When Should You Adjust Prices For Your Lawn Care Service
Your hourly rate and services may change over time and you may need to adjust prices in the following cases:
To learn more about pricing lawn mowing services, you can hear from experts here:
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How To Price Lawn Mowing Jobs
Quoting accurately on lawn mowing jobs can be a little tricky, especially if youre relatively new to the business. The price of your services must strike a balance between what customers perceive as a fair cost and the revenue you need to keep your business growing.
The pricing of lawn mowing services in Australia depends on many factors like the lawn size, difficulty of the work, the time spent, grass condition, equipment required, and the cost of labour. You will also need to consider your own expertise, your current business model and goals, and the going rate in your area of service. As a business owner, you need to identify and understand the costs of operating a lawn care business and factor them into every quote.
This article aims to serve as a guide to lawn mowing service pricing. Well discuss some proven strategies that can help Australian small business owners create competitive lawn care quotes, keeping their business profitable at the same time.
Read on to find out how to quote lawn mowing jobs accurately and keep your business profitable.
What Influences Lawn Mowing Cost
You probably know that prices vary from company to company. However, they generally stay within a relatively stable range. Aside from the obvious that we covered in the mowing calculator, factors that affect lawn mowing cost include the following:
- What’s included in the mowing service? Is it just mowing, or does the company offer all-inclusive packages, with weed-eating, edging, and disposing of the grass clippings? Do they also provide another service, for example, lawn ferilization?
- Has the lawn been mowed regularly? If it’s a new lawn that has never been mowed, or it has been neglected for some time, mowing will probably take longer and will require more labor than a regular lawns, and therefore may potentially cost more.
- Do you want to hire the company for regular mowing? Unfortunately, mowing does not last forever. You might want to consider setting up a regular mowing service with your provider. In most companies, the more frequent the mowing, the less it costs. For example, the same company can charge $50 for a one-time mowing service, but their price would drop to $45 for the same lawn if it was mowed by them twice a month, and to $40 if it was done on a weekly basis.
- How far from the company’s headquarters do you live? If it takes a while for them to drive to you, the lawn care company might want to charge more due to transportation costs such as gas.
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How To Bid Commercial Lawn Care
Commercial lawn care means earning good profit or big money. But it can also be a big headache if you do it wrong: The charge is too much, and you may lose the contracts. Under the bid, you could lose money. The goal is to achieve commercial lawn care and make a PROFIT, right?
In this guide, I will show you the right way how to bid commercial lawn care than you can handle.
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Calculate The Cost Of The Materials
As long as you offer only essential lawn care services, such as mowing, edging, trimming, and blowing, your main materials cost might be fuel.
Your bids need to include seeds and aeration, fertilizing, and shrub care if you provide these services to your commercial clients and you want to charge them.
As you go about your accounting, you may include your expenses for spark plugs, air filters, blades, equipment maintenance and repairs, and any other items you may need to purchase in your materials costs.
For example, say you estimate you will have $900 in expenses for $300 jobs in a year, and you would have to add $3 to each job to compensate for these expenses.
Depending on your formula, you may charge a higher percentage on large projects than on small projects.
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Avoid Lawn Care Price Increases During Selling Season
The worst time to raise prices is when all of your competitors post ads and try to steal your clients.
Try to raise prices only near the end of or after your mowing season. As a good general rule of thumb, many lawn care owners increase their prices during the end of summer or beginning of fall.
The only exception here is for no-profit or low-profit clients. In which case, feel free to raise your lawn care prices on these zero or minimal profit clients whenever.l
Nailing Your Pricing Strategy For High Margins With Less Mistakes
Youre just about ready to go out there and start growing a thriving new business!
However, this chapter is a critical key to making sure that you succeed. In fact, I can safely say that this is the most important chapter of this blueprint.
Whats that? Ive already said that a few times?
Youre right and thats because all of these chapters are the most important. I called this a blueprint for a reason. When a construction crew puts up a building, they base everything they do off of an engineers blueprint. Every single piece of that plan is required to make sure the building is solid.
Leave out an important support pylon on the ground floor and that 23rd floor will come crashing down.
Thats what these chapters are the support structures that go into making your lawn care company a solid structure thatll last for years to come.
The way that you price your services is absolutely critical to your success.
