How Do You Choose The Right Lawn Care Provider For You
You may never know by looking at someone that they are going to provide high-quality lawn care services, but you can certainly improve your chances in a few easy ways. The first thing you can do is ask for recommendations. Talk to family and friends and other people who hire someone to mow their lawns.
If they like the job they are getting from their lawnmower, then they will be happy to recommend them. Whats more, many lawn care professionals are only too happy to receive referrals from their loyal client base.
If you dont know anyone who hires someone to take care of their lawns, then look online. Check out online reviews for local lawn care companies and find out what people are saying about specific people, companies, and franchises.
Calculate Your Variable Costs
In another previous article, we looked at calculating the variable costs of running a lawn mowing business. It looked at the costs incurred when actually performing the work, such as fuel to get to site, mower fuel whilst on-site and the other small sundry costs we face when operating a business in the field.
A breakdown of an established lawn mowing businesss variable costs.
Therese figures tell us that every mile we have to drive will cost us £0.14 in fuel, every hour we run the mowers costs £2.14 and we need to factor in at least £1.00 to six jobs a day to cover refreshments.
What Do Other Lawn Mowing Businesses Charge
It really depends on the lawn mowing business in question every single one will vary to some extent. Some have a minimum rate, while others request a call out fee to assess the lawn and provide an accurate quote based on the work at hand. Others may simply provide an estimate that lies on experience and judgement, while others have a methodical system of factoring in all of the above factors and charges required.
If you want to compare with the market rates you can browse our state pages such as victoria, Queensland and NSW and drill down into your individual suburb to find the most recent average price charged in your area.
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How Do I Pay Someone To Mow My Lawn
Something that might put many people off hiring someone to take care of their lawns in the payment method. The unknown is a terrifying thing, but you can rest assured that lawn mowing pricing structures and payment methods are straightforward. You just have to ask to find out!
For one-off mows, the lawn mowing contractor will often require a bank transfer or payment once they arrive . For those who will be using a regular lawn mowing service, you are likely to receive a regular invoice with specific terms. Those terms can differ depending on the contractor mower.
When it comes to GST, some lawn mowing workers offer inclusive pricing, but others dont. If you are not sure, or if its not clear, dont be afraid to ask. Not all lawn mowing contractors in your area are GST registered as there is a minimum annual income you need to reach before you are legally required to do so.
Know The Value Of Your Time And Your Business
If youre doing it alone, business operations can be quite simple as its easier to manage just yourself. All you need to consider is how much you need to make per hour to run the business and make an acceptable profit.
However, this changes considerably when you have a few field service agents, and the process of creating quotes becomes a bit more tricky. This is because you have to consider paying yourself, your team, equipment and daily expenses, and administrative costs.
This is when you would be well advised to consider using specialist management software tailored specifically to lawn care businesses such as this one from Jobber. The software is designed, among other things, to helps streamline your quotation process by having all the information you need in one place.
It also helps reduce administrative headaches. Its the first and crucial step to creating better quotes since itll help you understand all aspects of completing a job.
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Good Lawn Care Quotes
When youre standing over the mower, smelling the fresh-cut grass and getting a tan in your jumpsuit, you know why you love this life. If lawn care is life, then good lawn care must be good life or something like that.
61. Just as you need to take care of your skin, you need to take care of your lawn.
62. You dont need a degree in horticulture to understand the benefits of a good trim. And your house deserves to have a great-looking lawn every day of the year.
63. If you take good care of a lawn, it will take good care of you.
64. Take care of your lawn. Everything will turn out great.
65. The grass is alive! Its time to make friends with it.
66. Its fine if I have to spend my free time with a rake. After all, when I count my children, I count my lawn.
67. The three lawn magic words are watering, feeding, and weeding.
68. To make sure your lawn stays lush, healthy and green, equip yourself with the very best lawn care equipment.
69. This is your lawn. Do what you want with it. But remember that heaven is for those who take good care of their lawn.
70. Lawn care is like marriage. It can be hard and tedious, but your reward will always be something beautiful to look at.
71. Nothing feels more American than a perfect summer day spent mowing the lawn.
72. Please remember to mow your lawn. Its a sign of respect for your neighbours!
73. For many people, mowing the lawn is hell on Earth, but we believe its a relaxing and refreshing way to spend an afternoon.
/2 Acre Lot Lawn Mowing Pricing
$50 Lawn Example
Amount of Grass: 11,500 Sq. Ft
Lot Size: 22,600 Sq. Ft
Notable characteristics:
This lawn has nearly twice the amount of grass than the 1/4 example above, but it is only $5 more per mowing service. Why?
