When you are starting your lawn care business, how do you find how much you should charge to mow a lawn? This is a subject that was recently inspired to us on the Gopher yard works lawn care service Care Business Community forum. Here are a few ideas.
First off, if have not done so, log on top of 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 may also want to ask yourself, do you have any friends in the online 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 instead of a lawn then ask a friend to acquire a few estimates to service their lawn. When to be able to three estimates, you could have a good idea just how much to charge. You knows the price, plus you will get the square footage proportions your lawn and you can divide that out to find how much to charge per square ft. Individuals . give you a ballpark idea. Keep in mind, the expenses you must 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 may 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, is walk the property and 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 for you to become manually trimmed and gone around while mowing. Luckily for me it still took the estimated time that I figured and my price still puzzled out to what I was looking for.”
If you are 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 associated with services, to your satisfaction, for $50” than the guy “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 need to pass those pricing details on to the customer. You don’t want the customer watching time and as you get better at your job and shave a few minutes off of 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 Prepared to. Then I figure my hourly rate or what I’d like 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 figure out the time it needs for each and then figure out the total time plus drive time.”
Another more advanced technique to charge per square foot based on formulas. Using formulas requires a little more experience, because it important your formulas are suitable.