How to choose the suburbs worth owning

Start with invoices, not a map

Every version of this exercise that starts with a map goes wrong. You end up circling suburbs you’d like to work in, which is a wish list, not a patch.

Open your accounting software instead and export the last 12 months of invoices. You want 3 columns: the suburb, the invoice total, and the date. Nothing else. If you’re still on a receipt book, an hour with the carbon copies does the same job and you’ll learn more doing it that way.

Twelve months matters. Six months of a Queensland winter tells you about heaters, not about your business.

Collapse it to a suburb list

Sort by suburb and total up 3 things for each one: how many jobs, what they billed all up, and the average invoice. Expect a long tail of suburbs with exactly 1 job in them.

That tail is the first useful thing you learn. Those are one-off drives, usually a favour for someone’s brother-in-law, and they’ve been silently shaping how you describe your service area ever since.

Score each suburb out of 12

Four columns, 0 to 3 each. Score fast and don’t agonise — the ranking is what matters, not the decimal place.

• Money. Average invoice there against your average everywhere. Well below is 0. Well above is 3.
• Repeat. Do those customers come back or send someone? Never seen again is 0. Regulars and referrals are 3.
• Drive. Door to door at 8am on a Tuesday, not on an empty road at 10 at night. Over 30 minutes is 0. Under 10 is 3.
• Story. Can you describe a specific job there — the street, what went wrong, what the houses are like? A blank is 0. A job you could tell someone about at the pub is 3.

Here’s what a scored sheet looks like. Invented numbers for an invented sparkie.

Suburb	Jobs	Avg invoice	Money	Repeat	Drive	Story	Total
Where he lives	31	$380	2	3	3	3	11
The one next door	19	$520	3	2	3	3	11
Acreage block, 18 min	6	$940	3	2	2	3	10
Big suburb, 25 min	24	$290	1	1	1	2	5
Industrial one-off	2	$2,100	3	0	1	1	5

Look at rows 3 and 4. The big suburb produced 24 jobs and the acreage block produced 6, and the acreage block wins by 5 points. Volume was hiding a lot of cheap work a long way away. That’s the reason job count on its own is a bad way to pick.

Row 5 is the other trap. One $2,100 invoice feels like the best job of the year, and it might have been. It is still not a suburb, because it happened once and there is no reason to think it happens again.

Story is a gate, not a column

Treat a 0 in the Story column as fatal regardless of the other 3 scores. A suburb where you can’t describe a single real job doesn’t get a page — not because of a rule we made up, but because there’s nothing to put on it.

A page about a suburb you’ve never had the ute in is the suburb name pasted over generic copy, and a customer can tell. Every page we ship has to carry at least 3 facts that appear on no other page on the site, and that’s arithmetic you can’t cheat: nobody has 75 distinct things to say about 25 suburbs. How that gets written down is a job of its own and it’s set out on the location pages service.

Then count who else is already there

Score first, adjust second. For your top 12 or so, run one search per suburb — your trade plus that suburb name — and count the operators who look genuinely real: a proper listing, a stack of reviews with dates on them, a website that isn’t from 2014.

• Up to about 4 real operators: leave the score alone.
• Around 5 to 10: take a point off.
• More than that, all well reviewed: take 2 off, and expect it to be a long job.

This is judgement, not maths, and it’s the part of the exercise where a second opinion is worth having. It’s also the count that decides whether a patch is winnable with a tight build or genuinely needs the bigger one — density inside your radius, not the population of the city you happen to be near.

Draw the line

Sort by adjusted score and rule a line. Not 4, because 4 suburbs is a patch with no depth and one quiet month wipes it out. Not 20, because by the time you get to the 20th you’re back to writing about places you’ve been once, and the whole thing collapses into the wide thin coverage you were trying to avoid.

The line sits where you stop genuinely knowing the place — that’s the whole test. If your sheet says 14 and you can tell a real story about all 14, take 14. If it says 5, take 5 and do them properly.

Everything under the line still gets served. It goes on one service-area page with a real sentence each, not a thin page each. You are not turning that work away. You’re just not pretending to specialise in it.

Two cases that break the rule

The suburb you want to grow into. No invoices, no story, high hopes. Honest answer: it doesn’t earn a page yet. Put it on the service-area page, chase work there deliberately for a quarter, and re-score it. Where we make a call like that on a client’s behalf, we write a 90-day checkpoint into the recommendation so it gets revisited rather than quietly assumed to have worked.

The suburb your best customer is in. One builder who feeds you 3 jobs a month can carry a suburb on his own. That’s fine while it lasts. Just write down that the score depends on 1 phone number, because that’s a risk, not a market.

Re-run it once a year

Your patch drifts. An estate finishes, a competitor retires, you take on an apprentice and the drive-time column means something different. Once a year, same export, same 4 columns, half an hour. The rankings move less than you’d think and the ones that move are the interesting ones.

One last thing worth doing before you commit: put the drive numbers for your shortlist through the arithmetic and see what the wide version of your patch actually costs you per week. The suburbs that look marginal on the scoring sheet usually look a lot worse once the hours are on the table.