Watch this video to learn how to set lawn care pricing to earn the most profit for your business.
If you’re watching this video, I’d highly encourage you to watch video number one and video number two if you have not already, because this video is based on the last two videos. And in it, I’m talking about how to figure out lawn care pricing for yourself as your business evolves.
In the last video, what we did was figure out the time for eleven properties within the seven thousand and seven thousand nine hundred and ninety nine square feet range. Remember, we’re using mowing as an example and we determined that our price based on hitting our target of forty dollars per man hour, the price needs to be twenty nine dollars and seventeen cents to mow properties within this range.
So basically what we’ve done, is we went through our business and we just simply tracked our time and measured our properties and we figured out, for all the different square footage ranges, what we need to be charging to hit our goals and we could do this for every service…fertilization, weed control, lawn mowing, aeration and all the different service types. Then, what we do is we basically build out our lawn care pricing. We call it a price matrix in Service Autopilot. It could be just a layout like this for you inside a spreadsheet. We figured out in our business, hypothetically I’m saying your business, that for five thousand to six thousand square feet, you might need to charge twenty eight. And for six to seven thousand, you might need to charge twenty eight dollars. Again, keep in mind, we’re using fictitious numbers to lay out a simple example.
So, just simply lay out something like this for the different services at different square footage ranges. Then, when you go out, you measure the property with a measuring wheel or you go online and you measure it with satellite imagery or pictorial imagery. You can literally look at the square footage, look at your spreadsheet, or if you use Service Autopilot, it will figure out for you based on the price matrix and it will give you a price. Service Autopilot really simplifies pricing and it also helps ensure that you’re always pricing your properties to achieve your target man hour rate.
So, that’s the basic premise of figuring out your lawn care pricing from the beginning so that you can set it and then price off of it from that point forward.
Now, something you might find as your business evolves, you might have originally set prices like this, at twenty eight dollars and twenty eight for this square footage. But, then what happens as it evolves and as your property makes changes and maybe as a little bit of the market you serve changes or the demographic you serve changes, you’re going to notice that maybe you’re starting to achieve a little bit different man hour rates. So, maybe your goal is to achieve a man hour rate clocked around forty eight dollars. So, let’s just go with that.
If you’re trying to achieve forty eight dollars per man hour when you’re mowing, and you’re nailing that on this property right here, five thousand to six thousand square feet. But, now on six thousand to seven thousand square feet, you’re not. You’re more on this forty six dollar per man hour range. So then, you’d probably need to raise that price to about twenty nine dollars to continue to achieve a forty eight dollar per man hour range.
In video number two, we went through and we tracked all of our time and that helped us figure out how much we’re making per man hour. Then, once we figure out how much we’re making per man hour, and we figure out averages across the square footage ranges, we can then really analyze our business and we can really adjust the business. Something we found years ago at our business is, we were really doing okay in this five thousand to ten thousand square foot range. But, as soon as we got into the bigger stuff, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen thousand square feet for residential, we weren’t making money, or, we were not making good money. It wasn’t holding up.
In my example right here, notice what happens, we’re pricing six thousand to seven thousand square feet at twenty eight dollars. Remember that these are made up numbers, these are not my exact pricing and it would be totally different for you and your market. But in my example, notice that, six thousand to seven thousand square feet is priced at twenty eight dollars. We’re pricing fifteen to sixteen thousand square feet at thirty two dollars. But what’s happening on those properties based on how long they’re taking us, we’re only making thirty seven dollars per man hour. Our target in my example, was forty eight, so notice how far we’re under performing.
So what that would tell me as the owner of the business is that, we either need to stop doing properties like these or we need to figure out how to be more efficient. Maybe we need to construct a route that has bigger equipment on it, so that we can go through this type of property faster and we basically group all of those properties into one crew and get through them faster. You’ve got to watch out on the back side though. You could drive up your non-billable time. You might get your per man hour time, you might optimize it and make the per man hour time you want, but then your non-billable goes way up. You may end up with tons of drive time and so you still don’t end up profitable for the day.
There are lots of considerations here and those are things to think about. And, I know that I’m not going to win as much business, but at least when I do win the business, we’re making money and that’s the goal.
And so, the point of this screen here is to show you two things. Once you figure out your average pricing by square footage, you then take that and you set that for each of the square footage ranges. Then over time, you re-analyze your business and you figure out by square footage range, what man hour rate you are earning right now, on average. If it’s too low, you back into it. If you want to go up to earning forty five here, if you want it to go up to forty eight, how much do you need to raise this twenty eight dollar price? And if you watch my video number one, or excuse me number two, and you paused the video on some of my formulas, then you can kind of figure out how, this one here is about raising the price. So you can look at my formulas and figure out how to do this for yourself.
I hope that makes sense. If you have questions about this, post them in the comment section and I will, based on the comments, potentially record additional videos on this topic.
One Reply to “How To Determine Lawn Care Pricing (Video Part 3)”
Great video, but what would the calculation be for one man that does a mowing in lets say 25 minutes? I’m a solo op, transitioning right now, so I’m always looking at number for guys with crews!