24 percent of the new price, and it's 27 percent less money than you had ten seconds ago.

Now work out what it takes to get that $900 back. At 30 percent margin, you need 900 / 0.30 = $3,000 of additional sold work just to be where you were before the phone rang. That's another half-day job, found, quoted, scheduled and built, to undo one sentence.

Substitute your own numbers. If you run closer to 22 percent, the same $900 needs about $4,090 of replacement work. The thinner your margin, the more violent a discount is.

There's a second cost that doesn't show up in arithmetic. The moment you take $900 off without changing anything about the job, you've told the homeowner your first number was decoration. Every number you give them after that gets treated the same way — including the change order you'll write when you hit rock.

If the objection is genuinely that another contractor came in lower, that's a scope conversation and it has its own script — finding out what the cheaper bid actually includes settles most of those. But a lot of "it's more than we expected" isn't a competitor at all. It's a homeowner looking at one number with no way to interact with it.

Three options change what the homeowner is deciding

A single price puts one question in front of the customer: yes or no. There's exactly one lever they can pull to feel like they had any say, and that lever is asking you to come down.

Three priced options change the question to which one. They still get to exercise judgement, they still get to feel like they shopped, and none of it comes out of your margin. The cheapest option is a real, buildable scope you'd put your name on — not the same job at a worse price.

It also does something quieter. A single price is unreadable. Nobody knows whether $11,200 is a lot for 120 feet of drain because they've never bought one. Three numbers with different scopes give the homeowner a way to see what the money buys. The middle option stops being a price and starts being a decision about roof water and cleanouts.

And it protects the top of your range. Plenty of homeowners on a wet lot would have paid for the whole-property fix, but nobody offered it to them. You can't sell the option you didn't write down.

What belongs in each tier on a drainage job

The tiers aren't arbitrary. On drainage work there's a natural ladder, and it runs along the diagnosis you did at the site visit.

The bottom tier fixes the complaint. The homeowner pointed at a soggy patch by the back fence. This option intercepts that water and gets it to a legal outfall. It's a complete, correct system for the problem they named. It is not a cheap version of anything.

The middle tier fixes the complaint and the causes you found. This is where the roof water goes underground instead of dumping at the corner of the house. This is where the cleanouts go in at both ends. This is where restoration steps up from seed and straw to sod, because the homeowner is going to judge the whole job on what the lawn looks like in three weeks.

The top tier fixes the lot. The front downspouts, the low corner that needs 900 square feet regraded, the second outfall so you're not running everything to one pipe. This is the one you'd build if the property were yours and the money weren't a factor.

Notice what changes between rows and what doesn't. The scope changes. The specification does not.

Cut scope, never spec

The fastest way to ruin this is to build the cheap option by using thinner pipe, skipping fabric, taking less fall or running a two-man crew where the job needs three. That isn't an option, it's a job that fails in year three with your name on it.

Some things stay identical across all three tiers, and it's worth being explicit about them on the page:

• Same pipe — solid where it carries, perforated only where it collects
• Same stone, same washed, same fabric wrap, same overlap
• Same minimum fall from inlet to outfall
• Same crew, same equipment, same excavation depth
• Same warranty terms and the same exclusions

When a homeowner asks what they give up by taking the bottom option, you want a clean answer: nothing about how it's built, only how much of the property it covers. That sentence is a lot easier to say when it's true.

Price the middle first, then build outward

Most contractors build the cheap one and add to it. Build the middle one first — it's the job you actually want to do, so price it honestly and let the other two be derived from it.

Cost the middle tier the way you cost any job. Whatever method you use, get to a real direct cost, then divide by one minus your target margin. Say the middle scope costs you $7,840 to build and you're holding 30 percent:

7,840 / 0.70 = $11,200

Now strip the middle down to the bottom tier. Take out the 40-foot lateral, two of the three basins, both cleanouts and the sod, and say that removes $2,240 of cost:

(7,840 - 2,240) / 0.70 = 5,600 / 0.70 = $8,000

Then add the top tier. The regrade, the dry well and the second outfall add $3,360 of cost:

(7,840 + 3,360) / 0.70 = 11,200 / 0.70 = $16,000

Every tier holds the same 30 percent. You're not buying the low option with your margin and you're not gouging the high one — the price moves because the work moves. If you get pushed on why the top one is double the bottom one, you can walk the homeowner through exactly which line items changed. That's a much better conversation than defending a number you arrived at by feel.

If you're not confident in the cost side of that division, the per-foot band is a decent sanity check on the middle tier before you derive the other two — where the per-foot shortcut holds and where it breaks covers when to trust it.

Make the middle option the one you actually recommend

Three options with no recommendation is just a menu, and menus make people stall. Your job is to say which one you'd build and why, in one sentence, on the page.

We'd recommend the second option. The rear downspouts are putting roughly a third of your roof into the same low corner we're draining, and tying them in now costs $3,200 — doing it as a separate job later costs more than that in mobilisation alone.

