Trades are the trade we quote most often, and the pattern is consistent: the work comes from referrals and from being seen locally, in that order, and almost nothing else moves the number. That makes the shopping list short and the priorities obvious.
Here is what a GTA contractor should buy, in order, with what each piece costs and why it is on the list.
First: the van
If you own one vehicle and one marketing budget, the vehicle wins. It is parked outside a job on a residential street for six hours at a time, which is six hours of advertising to exactly the people who might need you next.
Cut vinyl lettering — your name, trade and phone number applied directly to the doors and tailgate — runs from about $180 per side. It lasts years, it survives a car wash, and it looks like a business rather than a decal. For most trades this is all you need.
A partial wrap — printed and laminated panels across the rear quarters or the hood — starts higher and makes sense when the vehicle is the main advertising rather than a bonus. Full wraps are for fleets and for brands where the vehicle is the storefront.
Magnetic panels at 30mil, roughly $95 to $140 a pair, are the answer for a leased vehicle or one you would rather not drive to a barbecue with your number on it.
The one detail that decides whether lettering works: phone number height. On a van door read from across a street you want the number around 3 inches tall, and nothing else competing with it. A door covered in six service bullet points communicates less than a door with a trade and a number. There is a longer comparison in lettering versus a full wrap.
Second: lawn signs
A 4mm coroplast lawn sign, 18 × 24 inches, on a wire H-stake, costs around $210 for ten with the stakes included. Left on a lawn for the week after a job, it is the cheapest lead source a trade has, and it works because it is proof rather than a claim — the neighbours can see the roof, the driveway, the fence.
Order more than you think. They walk off, they get run over, they end up in the back of the truck under a tarp. Twenty is a reasonable first order and the per-sign price at twenty is meaningfully better than at ten.
Print one side unless the sign sits where traffic passes both ways.
Ask before you stake: some Mississauga and Brampton neighbourhoods restrict signage on boulevards, and a homeowner's permission covers their lawn, not the strip by the road.
Third: business cards, and enough of them
Trades hand out cards in a specific situation — standing in someone's driveway at the end of a quote — and the card ends up on a fridge for months. That argues for 16pt matte over anything gloss, because a matte card takes a pen. Writing a number or a date on the back of a card at the door is normal, and a gloss card smears.
500 cards on 16pt matte is the right first order. The jump from 250 to 500 costs very little, because most of the money in a short run is setup rather than paper — the full price guide has the numbers.
Fourth: crew apparel
Two reasons a homeowner cares what your crew is wearing: they can tell who is meant to be in the house, and it signals that this is a business rather than three people and a truck.
- Hi-vis for anything roadside or on a site. Class 2 vests and long-sleeve shirts, embroidered on the left chest and screen printed or heat-pressed on the back.
- Polos or work shirts for anything customer-facing — HVAC, plumbing, electrical, anything where someone comes inside.
- Hoodies and jackets for the crew, because they will actually wear those.
Process depends entirely on quantity. Under 24 pieces, DTF heat transfer with no minimum. At 24 and above, screen printing gets cheaper per piece. Anything going through repeated industrial washing should be embroidered, which does not crack or fade.
Embroidery has a one-time digitising charge of around $45 per logo. After that, every reorder is stitched from the same file at the same size with no setup, so kitting out a new hire in a year's time is just the garment and the stitching. Embroidered polos start around $28 a piece including the garment.
Fifth: the paperwork
NCR forms — 2-part or 3-part carbonless, sequentially numbered — are still the fastest way to leave a written quote or a work order at the door. They cost little, they look organised, and a numbered copy in the truck settles arguments.
Presentation folders matter for trades that quote large jobs. A folder with the quote, the insurance certificate and a page of past work in it beats a loose stack of paper by a margin that shows up in close rate.
Door hangers on 14pt with a hang hole are the way to farm a street after a job on it. Print 500, hang them on the block you just worked, and reference the address: "we replaced the roof at number 42 last week" outperforms a generic flyer by a wide margin.
Sixth: the website
You need one, and it needs to be five pages, and it needs to load on a phone on a weak signal because that is where homeowners will open it — standing in the driveway you just left.
What it has to do is narrow: say what you do, say where you work, show ten photographs of finished jobs, carry a phone number that is tappable on every page, and be findable. That last part is the Google Business Profile more than the site itself, but the site is what the profile points at.
Five pages starts at $399 — the website package. What a site should cost more generally is in this guide.
What to skip, for now
- A logo redesign, unless what you have is unusable. If your logo only exists as a JPG, that is a redraw into a proper vector file from $45, not a rebrand. See design and branding.
- Brochures. Nobody in a driveway takes a brochure. A card and a lawn sign do the same job for less.
- Branded merchandise. Pens and lanyards are the last thing to buy, not the first.
- A full wrap before you have a second vehicle.
A first order that covers the ground
- Door lettering on one vehicle
- Twenty coroplast lawn signs with stakes
- 500 business cards, 16pt matte
- Ten embroidered polos and six hi-vis shirts
- 500 door hangers
- A five-page website
Bought separately from five suppliers that is five artwork setups, five delivery dates and five invoices. Bought here it is one set of files, one proof cycle and one bill — which is most of the reason the second order in any category costs less than the first.
Everything above is produced at our shop on Skymark Ave in Mississauga and delivered across the GTA. Call 905-598-3960, or look at printing and signage and custom apparel for the specs.