How to bid a lawn care job.
Properly bidding a lawn care and landscaping contract involves a fine balance between covering your costs and knowing how much your customer will pay. Underbidding is one of the biggest problems that new lawn care business owners face.
The StartALawnCareBusiness.com estimating guidebooks give you extensive information and examples on how to bid lawn care jobs. Whether you are doing simple grass cutting or installing intricate landscapes, you must know how to properly bid your jobs or you risk going out of business. Below are 3 simple guidelines to follow.
1) Know your costs:
You should never bid on a lawn care job until you know your costs to perform that job. If you are bidding on a straight-up grass cutting job, your costs include: labor, equipment depreciation, supplies (gasoline, weedeater line, etc.) transportation costs, and office expenses (including all other expenses of operating your business.)
There are very few instances when you should ever do landscaping for less than your cost.
2) Know your customers:
Knowledge of your customers gives a good indication of the amount they are willing to pay for your services. A customer in an exclusive neighborhood with 30,000 square feet of finely manicure grass should be willing to pay more than $20/week to have the grounds maintained through the summer. It behooves you, as a lawn care business owner, to extract enough information from your prospective customer during your initial interview to help you determine the amount of money that customer is willing to pay for your services.
3) Know your competition:
Your competitors will always attempt to lowball and underbid your prices. Keep tabs on your competition. Learn what they are charging. Learn what tactics they are employing to steal away your customers. Counter their moves by providing top-quality services and charging fair prices for your lawn care / landscaping work.
These are just a few tips on pricing your lawn care jobs. In our 17 years of lawn care experience we have performed jobs from small $20 duplexes up to large 90 acre industrial complexes and multi-year government contracts. We have poured our pricing experience into the lawn care business program. If you are interested in learning how to properly price your jobs, our estimating guidebook and estimating calculators will help you give better bids.
Our Lawn Care Business program is on sale right now at:
www.StartALawnCareBusiness.com
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#1 by Kyle D on March 16, 2010 - 2:45 pm
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I thought this was very true!