Mike Andes explains why lawn care estimators shouldn't give customers a line-by-line breakdown of every cost. Overhead like office staff, insurance, and rent are built into the price. Too much detail just creates confusion and more questions.
$460
$450
$100 per hour
The $460. I need a breakdown of what they charge to make $450 for. I need it. I need it cash by cash. I don't understand. They gave me $460 and they told me what I was they going to do, but they didn't give me a breakdown.
A lot of times the customer will ask for a breakdown specifically of the estimate. And we're willing to break that into labor and then materials. But when you start going too much deeper than that and breaking apart in really, really fine detail, customers usually get confused. And honestly, leads to more questions than anything, mostly because they don't understand the cost of doing business. And overhead is baked pricing. In this case, she's like $100 per hour. That's crazy. Well, the fact is that we went and already met with her as an estimator. You have office staff going back and forth, work, change orders. There's also things like debris wrapped into that, the cost of debris and hauling stuff to the dump, as well as general overhead. Things like the office, rent and insurance and all these other things that go into operating a business.
