How To Do A Mulch Job | Measure, Estimate, and Price Mulch | How To Mulch Tips

Today we're going to turn this.

Into this.

Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes here@landscapebusinesscourse.com today we are parked in a no parking spot, but we're trying to do good things. We're trying to install mulch for the city for completely free. We've already had some dirty looks from the city workers, but we're gonna get the job done. We're trying to make this. These signs look better. We're gonna finish up the sign we did last week. You can go watch last week's video over here. Click the link there to watch us do the cleanup portion. But today we're installing mulch, and I'm gonna hopefully share with you how you can make some money installing bark mulch just like this.

Cool. All right, so what we'll do, basically, last week I cleaned this one up already. Okay. So we'll install mulch just in the top part, basically, and then we'll do the same thing over in that bed. And that bed does need some cleanup. Okay. So. Which is sick. I should have got a hedge trimmer, but there's really not too much. That one just really needs sick. You don't have a hedge trimmer, do you? No, I have hand loppers. Yeah, it's really just that butterfly bush on top needs to come down a bit. I can get that later. We can get all the weeds, though, with the weed whacker, really, and then just install mulch. So what we could do, if you wanted to, you could take your trip truck over there behind Danny's car, and let's get started on the cleanup portion. Okay. I'll get this mulch and sole and then bring the truck around and we'll do that mulch. Wrap that part up together. Okay. So just as much as you can do. Like, this one had, like a ton of overgrown, like, tree stuff, but that one's really just, I think, weeding. Like all those horsetails, all the stuff around the base of it, pretty much scalp it down. Yeah, let's just do that. And we'll put the molts on top. So I'll be over there in a few minutes.

Big shout out to Kent for helping me on this job. He's the one with the straw hat, helped me on his. This job before went out and did his mowing route. So big thank you to him. So as you saw last week, we got this whole place cleaned up, doing city work for the city. And yes, of course, they did give us a call. They called and they wanted to want to Know what we were doing and why we were doing it, and they weren't too happy, but we said, hey, look, we're just trying to do charity. We're just trying to do some good for the community. We're not gonna charge you anything for this. So they laid off a little bit, but, you know, they thought we were trespassing and all that fun stuff. But we're just trying to help the community here because these were overgrown and. And wanted to make them look a little bit nicer. They're the kind of the gateway to not only our. Our little city here in blaine, but also the entrance into the United states from canada. Right. When you come to the border, these are the signs that you see. And what's really cool is from this job already, we've already got at least one or two projects, and from clients just driving by, liking the fact that, you know, we're in the community, that we are trying to help the city. And so we've already got a couple of clients from this great branding. And you can see here, as I'm next to the road, the truck is there. They can see the phone number, and we've already got a couple calls at command center from that. We got some long looks, though, from some of the city workers as they would drive by. All right, we're gonna do some basic math here on installing mulch, because maybe in the past, you don't really know what a cubic yard is. You don't really know the lingo of what that when you go to a supplier, what that means. So when you're looking at a yard and you're trying to figure out, okay, how many yards of material do I need to install bark mulch or any sort of mulch or pine straw even into the beds for this client? Well, this is the math you need to know. So one cubic yard is equal to 108 square feet at three inches thick. Alright? So what that means is if I have a thousand square feet and I want three inches thick of mulch, I'm gonna need 10 yards of material. I'll have a little extra at that point. So I always use a hundred just for the sake of knowing, hey, I have about 8% left over. You'd rather have a little bit too much than not enough. And so one yard, one cubic yard is gonna do a hundred square feet of flower bed at 3 inches thick. What that means is, if you do the math is if I don't need 3 inches thick, let's say I want only 1 inch thick, just really kind of a thin dusting on top to make it look nice. Then I can do 300 and a little over 300 square feet of bed space. So if you're brand new and you can't eyeball how many yards of mulch you're going to need, definitely take a tape measure, take a measuring wheel, get the square footage of the flower beds, or even use like Google Earth and use pins to figure out what the square footage of those flower beds are. And then just extrapolate the math, divide it by 100 and that's going to give you how many cubic yards you need at three inches in depth. All right. What tools do you need to to get these type of multi jobs? It's really basic. A pitchfork, a scoop, shovel. Definitely get a wheelbarrow. That's really good. So like this wheelbarrow here, for example, that is a flat free tire. You know, you can't get a flat tire on these things. And these things are solid. We've used this thing for probably five years. It has a little bit of bent up front. You know, it's not perfect, doesn't look beautiful. But Trust me, spending $150 like these ones are, I think $110 on a wheelbarrow. Don't skimp out on the wheelbarrow. Otherwise you'll literally go through a wheelbarrow every couple weeks when you're installing mulch. If you get the cheap ones that have tires that can go flat, they have flimsy frame, it's just not worth it. Spend a little extra on the wheelbarrow, get a rake. And you don't even need a dump trailer. Like here I have the big 7 by 14 dump trailer from load trail. It has 10,000 pound capacity. You don't need that. You could have the multi delivered directly to the client's house. So. So even if you're just getting started, you don't have a big truck, you don't have a big trailer like that. Just have your supplier deliver it to the property, put a tarp down, so that way it's easy to clean up and have them dump the material on site. We have a shop where we have a whole bunch of material. We have a loader and we put it into the dump trailer in the morning. We have about three yards on this job, total three yards of material. But you don't need all of that to get started. If you want to get started, have the supplier deliver it to you and charge the client for that. The only other thing you really need Is the blower to clean off. And you'll see that in just a little bit. Now, the big question is pricing on a bark job like this. So there's really just the major three things. You want to include the cost of the material, plus marking that material up, which we'll talk about in a second. And the next one is optional. And that is if you need a delivery. If you need someone to deliver the material, they might charge 40, 50, $60 to deliver the mulch and bring it with a dump truck. You want to charge that as well and charge up the customer. And the third thing is budgeted hours multiplied by your hourly rate. You want to charge the client. So, for example, let's say that my supplier charges $30 per yard of mulch. I'm going to charge, let's say $40, just material markup. That extra $10 is going to cover the cost of me going and talking to the supplier, picking it out, all the rest of it. So let's charge $40 and let's say there's six yards of that. So that's $240 in material cost. Let's do five budget hours at $50 per hour to the client for labor. That's $250 total. Let's add a $50 delivery fee in there for a total price of $540. We'll talk about in a second what that actually equates to in profits.