Price yourself too high and you wont be able to close enough new customer to sustain yourself. Price yourself too low and youll find that youre working your Mean Green off and not making any more than any old dead end job.
The bad news is that there really is no exact formula to figure this out. Even more bad news is that you will make some mistakes. The good news, though, is that this isnt a big deal. Youre going to get good at pricing your services by doing it.
Maybe youll go over or under but with a little experience, youll very quickly develop a feel for it.
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Include Additional Services And Materials
After youve estimated your service pricing based on the clients property size and conditions, add costs for any additional services and materials that fall outside your typical work.
For example, a client might ask you to use specific, eco-friendly materials that cost more. Or they could ask you to haul away leaves, dig or fill a hole, or clean up brush and debris.
If you discover add-on services or optional work that would enhance the joblike preventive weed controladd those to your lawn estimate. Including optional services is a great upselling technique that benefits both you and your customer.
Once youve identified the additional services and materials the job needs, you should:
READ MORE:4 ways itemized quotes can help you grow your service business
Making Adjustments To Limit Mistakes
As Ive mentioned before and will again youre going to make some mistakes, especially in the beginning. But there are ways to limit the number of mistakes you make and ways to learn from them so that you tighten down your bidding system.
Its one thing to screw up a bid or two, but its another to lose money on an ongoing and regular basis. The first and best way to figure out if this is happening is to do a day in review. When you get home after a long day of mowing, look back on that days activities and do some quick math.
For example lets suppose that its 6pm and you just finished up a long 10 hour day.
Based on the man hour figure we came up with, you shouldve earned $520 for that day
But what if you didnt?
Suppose you grossed only $480.
On the surface of it, you might say, oh well, close enough. But not acknowledging this factor and not figuring out where the leak is the #1 cause of the utter failure of many lawn care businesses.
As you review your day, you realize that you spent an hour and a half at Mr. Squinchmeyers house but in your bid, you quoted him $39, or about 45 minutes.
Whats more.. It turns out that you screwed the pooch here and way under bid this job. Sure, one job once per week isnt going to kill you, but think of it this way
If you waste $40 once per week every week that comes out to over $2,000 that youre simply pissing away!
Doesnt seem so small now, does it?
And what if you have 3 or 4 Mr. Squinchmeyers?
Will he stick with you?
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Lawn Care Price Calculator
Every landscaping company has its own way to calculate the cost they charge you. Some companies need more customers and are willing to charge a lower price. Others really dont need any new customers and will only take on an extra yard if they can make a lot of money on it. Also, some lawn mowers charge by the hour, but most will give you an estimate for the job which will be based on the size and difficulty level of the yard.
If you choose to mow your own yard instead of hiring a professional, you can estimate the time required to mow by using this calculator.
How Companies In Three Revenue Tiers Price Their Mowing Jobs
If youre like a lot of landscape businesses, pricing your mowing jobs may be a sore spot. There are quite a few factors that go into pricing and most of them are going up. In fact, 66 percent of landscape professionals answering a recent Turf survey say they are raising mowing/maintenance prices this year. Of those raising prices, the average increase is 5.8 percent.
From rising labor wages to higher equipment costs, all of the signs seem to be pointing toward raising mowing prices, but its not always easy to do. The problem with pricing jobs is that everyone is afraid, says Dan Gordon, certified public accountant and managing member of TurfBooks. Mostly, theyre afraid of losing business. So, even companies that are raising their prices often arent always doing it in a meaningful way. Theyre really squeezing their profits because theyre afraid of raising prices too high.
Of all of the factors that come into play with the decision to raise prices, Gordon says that labor is by far the most significant.
We reached out to three different landscape business owners in three tiers to determine how theyre pricing jobs. Interestingly, at all ends of the revenue spectrum, the contractors we spoke to did raise prices this year.
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Quick Videos On Lawn Care Pricing
Jonathan Pototschnik, Lawn Care Millionaire and co-founder of Service Autopilot, has recorded a quick lawn care pricing video to help lawn care business owners just like you.
In this short video, you’ll discover the basics of lawn care pricing:
- How to look at your lawn care services
- Why you cant copy your top competitors
- How to fix your lawn care pricing strategy
Now, without further ado, here’s how to create the best lawn care pricing strategy and maximize your profits…
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Posted: Sep 26, 2017 · Estimate manpower. If the job requires more than yourself and an assistant, then factor the cost of additional labor into the price of the bid, drawing on your average hourly rate. Make sure you are fair to both your employees as well as the individual or company with which you are contracting for the job. Estimate the cost of materials.
