A question that gets posed to me all the time by beginning lawn care business owners is “how much should I charge for lawn maintenance.” This is a topic we cover a lot in the free lawn business course but let me explain a few important concepts.
You need to decide how much or how little you are willing to make per hour of profit. One of the biggest mistakes new lawn guys make is not factoring in expenses in doing a job. You have gas for your equipment, employees, gas for your truck to travel to the job and often there are other odds and ends you don’t think about.
So if you are looking to take home at least $25 an hour after expenses you need to charge enough to cover your expenses and make your money. For example, if you are bidding a job that you know is going to take you about 1 hour then you would need to start out with your $25 and then add in expenses. Perhaps you are paying an employee $10 an hour and let’s figure in you have about $5 in other expenses. So you would charge the person $25+$10+$5 or $40 to do the job.
You can adjust the price as you feel necessary to make more or less money depending on what you think is fair. You could probably get away with charging a little more for a job that is going to take an hour.
This is a very general idea on how to bid on a job but hopefully will give you a little more confidence when you are giving bids out to new customers.