You want to try and rake some of it up? Probably, yeah, we'll rake it out. We'll spray it maybe a little bit. But, like, it's all that really fine stuff. So once the mulch is on that, it's fine. This is the part that really we need to clean up because we won't put mulch on the rock. I don't know, man. Like, this is all crummy rock.

I think we should just mulch the whole thing. Like, this area, it's never gonna look good because it's just the rocks are hardly. They're not enough.

You know, I think I have enough mulch. I have like half of it.

We'll start like the area in the back. It's obvious. And then this area, if we have enough, we'll just put mulch here too. See if you want to rake it out and then just spray it. I didn't know how to far. Oh, yeah, that's fine. We're not even gonna go over there. Little pro tip here. And that is when you're doing the mulch, if you tip the dump trailer Back a bit. If you're concerned about it being bad for the hydraulics, there's this underneath and you can just. On here there's a gravity fed one. So you just. Gravity. There it is.

Makes it easier to get the mulch out of the back. Definitely. You want to tip the dump trailer if you have one. When you're doing molts, it's so much more helpful than having to jump up in the trailer. You at least have gravity on your side. So. All right, let's jump back to the numbers. So we charged $30 per yard, but we charged $40 to the customer. That $10 extra is what's called material markup and helps with overhead recovery. But let's look at the profits. So the cost of goods sold. You might see this known as cogs, C O G S cost of goods sold is going to be $230. That's going to be the $50 delivery fee plus $30 per yard of material times six. So 180 plus the $50 delivery fee is $230. That's the cost of goods sold. Now we charge the customer $540 total price. So our gross profit on this job is $310. Now let's assume that we do do a job. And I'm not talking about this job specifically, remember I'm just doing a hypothetical job that you would be doing for mulch. But let's say we do the job in five hours, right? And we had budgeted for five hours on the job. Well, now if I take my gross profit of $310, divide that by five, I technically made a gross profit of $62 per hour. Now, obviously I'm not taking account employee costs if I have other labors. But let's just assume for this sake that I'm working by myself installing mulch around my neighborhood for some of my other clients that I already might have for mowing, I have a gross profit of $62 per hour. So now the golden question if you stay with me this far is how do you sell bark? Jobs like this, I call it bark, some people call it mulch. Typically the bark is finer like this, whereas mulch you can get really chunky stuff that is almost like hog fuel. And it's just chipped up wood. Basically you get wood chips. All of that sort of material is great for what we're trying to do here. What you want to do in terms of selling these type of jobs is there's a few highlights of what this type of job is. Going to help the customer with, number one, you want to highlight that there's going to be less watering required for the plants, simply due to the fact that as we go into the summer and it's really hot, that we are going to. You're going to have to water plants a lot more as it gets hot in the summer. If you have the mulch down, though, it kind of provides a protective barrier to. To the existing soil so that it doesn't get baked in the sun. It gives a little bit of protection to that and allows you to water your plants less. Which, from a cost analysis standpoint, if someone's watering their plants every day and they have to have a sprinkler system and they have to have a drip line and all the rest of it, they might save 50, $60 a month in just watering costs just by having the mulch there to be able to really absorb the water and retain that moisture throughout the heat of the summer. All right. Another thing that you want to highlight on those, you know, if you're doing door hangers or flyers or yard signs or whatever it might be, you want to definitely highlight the fact that there's going to be less weeds, right? So, for example, we talked about last week in terms of the difference between pulling weeds versus knocking the weeds down and spraying them. But what's really cool about mulch is if you have a really weeded area like this one, we just knock down the weed at the weed whacker, then we sprayed it really heavily, then we put the molt on top. What that does, if you put the mulch on nice and thick is it creates a barrier from the sunlight