Good evening all
I operate as a sole trader and throughout the cutting season I use an alternate week on/week off diary to provide fortnightly lawn cuts so that I can utilise the off week for one of jobs and small landscaping projects.
i have been self employed for the last 6 years and whilst the very predictable small garden (typical new build type) for a mow blow and go visit is easy to price (I give a price per visit quote but for my own reckoning, I base small lawns on £1 per minute) and profitable when stacking enough up in a local area, the mid to larger size lawns have always ended up with one of two scenarios....
1. I give the customer a price based on what I could be earning on small lawns and they walk away
2. I base the price on a "typical hourly rate" as defined by the many cost calculator websites out there and I end feeling like I'm working for nothing!
I know the easy answer to this is just to target the small profitable gardens, but I have a hard earned reputation within my area, which tends to have a lot of mid to larger size lawns gardens and I get many word of mouth recommendations for beautiful gardens and decent owners who's gardens I would like to take on, if the price is right of course!
I run a Honda HRX 21" for mulching and smaller lawns and a Lawnflight Pro 553 for larger/rougher lawns.
i have done some leaf collect and tidy work over the winter for a customer whom I would be happy to work for again but they are asking for a quote for fortnightly cuts throughout the cutting season for a 1000sqm lawn.I provided a cut/hoover up of the remains leaf matter which took 2 hours including collecting without any edge strimming.There are around a dozen trees or stumps to navigate, a couple of border edges and a fence around the whole perimeter to strim up to. Based on my £1 per minute, I'd be quoting £140 per cut, but this seems a bit excessive?
any thoughts or experiences welcome....feel free to take the p1ss so long as you make me laugh too.👍🏻
Rich
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Replies
Rich, Been in the trade a very,very long time and we still struggle to gauge a happy medium for domestics .
One thing that I find is that cut and collect is a different service than a mulch cut. Cut and collect takes longer, as a result of stopping to empty bag, and you need to dispose of the cuttings.
As a result, I often offer 2 options for mid to large lawns- cut and collect at one price, and mulch at a different lower price. All with my pedestrian mower.
i do one that is around 1500sqm size, and with strimming around all edges, I get it done with mulching in 90min and charge £80 per visit.
Of course it needs to be the slower growing grass to be able to offer a fortnightly mulching cut- just one reason that I always insist on visiting potential new customers before quoting.
Work out what you earn per hour, or per half day, at £1/ minute, because I bet you don't get 60 chargeable minutes in every hour! This will give you a better idea what to charge per hour for larger jobs.
I agree £140 sounds steep, my gut is telling me £80-100, but I haven't seen the site.
I always take into account the avoidance of travel time, that is the biggest thief of ££
Your £1 per minute is all well and good, but if you have to load, drive to the next street, park and unload you will have probably lost 20 mins in total, often IME its far more than 20min after clocking off at one, and starting the clock at the next garden. So in that example you are only earning £40 an hour.
If however you are in one garden for 2 hours there would be no travel, so wear and tear on van/you, no wasted time. Charge £80 for that and you would proably get the gig. I get the £100 an hour if you have some stupendous zero turn ride on that cost thousands... but a couple of pedestian mowers on a large lawn I think is a bit steep.
On large lawns I had a helper and we used two 21" mowers, I charged the same rate for both of us (£30 per hour each - I retired from that in 2021). That upped the profit. Lots of options. One can strim, one mows, or 2 mowers, first one to finish strims - it also makes it more fun.
Find yourself a relliable bod (thats the difficult bit), who can drive a mower in a straight line, and not pick up gravel with a strimmer and you will soon be earning more than £100 an hour. You will also after a few bedding in weeks, be able to take on twice as many gardens.
THinking back,I used to set myself a daily and minimum weekly take... also monitored it for the month. From memory the minimum was £200 a day, or £1000 a week.... £4000 a month. We had it, so it always came in at the £4K a month, 12 months of the year. Both of us working a full 7 hour day (1 hour for lunch/rest) meant a £420 day. Easy.
Perhaps consider taking a cut on the larger lawns if those gardens can offer Winter opportunity but obviously try to establish if those larger gardens already have another gardener providing maintenance in which case it's pointless .
I used to have this dilemma as many gardeners do . Do I try and fit Three small gardens in a day or spend all day in one big garden ?
Smaller gardens are more profitable but more driving , unloading , re loading etc involved , customers like to chat . Can lead to burnout very quickly .
Much prefer spending all day in one large garden multi-tasking and preferably for the customer to have a separate lawn operator if not accept it's included in the daily maintainance price as it's very difficult to charge separately for the lawn cutting but then this is offset by the fact that those customers want you to provide a weekly service as opposed to fortnightly .
We prefer multiple smaller gardens with several on the same road where possible. We find it's much easier to earn the target £1 per minute on smaller gardens than on ones that take hours to do. Plus, by having 2/3 on each road, your travel is limited too. Of course this is not always possible, but it's what we prioritize and aim for whenever possible.
All the best
Interesting.