Setting a service area for a mobile business

A mobile business should set its service area by drive time from where its vans start each day, not by postcodes or a round number of kilometres. Take bookings freely inside a short drive, charge a travel fee or require a minimum booking in an outer ring, and decline beyond it. Then check that the area holds enough of your customers to fill the week, and plan each day's jobs in an order that keeps the van moving the least.

This article is for owners of businesses that go to the customer: mobile dog groomers, car valeting and mobile mechanics, cleaners, physiotherapists and hairdressers who visit homes, laundry pickup services and food trucks. It covers why drive time is the right unit, how to draw the rings, what to check inside them, a worked example in Melbourne, the mistakes that eat into a working day, and an AI employee that helps run it.

Why minutes, not kilometres

A mobile business sells hours. Every minute behind the wheel is a minute not grooming, cleaning or cooking. A 10 km trip across a city with a bridge and a motorway can take less time than 5 km through narrow streets, so a radius in kilometres sets the wrong boundary in both directions. A drive-time area follows the roads and turns the question into the one that matters: how long before I can start work?

The Travel area block draws that area from each starting point, within a travel time by car or a distance by road. For now it reaches up to 15 minutes or 10 km by road, which suits the inner ring of most mobile businesses; a larger outer ring can be added as named suburbs or a drawn shape. If the routing service cannot draw an area, the block uses a circle at a typical speed and says so.

Drawing the rings

1. Start from where the van really starts: the owner's home, a shared unit or the depot, not the business's registered address.
2. Draw a 10-minute drive area. This is your core: book anything here without a fee.
3. Draw a 15-minute area. The band between the two is the outer ring: book it with a travel fee, a minimum spend, or only on the days the van is already nearby.
4. Mark anything beyond as on request. Some jobs out there are worth it; most are not.

Checking there is enough work inside

• People living there. Demographics gives the residents inside each ring and their age groups, in the countries its population grid covers (Australia, Canada, France and India among them; not the United States or the United Kingdom).
• The places that point to your customers. Nearby places inside the ring: vets and pet shops for a groomer, offices and car parks for a valeting service, apartment buildings and gyms for a cleaner, office parks and markets for a food truck.
• Your past bookings. Uploaded to My data with their positions, they show how much of today's work falls in each ring, and how much sits outside both.

A worked example: a mobile groomer in Melbourne

This example is made up. A dog groomer in Melbourne runs one van from home in an inner suburb and wants a second van. She draws 10 and 15-minute drive areas from home and from a possible second base across the city, counts residents in each ring, counts vets and pet shops inside them, and plots last year's bookings.

Most of her bookings already sit inside her own 10-minute area, and a good number sit in the outer ring to the east, where she has been driving for free. The second base's 10-minute area overlaps hers very little and holds a similar number of residents and more vets and pet shops. She opens the second van there, starts charging a travel fee in her own outer ring, and passes the eastern bookings to the new van, whose core they fall in.

Mistakes that eat the working day

• Free travel everywhere. Without an outer-ring fee, the far jobs cost as much in driving as they earn.
• Booking in arrival order. Three jobs in the same street on three different days waste hours. Group bookings by area and day.
• Two vans, one area. Vans that both serve the whole city cross each other all day. Give each a territory.
• Assuming residents where there are none. In the United States, do not invent a resident count; use places and your own bookings.
• Never revisiting the rings. As the client list grows, a suburb in the outer ring may deserve to move into the core.

An AI employee to plan the week

Once the area is set, the same tools help run it day to day:

1. New rows or Schedule: tomorrow's bookings from a sheet or a table, each with an address.
2. Split by territory: with two or more vans, share the jobs out by area so each van gets a compact patch.
3. Route planner: one route per van from its start point, each job with its order, the minutes from the job before and a directions link.
4. Email to each driver the evening before.

What lands each evening is a short list per van, in visiting order, with the drive between jobs and the day's total. Templates to start from: Where to run a mobile grooming van, Where to park my food truck this week and Where to launch laundry pickup.