That works because it's a reason, not a nudge. Look at the spread: the bottom option is 71 percent of the middle and the top is about 143 percent of it. The step from $8,000 to $11,200 has to read as cheap relative to what it removes from your call-back list. If the gap is too wide, everyone takes the bottom one. If the bottom option is barely below the middle, the whole thing reads as a trick.

The ratios that work vary by market and by job size — on a $4,000 job a $3,200 step is absurd, and on a $40,000 job it's a rounding error. The principle holds either way: the middle option should be the one where the added scope is obviously worth the added money, and the bottom option should be the one you'd genuinely build.

Two rules keep you honest. First, you must be willing and able to build the top option if they pick it — if it's there purely to make the middle look reasonable, you've written a fake number into a legal document. Second, name the tiers by what they cover, not by Good, Better and Best. "Backyard plus roof water" tells a homeowner something. "Better" tells them you have a template.

Presenting three options without creating three decisions

The risk with options is decision paralysis. You solve that with structure, not with fewer options.

1. Put the diagnosis on page one, before any price. All three options solve the same diagnosed problem at different extents — the homeowner needs to understand the problem before the numbers mean anything.
2. Show all three prices on one screen, side by side. Three separate documents is three separate decisions.
3. Mark the recommended one and give the one-sentence reason.
4. Make each option individually signable. They pick one, they sign that one, and the record shows which scope they agreed to.
5. Keep scope exclusions identical across all three — rock, unmarked private lines, restoration limits. Those don't change with tier and shouldn't look like they do.

The mechanics of page one, the option layout and the scope language that keeps you out of arguments are covered in detail in the anatomy of a drainage proposal that gets signed the same week. Options are one part of that document, not a replacement for the rest of it.

ScapesHQ builds options into a proposal and records which one the homeowner signed, with the signature evidence on the record. What it doesn't do is price the tiers for you — there's no pricing-rule engine, and building tier B from tier A is your arithmetic, done once per job type. Most contractors do that math a handful of times and then reuse the shapes.

When one price is the right answer

Three options isn't a universal rule. It's wrong in a few specific situations, and forcing it there makes you look like you're upselling.

Skip it on a diagnostic or a service call. If someone's calling about a failed drain, they want to know what's wrong and what it costs to fix. Handing them a tiered menu on a $900 repair wastes everybody's morning.

Skip it when the scope is fixed by someone else — an engineer's spec, a GC's bid package, a municipal requirement. There's one scope, so there's one price.

Skip it when there genuinely isn't a smaller correct fix. If the water table is high and the only honest answer is a pump system, don't invent a cheap option that you know won't work. Quote the one thing that works and explain why the cheaper approach isn't on the page.

And skip it on small jobs where the admin costs more than the upside. Below some threshold in your business — you'll know roughly where it sits — building three scopes for a $1,500 job is time you could have spent on a $12,000 one.

Everywhere else, the three-option proposal does something a discount can never do. It gives the homeowner a lever that moves the work instead of your margin, and it puts your best version of the job on the table where they can see it.

FAQ

Should I show the homeowner all three prices at once, or start with the middle one?

All three at once, on one screen. Revealing prices one at a time reads as negotiation, and it turns one decision into three. Side by side, the homeowner compares scopes rather than reacting to a single number in isolation.

What if customers pick the cheapest option every time?

Usually one of two things is wrong. Either the gap between the bottom and middle tier is too big to feel worth it, or you didn't give a specific reason for the middle one that ties back to something you found on the site visit. If your bottom option is 71 percent of the middle and people still take it, try moving the split — pull one more item down into the base scope so the step up gets smaller.

Do I have to be willing to actually build the top option?

Yes. A proposal is a document someone can sign, and if the top tier is there only to make the middle look reasonable, you've written a price you can't honour. Build the top tier from real scope you'd be happy to schedule.

How do I handle a homeowner who wants to mix items between tiers?

That's a good sign, not a problem — it means they're engaging with scope instead of price. Reprice on the spot using the same margin divisor: add the cost of the items they want, divide by one minus your target margin, and reissue. Just don't let a mixed scope quietly land at a lower margin than the tiers it came from.

Does offering three options slow down the close?

It shouldn't, as long as you state a recommendation and each option is individually signable. What slows closes is ambiguity about what happens next, not the number of choices. If you're seeing proposals sit for a week, the follow-up sequence is usually the issue rather than the options.

The short version

A $900 discount on an $11,200 job with 30 percent margin takes 27 percent of your profit and needs $3,000 of new work to replace. Three priced options change the homeowner's question from yes-or-no to which-one, and none of it comes out of your margin. Price the middle tier first at your target margin, then derive the bottom by removing scope and the top by adding it — cut scope, never specification.

Book a walkthrough and we'll put your last three quotes side by side as options and see which one you'd have recommended.