My perspective and for those of you who don't know I'm in the same area as Ron and I have worked side by side with Ron helping each other out on many occasions. So I know his market and him very well.
Areas circled in red in Ron's service area.
Area in the black rectangle is my service area.
We really don't compete with each other. Ron's area is oriented more to the south as he lives in Sooke. I live in Sidney and I have deliberately chosen to concentrate and focus within the black rectangle. I do not market outside of that area.
So here it goes Ron...
Your website is horrible for the following reasons.
Its ugly
The flash hides you from better ranking
The site is out of register with at least Firefox and Chrome
It doesn't navigate correctly
Its 180 degrees off target in its consumer message
There is no call to action
In short, its a total loss. No ifs, ands or buts.
Here is what has turned you inside out both in your own frustration and in the eyes of customers. Your are obsessed with justifying your price. Regardless of how much the customer might have paid in the end you leave the job you feel a lot better than I think most of your customers are really feeling. They recognize that you take great pride in your work but for the most part are being kind to you by not really expressing what I think too many are honestly feeling.
The unreasonable period of time you spend in a customers home obsessing with your vacuum getting the extra 20% of dry particulate out of a carpet (of which 75% of what is left will be picked up by the flush and suck of your TM anyway) takes all the additional profit you could make because you spend all the unnecessary time working on the carpet and inconveniencing your customer at the same time. At the least, if you insist on this you need to use a helper to reduce the time and maybe more effectively up sell.
Refrain from getting too personal with a customer, their home or their possessions. It may not seem like it to you but many are very spooked by this. Try and be brief but not abrupt, pleasant, concerned for their satisfaction, thank them and leave.
Back to your website. Nobody but another carpet cleaner wants to see all that geeky wanding and vacuuming crap. It would be like Burger King spending 50 seconds of a 60 second commercial talking about their grill instead of smiling customers, plates of mouth watering food and helpful staff. You should be selling fresh smelling home, safety of kids and pets, and pride of appearance. Another example. Your site is 90% about working with tools. It would be like a landscaper showing 90% of the website about digging and raking instead of showing a family enjoying a beautiful yard that was constructed in a quick clean efficient manner.
Now to the telephone. Telling people if they are looking for a low price you would be glad to refer them to a budget cleaner that might more fit their needs would be like a Mercedes salesman telling a person who when into their showroom that I'm not even going to try and convince you I think you should go to a Kia lot. Customers call you because they have dirty carpets and you should have the wits to tell them lots of things (BENEFITS NOT PROCEDURES) to convince them with including flexibility in scheduling, range of services and saving them money by making their carpets look almost new or new.
Funny how you think they are all about price and yet YOU are all about price. You should be all about NET.
If you charged 20 to 25% less AND spend 25% less time in a customer's home you would have three times as much business. If you turned your website around to be customer friendly and customer benefit oriented you would have 3 times as many phone calls from it. If you changed your response on the phone you would get double the bookings. I think you might even want to try a two month experiment with Full Circle answering your phone.
There is one very simple question you need to ask yourself and be brutally honest with. If you are such a good cleaner as you think you are in the eyes of your customers why is it that your referrals from existing customers are not dramatically growing? It's not the economy.
Let go Ron. You are too committed to doing a good job to not deserve being rewarded for your perseverance.
If you did what I suggest you would double your net profit in the next 18 months. All though this could be up for some debate, you seriously should consider re-branding your company. If it was me I most definitely would.