How your lawn care business should estimate mowing jobs.

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 asked to us on the Gopher Lawn Care Business Forum. Here are a few ideas.

First off, if you haven’t done so, log onto our lawn care business forum and post your question along with your region. There is a good chance another lawn care business owner in the area can give you the going rate. You may also 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 lawn. If you don’t have a lawn then ask a friend to get a few estimates to service their lawn. When you have three estimates, you will have a good idea how much to charge. You will know the price, plus you can find the square footage size of your lawn and you can divide that out to figure how much to charge per square ft. This should give you a ballpark idea. Keep in mind, the expenses you have to run your lawn care business can drastically differ from another lawn care business owner’s expenses, so know your expenses.

If you are a new lawn care business owner, you may want to charge based on man hour. Author Joel LaRusic suggests “you want to quote quality, not time. In other words it's better to say "I'll perform these set of 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 details on to the customer. You don't want the customer watching the clock and as you get better at your job and shave a few minutes off of it, that should be to your advantage.”

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