HOW TO PRICE a mowing job (USING SATELLITE!)

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes. And today, yet again, my producers have pulled me out in the middle of the night to once again watch a lawn being mowed and do a voiceover. And I have to first say before we get started, big shout out to last week's winner who guessed how many square feet the property was. You watch that video here. But the winner was Austin Abbott with a guess of 4,315 square feet. And for that he won a lifetime access pass to landscape businesscourse.com Congratulations, Austin. You check out the email below in the description and make sure to reach out for your reward. Now today we are also giving away something very valuable and that is access to the MBA for entrepreneurs. That link is in the description as well. You can check it out. And it's worth 500 bucks. So whoever today can guess how many minutes it took this crew to mow the lawn. And when I say minutes, I mean total man hours. So if there's two of them, you're gonna have to double how many minutes you think it took them to do it together. Alright, so let's go ahead and jump in to the video here. We alright, so it looks like we got ourselves a residential lawn here. I haven't seen this before. As per usual, we got a 30 inch mower in the back. It's an Exmark 30 inch mower in the front yard we got ourselves a 21 inch HRX Honda 21 inch push mower. Now I've talked about these 21 inch push mowers in the past and it's mostly because we couldn't get our hands on any commercial lawnmowers for like the next 10 to 12 months because of supply chain shortages. But we've actually really begin to like these because they're so light. It's much less wear and tear on the crew when it comes to push motors mowing throughout the day. So taking how we want to look at the property here, right we got this in the backyard, the 30 inch mower. Jesse's kicking butt here trying to wade through these low tree limbs. And then in the front yard you got this 20 inch mower. So take a look at the lawn. What we're trying to do here is guess how many minutes it took to mow this long. We edge, we blow everything off, we take care of things. But you've got to guess how long do you think it took them to mow this lawn? Now today we are talking about doing these type of lawns and getting estimates. How do you price these Type of jobs. Now, in the past, we used to go to every single property, we would go look at the lawn and we would give a good guess of how long it's gonna take us to mow the lawn, multiply that by our hourly rate and there was our price boom and we'd send the estimate out and that was fine and good. But when you're trying to scale up the business and it comes to the point where you're trying to, you're literally driving around half your day being spent just doing estimates. You're spending gas money, you're spending maintenance of a vehicle, you're spending a very valuable person, typically with your estimators time to go and look at lawns. Now for things like project based work or cleanups, you're going to have to go visit the property, take, get your eyes on the actual work that's being done. The project, it cuts custom, it's very custom. But that's what I love about mowing, that's what I love about lawn care is the fact that you don't have to actually have to go in person to see these properties. You can do it by square footage. You can use a free tool like Google Earth or Google Maps to be able to actually get the property square footage. Now some people like to use the lot square footage. The problem with that is that you are somewhat inaccurate due to the fact that there could be concrete, there could be big pieces of land on a larger property that are actually not maintainable because they just pasture. As well as the fact that if the house is really big, it could be on the same size property but have half the amount of actual mobile turf square footage. Or if you're doing treatments, no half as much chemicals are going to be used on that lawn. So what we do is we actually measure out using pinpoints on a satellite image of how many square foot feet the actual turf size is. Now there's a lot of reasons why you would not want to do this. The biggest reason is because, well, what if I get to the lawn and it's all of a sudden 3ft tall? There's lots of ways to get around this. Some people will charge a per minute rate on the first visit. Some people will just say, hey, look, the first visit, it could be a lot more. After that we're good to go. Some people will just simply eat the cost of that first mow and know that it might take them a little bit longer because it's overgrown. But they just know, hey, if I get to sell this on the phone, it saves me 30, $40 worth money and fuel and driving around all day doing estimates. So I highly recommend if you're looking right now and you're like, man, I just seem like I'm driving around all day doing estimates. You have to remember that you have to take the time value of money and if your time could otherwise be spent doing projects being worth 70, 80, $90 an hour, you have to realize that 10 hours of your day doing estimates is literally worth 7, $800. So if you're doing it for mowing, you're doing it for treatments, things that can absolutely be done by a virtual assist that can be in the office, pay them 15, 20, $25 per hour, you can absolutely save time money and you actually make more profit. Because instead of you doing non revenue producing activities, if you have three, four, five employees, you can actually go join them and actually become a revenue producing team member that's actually bringing revenue to the business instead of being an overhead cost drive around doing estimates all day long. Because let's just be honest, most properties you drive by and literally within three to four seconds you get eyes on the property and you know exactly what the price is. So why not use a S footage rate matrix that basically at a certain square footage and above, you start to go up in price, you're gonna have a minimum. Obviously a 500 square foot lawn, it doesn't matter if it's 500 or 2000, like you gotta charge the same like minimum price, you have that minimum rate that you're gonna charge just to drop the gate, just to start doing service on someone's property, to be able to cover the cost of doing business with them. However, you absolutely can do this over the phone, you can absolutely do this without going to a customer's property. And maybe you don't have an office person, maybe you don't have someone do estimates over the phone. But even if you get a voice message, even if you get a estimate request form from your website, you can absolutely use these, this technology satellite to be able to do square footage based estimates, whether it be lot square footage or turf square footage. Comment below how you do your estimates for mowing and what you charge per square foot. Now I'm giving you all the information like square footage and actually here's the whole property from an aerial image. But today what I want you to tell me is how many minutes will it take to do this lawn? Alright, so if there's two people and let's just say it took them 10 minutes, that would mean that you got to put 20 minutes in the description below. The person that is the closest is going to get lifetime access to MBA for entrepreneurs. The course that I made specifically for small business owners. Taking everything I learned in my mba, my master's in business administration, boiling it down to the online course actually is digestible tips for you to grow your small business and the things that I learned and went to school for for two years in business school. So alright now before you leave check out this video here where you have to guess the price that we charged for the lawn because everyone's wondering like what do you charge per hour and what do you charge for a lawn? What would you charge for this lawn? Well you can check out exactly my prices by checking this video out here, guess what it is and then watch last week's video and you can actually find out exactly what the price was and we'll see you tomorrow.