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 matter that was recently motivated to us on the Gopher Lawn Care Business Community forum. Here are a few ideas.
First off, if you’ve never done so, log on top of the lawn care business forum and post your question along with your region. There is a good chance another lawn care business owner around can give you the going rate. You furthermore 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 speak to a few local lawn care businesses in your area and get an estimate from them to service your lawn. If there isn’t a lawn then ask a friend to obtain a few estimates to yard works landscaping service their lawn. When to be able to three estimates, you will have a good idea how much to charge. You knows the price, plus you can find the square footage dimensions your lawn and you can divide that out to figure how much to charge per square ft. Individuals . give you a ballpark idea. Keep in mind, the expenses you require run your lawn care business can drastically alter from another lawn care business owner’s expenses, so know your expenses.
The next question you most likely are 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, is in fact walk the property certainly not be in a rush to get in and out. I did this once and when I got there I was in for a surprise. I did not know there were four ditches in the front lot that would need being manually trimmed and gone around while mowing. Luckily for me it still took the estimated time that I figured and my price still discovered to what I looked for.”
If you are a fresh 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 short it’s better to say “I’ll perform these group of services, to your satisfaction, for $50” than condition expertise “I’ll spend an hour at your house for $50.” Of course, you can use your hourly rate to base your price on but you don’t need to pass those pricing precisely to the customer. You wouldn’t like the customer watching the 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 into smaller sections if I want to. Then I figure my hourly rate or what Let me make from the property and put a price together from that. A lot of times commercial properties are going to be broken up into a few mowing areas, I get it easier to just figure out the time it will take for each and then figure out the total time plus drive your time.”
Another more advanced strategy is to charge per square foot based on formulas. Using formulas requires a a lot more experience, because it critical your formulas are best.