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The Farison Lawn Care Guarantee
Looking for a guarantee? Look no further.
All professional lawn treatment programs from Farison Lawn Care feature free service calls and estimates. In addition, we are committed to using only the highest quality lawn and plant care products while also featuring fertilizer and spray programs that are completely guaranteed.
Did weeds grow back after we applied a post-emergent weed control treatment? Well be happy to come back and reapply. Perhaps there are still bugs and pests infesting your trees. If so, please let us know, and we will spray again.
Farison Lawn Care has the highest regard for all of our customers in the Louisville, Kentucky area and we want you to be satisfied with all the services we provide.
How To Estimate Property Sizes
Figuring out how the size of the property is essential for an accurate estimate. While you may be tempted to guesstimate square footage, its best not to. A miscalculation could result in you getting underpaid and end up setting unrealistic client expectations down the line.
Ed Ramsden offers his advice for accurately measuring a property:
You can buy software to calculate square footage of the property. Most of the time, these options just use Google Maps satellite data to give you the information.
If youre using Jobber, you can actually get the property size right inside your client profile page to help you estimate more accurately.
When youre in a client profile page in the CRM and have put their address into their profile, simply click on the map icon, and Jobber will open the property in a new tab.
Make sure that the map view is in satellite mode, drop pins around the property to draw a box, and Google will automatically tell you the square footage of the property without even being there!
It can measure the distance around the perimeter too.
Knowing the size of the lawn also allows you to determine how much material, such as fertilizer or weed killer youll need to cover the area too, so its not just about mowing area.
As with equipment, most fertilizer manufacturers will provide you with use estimates that you can reference to figure out how much product youll need for the area youre servicing.
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Dont Forget Overhead And Equipment
Once youve calculated the cost of labor, you will factor in overhead and other costs.
Your lawn care companys overhead costs may include:
- Administrative staff.
After labor, your businesss second-largest expense is equipment. Just like labor, equipment costs money, so you have to make sure that youre always in a position to maintain or replace it if necessary.
As a result, equipment should always be factored into your overhead costs. You should markup anywhere from 11 50% to cover your total overhead costs.
From there, add a markup for profit. Your markup should be based on how much profit you are looking to make from every job and is determined by your other expenses.
Before arriving at a final price, double-check that youve included every element of the job in your calculation and have priced any special factors correctly.To give your customer an idea of your prices beforehand, you can create a lawn care price sheet.
Commercial Lawn Mowing Rates
Commercial lawn mowing rates tend to vary, but the average job cost is between $50 and $250. Generally, there are three lawn mowing pricing models you can choose from when setting your rates:
- Charging by the hour: This is the most common pricing model where you charge customers an hourly rate from start to finish.
- Charging by the square foot: Some lawn care companies charge customers based on how much land they mow.
Charging a flat rate: A flat rate is where you charge a set amount of money for each lawn mowing job. Due to its consistency, this pricing model is best used for recurring customers.
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Use Your Lawn Care Estimate To Make A Quote
An estimate is a rough but educated guess at the cost of completing a job. This gives you some wiggle room in case any unexpected details pop up during the work.
Estimates dont generally include taxes or additional feesthey just cover the basic costs of the requested services. You can give your client a lawn estimate right after a walkthrough or phone call.
Once youve sent an estimate to a client and theyve approved it, you need to put together a quote. Your quote should tell the client exactly how much theyll be paying for the job. Quotes include exact prices, taxes, fees, discounts, and any additional costs.
Heres what your quote should include:
- Your companys name, logo, and contact details
- Your clients name, address, phone number, and email
- A detailed list of the services and materials youll provide, with their associated costs
- Optional line items for added services or tasks that would enhance the work
- The total estimate for the job, including sales taxes and any special discounts, rates, or package deals
- Terms and conditions, including the deposit amount and invoice payment terms
- Space for the clients signature so you can start on the approved work
You can send a quote after your client has accepted and approved your estimate. Most of the time, the price given in a quote should be the same or very close to the invoice the client receives at the end of a job.
