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Neither - price by job after assessing location, site, access, difficulty & potential hassle based upon internal charging rate.
Ensure quote covers how green waste is dealt with....
Neither, either priced by the cut on a weekly or fortnightly basis or a price given for between X and Y cuts per year on commercial contracts.
Commercial often set the spec in terms of finish and cutting height.
Price for worst case scenario, or mad spring growth, then you gain a bit in slower months.
Remember edging properly takes time too.
Don't forget the costs involved with waste disposal.
As said above, price per cut only. Never, never on an hourly rate basis. Hourly rate is only in your own head as a part of the equation of working out a price per cut. It might sound obvious but you have to know how much you want per hour and then calculate how long it will take to mow.
Mostly it is down to experience and precedent I’m afraid. So if you have a similar job that you do then the price will be about the same. If it is twice the size of the existing job, then twice the price of that one, or if you have a similar job which you feel is under-priced, then you have the opportunity to learn from this and correct the pricing on this one.
I use this free online area calculator. https://www.freemaptools.com/area-calculator.htm
It is a big help to know exactly what area there is and also to know the areas are of existing work, for comparison. Although area is not the only factor. There might be ten times the amount of strimming on job ‘A’ than on job ‘B’ although both have the same area. On some jobs the grass grows extremely quickly whilst on another it hardly grows at all. They all have to be factored in.
Again experience is key.
It really depends on how much to want to automate the process of quoting. Most accurate will be price per job from site visit and individual quote, but that will take you the most time. Also this is more applicable for larger jobs - so partly depends on your target market.
What we do.
We have a price list broken down into bands, eg upto 50sqm, 50-100sqm, etc as in gets bigger, the bands get wider, eg 800-1000sqm.
This is the price for a weekly mow with waste away as needed, it's 20% higher if every 2 weeks. The price can also be adjusted to take into account access problems, extra strimming, slopes/banks etc. Just depends how far you want to go. For smaller domestic lawns of say around 200sqm, there's not a lot of variation.
In my mind I have a day rate for the van with 1 or 2 people and I sanity check by estimating how many of those lawns I would do a day with 15mins travel /setup between.
I like to have a price table as a baseline as it speeds up the process and means consistency / fairness between customers.