- Few obstacles This lawn has a couple trees and beds in the lawn, but for the most part, it is wide open mowing.
- Slight slope in the back Its hard to tell, but this lawn has a slight slope in the back, not enough to affect the price though.
Pictures of this lawn:
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Know The Parts Of A Lawn Care Quote
When it comes to the meat of it, you need to know the things to include in the lawn care quote. The first is a minimum price for any lawn. Since some clients might only require partial lawn care, you need to have the bare minimum you can charge for any service for it to be worth your time.
Here are the main things to consider:
Weekly Grass Cutting From March To November
During the mowing season, we provide weekly grass cuttings throughout the months of late March/early April to late October/early November. Once we begin to enter the winter season, our weekly visits will stop until we begin to see spring growth.
You can expect to see us 33 times a year on average, depending on the weather in the northern Virginia region.
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Do A Walkthrough Of The Property
Providing an estimate over the phone can be difficult. Without being able to see the condition of the property or accurately determine the size, you risk providing an estimate thats either too low or too high.
Use this as an opportunity to assess the lawns condition and whether youll need to do any extra work, like service an area a customer forgot to mention or do a mini clean-up before you start a job.
Recognized For Excellence In Lawn Care
Over our time in business, we have had the honor to receive a number of awards for our exceptional lawn service. Angies List, Home Advisor, and Expertise have all chosen to highlight our quality work and service. Additionally, we also maintain an A+ rating with the Better Business Bureau. Although we did not enter this industry with the goal of winning any awards, we have to admit it feels good to be recognized for our hard work.
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Our Lawn Mowing Schedule
Freshly mowed grass can work wonders for the overall aesthetic of your property while also preventing diseases and insect infestations. Our crew performs lawn mowing throughout the year and follows the schedule outlined below.
- Weekly visits from April to October: In order to handle the abundant growth that your lawn will experience here in Texas, we will swing by your property once each week to mow your grass during these warmer months.
- Bi-weekly visits in November and March: Your grass will begin growing at a much slower rate in November, so we will reduce the frequency of our mowing service from weekly to bi-weekly. We also offer bi-weekly mowing in March as your lawn starts to reawaken from its winter slumber.
- One visit per month from December to February: The growth of your grass will slow considerably during the winter, so we will mow your lawn once each monthduring this colder season.
Why Higher Prices Will Get You More Clients
If you follow our blog, you will hear this again and again: Premium is the best strategy for most lawn care business owners.
Seek to be the highest-quality service in your area. After all, premium services will bring in premium clients, which means premium profits.
Dont be the cheapest guy on the block. Be the most valuable.
Years ago, a tech company decided to enter the laptop market.
Their competitors clashed over more memory, more power, lower prices.
Inch by inch, they fought a battle nobody could win.
So, this tech company went the opposite direction and didnt focus on low prices or low production costs.
They went all out and made sleek, user-friendly laptops. Their laptops looked like they came from the future, and it was exactly what people wanted.
Today, you know this company as Apple, and their premium pricing strategy was a huge success. Most recently, Apple reported an impressive 42.5% in gross margin.
You too can be the Apple of lawn care or landscaping in your area. You can live out The Pareto Principle in your market to increase your profits.
Bottom Line: Make yourself unique. Differentiate yourself from the competition. People should see the quality in everything you do your performance, your customer service, and your lawn care prices.
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Get Your Free Lawn Care Estimate Template
Estimating the material, setting the price, and submitting the estimates are the key to success. Thats why Invoice Quickly provides you free multifunctional lawn care estimate template so that you could create and send estimates that are high-quality and precise.Our attractive and time-saving lawncare estimate templates are available in various popular formats like , , PDF, Word, and Excel. You can download it for free.
Get Paid Faster
Lawn Mowing Service At Competitive Rates
Our commitment to our valued clientele doesnt stop with excellent customer service and fast turnaround times. We spare no effort to keep our rates accessible and competitive. To start, all our technicians are trained and qualified to perform comprehensive landscaping services, so we never have to outsource to third-party workers. We also own and operate commercial-grade equipment, which saves us costs on rental fees. What do we do with all our in-house cost savings? We pass them on to you, of course. But dont just take our word for it. Get your no-obligation quote from us today and see for yourself how affordable routine lawn mowing can be.
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Calculate Your Hourly Labor Rate
How much are you going to charge per person, per hour for the average job? This number should be based on things like the going rate in your area, how much money you want to earn per hour, and how much youre paying your employees.
If youre just starting off, look at the work and estimate the time it will take you to complete the job. Then consider how much you want to make per hour.
