Mike Andes breaks down two ways to estimate lawncare labor hours: direct time estimates, which are more accurate but harder to scale, and production rates, which scale better but are less precise. Use direct estimates when you're doing a few quotes a day. Switch to production rates when volume picks up.
Can you run through the process used to determine budgeted hours for a property? There's two ways of doing this. One is using a more or less, hey, I look at it, how long is this going to take me? It's usually the most accurate, just usually not the most scalable. Because if you have 100 estimates in a day, there's just no way you're going to be able to have one person do all those estimates. Whereas one person could do 100 estimates if it was using some sort of production rate. That being said, I think too many people get into production rates when they're getting 1, 2 estimates, 3, 3 estimates a day. And they don't need to, like, literally, if they could just spend 20, 30 minutes a day, they'd be able to drive by those properties to be very accurate. If you start going to production rate, you're going to start giving up accuracy for scalability. And it's totally fine once you start getting a ton of estimates. When you're getting two, three estimates a day, you want to close as many of those as possible. And accuracy is extremely important. If you're doing P4P or if you just want to close many deals as possible, you want to make sure that when someone says that's too expensive, that you're like, no, I know exactly how long it's going to take because I came and saw the property.