to getting to the weeds so they can't photosynthesize. So if you'll grass and these other green leaf, you know, clover or whatever else, you know, weeds we're pulling, if they can't photosynthesize, they can't grow. So by putting the bark over top, you got to do it pretty thick in order for this to work. You can keep those weeds. Basically, you suffocate them from their, you know, resource of the sunlight that allows them to grow. So again, keeping the weeds down is going to save the client time. And you can really pitch the fact that, hey, instead of pulling weeds all summer long, why don't you install mulch one time in the spring and really cut down the amount of time you have to spend every single week pulling the weeds? And no one loves in, you know, pulling weeds. Let's just be honest. If they are, well, I Don't know. You need to come work for a landscaping company because we've got plenty of weeds for you to pull. But anyways, it also looks really, really good. And this is the big thing you want to highlight when it comes to selling mulch jobs is just how good it makes a flower bed look and makes the flowers pop. The color of these plants really come out when you have that barrier below that, that kind of blank canvas of that either brown or black. There's a whole bunch of different colors that you can have with mulch. But it looks, it just makes the plants look so, so much better and creates that definition between them. Especially in an area where there might be mature plants, they're kind of starting to grow in together. You trim them up a little bit, then you put that mulch in between, really gives some definition, allows the color of those plants and flowers to really, really pop. And now it's like, well, great. We, we're going to reduce the amount of watering, we're going to reduce the amount of time it takes to weed the beds. It looks really good. But who do we sell this to? Number one really great opportunity is people when they're wanting to sell a house. This is like one of the cheapest ways to improve the curb appeal of a home is installing bark mulch. For 5, 600, $700, maybe it's a big property, $1,000, they can install a whole bunch of bark mulch in all the flower beds and make the place look brand spanking new. Looks really, really good. Makes the house pop. So if you are in your area and you're seeing a house that's going up for an open house or going up for sale, it's a great opportunity. Contact the real estate agent, be like, hey, why don't we install 10 yards of mulch? Here's the estimate, here's what we would charge. That is a great opportunity for houses that are going on the market. They want to maximize the curb appeal and, and the value to a prospective buyer. Another thing you want to do is if you have mowing customers, the beautiful thing about having mowing customers is you have their contact information. You can upsell them on more services and bark mulch is a great thing to sell them. If they do mowing with you already, they already know like and trust you and so you can upsell them into mowing. And when you get those bark jobs, make sure you're doing door hangers and yard signs all around that neighborhood and to the neighbors of that job. Because, because if you make one property look really good. You can sell those to a whole bunch of the neighbors that want their bark mulch installed as well.

All right. Thanks, brother.

All right, we're just wrapping up here. And we have finished now both signs, both this one and the one across the street. All in all, this probably took about four man hours to weed. Put mulch down, spray it, trim the bushes, the whole nine yards, haul the debris away. Usually that would have cost probably about 6, $700 to to pull the weeds, spray it, get the debris out of here, put the mulch down, at least that. But we did this all for free for the city. I'd encourage you if you want to get started with your lawn care business. Adding mulch as a service to your customers is a great way to add the value of that customer. So instead of just mowing their lawn, 30, $40 a week, you also get a 6, 7, $800 job a couple times a year. Install mulch like this. The mulch allows for less watering, less weeds and less maintenance by the client. Check out the link below in the description where we actually give you templates for your door hangers, yard signs, postcards and flyers so you can sell mulch jobs just like this. I'm Mike Andes, landscapebusinesscourse.com We'll see you on the next video. Hey, I heard if you don't click the subscribe button down below, your worst lawn care customer is gonna give you a call today.