Pricing by the hour makes sense because lot size isnt always an accurate pricing metric. For example, garden homes might take you half an hour to complete, even if they are the same size as a quarter-acre lot, which could take you 45 minutes to complete.
Jason Creel explains that your hourly rate is important, but you shouldnt communicate it to your clients.
He explains:
Lets just say that your hourly rate is $60 per hour. Now, youre not going to speak to the customer and say, hey, I charge $60 an hour, so Im going to time myself when I cut your grass, and then multiply that by 60. Youll quickly learn how to estimate and then multiply that in your mind.
Pro tip: if youre just starting out and not sure about how long a lawn will take, keep track of the time it takes you to complete the job using time tracking software or a stopwatch. From there, find the average of your labor hours over time before figuring out exactly what speed you work at.
Prefer watching a video? Jason Creel talks about pricing out lawn care services below:
Funny Lawn Mowing Quotes
Its no secret. If you want a lush green lawn, you need to sweat for it. You need to make the walls of Jericho fall. You need to pull the planets together. Its not easy or funny. You need to mow and keep mowing until the word mow no longer exists. And you have to smile through it all.
76. The man who called lawn mowing a chore had a poor vocabulary. What happened to it being an opportunity for you to be outdoors and enjoy our great weather?
77. Cheers to waking up to mango smoothies on the beach, while others wake up to the clunk of a lawnmower.
78. If you arent comfortable with a new government policy or with the taste of the sandwich you bought, you should mow your lawn.
79. Mowing the lawn is hard enough to be compared with travelling to Mars without technology.
80. Mowing the lawn is the worst. Its hot, repetitive, and completely uneventful. In fact, its so boring that no one has ever stolen a mower.
81. Why do I feel like those who mow lawns are the number one consumers of painkillers?
82. Some people think that Im crazy for mowing the lawn regularly, but it actually does wonders for my health.
83. We all get to the age where paying a lawnmower to work is like paying for entertainment, and I think I just passed it.
84. Isnt being young a gift? Isnt it given to those who are expected to mow the lawn every Saturday morning?
85. Ask three teens what they did last Saturday. Leave that city if none of them mowed the lawn.
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The Standard Bidding Unit The Man Hour
In order to take the big mystery out of bidding for jobs, were going to help you to create a standard unit of measure.
Something that you use as a guide whenever you price a new clients weekly lawn mowing visits or a shrub pruning job for example.
The biggest key behind this unit is having a fairly good understanding of how much time something is going to take.
Thats the tricky part at least in the beginning. But thats what your first 10 customers are really for they allow you to get a good feel for the work and how to gauge the amount of time a lawn or other project will take. A little later on, Ill go into some ideas thatll help you better guestimate your time and how to really hone your instincts so you can be right on the money.
Now I know that Ive mentioned before that thinking of yourself as an hourly employee is no longer acceptable. Youre in business now, and its not how much money you make per hour, its how much your business makes per hour. Its a subtle difference but its an important one. The difference between an hourly wage and a man hour can mean tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to you.
The reason that you use the man hour as your basis or as your standard unit of measure is that this will always be your basis.
So how do you figure this out?
Well, lets start with your $5,000 per month salary or $60,000 per year. At a regular 40 hour per week job, you can figure out your yearly salary by multiplying your hourly wage by 2,000.
Yard Cleanup In Spring And Fall
Ever spring youll have downed branches and debris in your lawn and garden beds to pick up and remove.
In the fall youll want to prune back perennials and rake out garden beds to make them neat and tidy.
Homeowners generally pay between $100 and $250 for yard cleanup in the spring and fall, and its a great investment in making your home neat and tidy so you can focus on enjoying your lawn all year.
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How Does The Type Of Lawn Mowing Required Affect Cost
Not every lawn mowing job requires the same style of work some are lengthy clean up projects, others are more regular maintenance. As a result, this affects the cost. Here are some of the common ways in which your prices may vary.
- High priority lawn mowing. If, due to urgency, a lawn needs mowing higher up the priority list, an additional fee may be required as compensation over other scheduled jobs.
- Off-peak lawn mowing. If theres an emergency or simply high demand across weekends or public holidays, its often a good idea to charge a surcharge for lawn mowing services during unsociable timeframes.
- One-off lawn mowing jobs. Obviously, most lawn mowing professionals would prefer a regular mowing contract over one-off jobs. Its not uncommon, therefore, to charge more for a one-off lawn mowing job as a result.
- Tidy up mowing jobs. These jobs are typically arduous with little previous maintenance, a lot of work essentially needs to be done from scratch, which requires plenty of time and effort. Numerous other services including pruning and weeding may also be required. Its important to factor all of this in appropriately.
