When you are first 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 have not done so, log on top of the lawn care business forum and post your question along with your part. There is a good chance another yard works lawn care service care business owner in the market can give you the going rate. You furthermore 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 talk to 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 you have three estimates, you may have a good idea how much to charge. You knows the price, plus you uncover the square footage sized your lawn and place divide that out to figure how much to charge per square ft. Ought to actually 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 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 and 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 worked out to what I wanted.”
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 other words it’s better to say “I’ll perform these associated with services, to your satisfaction, for $50” than to say “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 don’t want the customer watching the hands of time and as you get better 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 I have to make from the property and put a price together from that. From time to time commercial properties are probably broken up into several mowing areas, I find it easier to just locate the time it might 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 a bit more experience, because it is crucial your formulas are accurate.