How your Lawn Care Business Should Estimate Mowing Jobs
When you are starting your lawn care business, how do you find how much you should charge to mow a lawn? This is a question that was recently inspired to us on the Gopher Lawn Care Business Forum. Here are a few ideas.
First off, if you have never done so, log to the lawn care business forum and post your question along with your range. There is a good chance another lawn care business owner in the area can give you the going rate. You additionally want to ask yourself, do you have any friends in the business? If so, ask them what they charge per lawn.
Another response that was posted was to make contact with a few local lawn care businesses in your area and get an estimate from them to service your lawn. If you have to a lawn then ask a friend to obtain a few estimates to yard works landscaping service their lawn. When you three estimates, you may have a good idea simply how much to charge. You knows the price, plus you come across the square footage size of your lawn and place divide that out to figure how much to charge per square ft. This could give you a ballpark idea. Keep in mind, the expenses you end up being run your lawn care business can drastically alter from another lawn care business owner’s expenses, so know your expenses.
The next question you may well be wondering is should you charge by the square foot or man hour?
Kurt Chance said “The first thing you always want to do, when giving an estimate, has been walk the property certainly not be in a rush to get in and out. I did this once and when Acquired there I was looking for a surprise. I didn’t know there were four ditches in the front lot that would need with regard to manually trimmed and gone around while mowing. Luckily for me it still took the estimated time that I figured and my price still worked out to what I wished.”
If you are an additional lawn care business owner, you may want to charge based on man hour. Author Joel LaRusic of mowboy.com suggests “you want to quote quality, not time. In simple terms it’s better to say “I’ll perform these regarding services, to your satisfaction, for $50” than capable “I’ll spend an hour at your house for $50.” Of course, you should use your hourly rate to base your price on but you don’t wish to pass those pricing details on to the customer. Discontent and the customer watching time and as you get good at your job and shave a few minutes associated with it, that should be to your advantage.”
Kurt explained further “What I do when estimating large properties is I figure out how long it’s going to take me. Break it on to smaller sections if I have to. Then I figure my hourly rate or what I must make from the property and put a price together from that. Sometimes commercial properties are huge broken up into several mowing areas, I get it easier to just calculate the time it will take for each and then figure out the total time plus drive time.”
Another more advanced strategy is to charge per sq . ft . based on formulas. Using formulas requires a a lot more experience, because it is vital your formulas are effective.