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The days before the first shovel are not your delay. They are the job.
The short answer
811 is the free national before-you-dig service, and it needs a few business days. Those days are not slow work — they are the part that keeps a bucket out of a gas line.
Your customer agreed on a Tuesday and expected machines by Thursday. It is now the following week, nothing has moved, and he has started wondering whether you are busy with somebody else’s job.
What is actually happening is that other companies are walking his property with paint and flags. 811 is described by the people who run it as “the free national before-you-dig service”: you contact it, and the utilities come out to have “the approximate location of buried utilities be marked with paint or flags”. The advice is to do it “a few business days before you begin any digging”.
A few business days in which your customer sees an empty yard and you have nothing to show him.
Why the wait is not the same as slowness
Because it is not your calendar. You cannot start it earlier than the day the job is confirmed, and you cannot make the utilities move faster. The only thing you control is whether the customer understands what those days are for before they start, or afterwards while he is annoyed.
There is a second half to it that almost nobody explains, and it matters even more. The marks are “approximate”. That word is not a hedge — it is the reason careful digging near a marked line is slow work by hand rather than fast work with a machine. A customer who has read that once will never ask why the last two feet took the whole afternoon.
The page nobody in your trade has
Competitors’ sites show equipment. Big machines against a blue sky, which tells a homeowner nothing he can use. What he wants is a calendar he can believe, and the honest version of that calendar starts with days you cannot compress.
| What the page says | What it settles |
|---|---|
| That locating happens before any digging, and it is free | The suspicion that the delay is a scheduling excuse. |
| Roughly how many business days it takes where you work | The single question behind the whole conversation. Your state sets it, so you can state it. |
| That the marks are approximate and what that means on site | Why the machine stops and the shovel comes out — the part that looks like inefficiency and is the opposite. |
| What you do during those days | Turns dead air into visible preparation: permits, access, where the spoil goes. |
| What happens if a line turns up unmarked | The worst day on any excavation job, and the one nobody wants to discuss in advance. Saying it first is what a professional does. |
The last line collects the thing only the homeowner knows: the irrigation line his brother-in-law put in, the old fuel tank, the cable to the shed. None of that is on any utility map, and asking for it in writing at the start is worth more than any amount of equipment on a photograph.
What this changes
It moves you out of a comparison you cannot win. Somebody will always claim they can start tomorrow, and on a driveway replacement that sounds like an advantage. Set against a page that explains what the first few days are for, it sounds like somebody who has not called anybody yet.