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 Forums. Here are a few ideas.
First off, if you’ve never done so, log to 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 community can give you the going rate. You likewise 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 contact a few local lawn care businesses in your area and get an estimate from them to service your yard works lawn mowing service. If be fit a lawn then ask a friend to acquire a few estimates to service their lawn. When you three estimates, you will have a good idea exactly how much to charge. You will know the price, plus you can find the square footage proportions your lawn and can certainly 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 require run your lawn care business can drastically vary from another lawn care business owner’s expenses, so know your expenses.
The next question you might 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 do 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 couldn’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 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 simple terms it’s better to say “I’ll perform these set 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 information on to the customer. Probable disappointment the customer watching time and as you grasp 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 down 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 huge broken up into a few mowing areas, I find it easier to just figure out the time it calls for for each and then figure out the total time plus drive season.”
Another more advanced method is to charge per square foot based on formulas. Using formulas requires a much more experience, because it is vital your formulas are suitable.