When you are beginning your lawn care business, how do you find how much you should charge to mow a yard works lawn care service? This is a matter that was recently inspired to us on the Gopher Lawn Care Business Place. Here are a few ideas.
First off, if have not done so, log on the lawn care business forum and post your question along with your community. There is a good chance another lawn care business owner in your area can give you the going rate. You furthermore want to ask yourself, do you have any friends in the career? If so, ask them what they charge per lawn.
Another response that was posted was to contact a few local lawn care businesses in your area and get an estimate from them to service your lawn. If be fit a lawn then ask a friend to obtain a few estimates to service their lawn. When get three estimates, you will have a good idea how much to charge. You will know the price, plus you will get the square footage dimensions your lawn and may do divide that out to find how much to charge per square ft. This could give you a ballpark idea. Keep in mind, the expenses you ought to run your lawn care business can drastically are different 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 walk the property certainly not be in a rush to get in and out. I did this once and when Received there I was in for a surprise. I didn’t know there were four ditches in the front lot that would need regarding 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 wanted.”
If you are a brand-new 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 pair of services, to your satisfaction, for $50” than the guy “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 must have to pass those pricing exactly to the customer. You don’t want the customer watching the time and as you get better at your job and shave a few minutes from 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 have to make from the property and put a price together from that. Sometimes commercial properties are gonna be broken up into a few mowing areas, I locate one easier to just discover the time it will take for each and then figure out the total time plus drive time.”
Another more advanced approach is to charge per square foot based on formulas. Using formulas requires a little more experience, because it is vital your formulas are genuine.