How to PRICE and ESTIMATE Landscape Jobs

Electric fences are turned off. And do not, do not do anything around beehives. Today we are going to do some drive by estimates. Now why are we doing that? Our estimator at the local location got into a motorcycle accident unfortunately and has been out for the past few days and they've been way behind on estimates. So we're going to go out and do a few of them. Going to bring you along for the ride. Now the update for this morning. It started off very good. It was a good day. And somehow when you have software and you're running the business and you have no idea why servers go down in the middle of Lansing, Michigan to cause the site to go down completely destroys the day, I get very annoyed. So if I seem a little off, I look very tired. It's because co pilot went down this morning and it makes me very mad. So let's try to put that behind us, move forward and make some money on these estimates. Here we go. Oh, let's see what we got here. 2,395. Oh, great. We already passed it. We're starting off on a strong foot, folks. Whoa, don't go in the ditch. Okay, folks, this is the. The ghetto. This is literally. Oh, dude. You're gonna be able to look into Canada. There's a border patrol sitting there and I don't see a whole lot of dandelions, but I do see a border patrol and that's Canada right there. Okay, let's see what's going on here. There's a dog. Oh, and a cat. Okay, we've got. We're gonna have. Folks, we're gonna. We're gonna have some problems here. How you doing? Is this unit two? Is this unit number two? Yes, it is. This is what they've done in the past, like the weeding of the corner. Yeah, they just. It would be better. I've got really bad back problems. You're good. Be better if they can take the woods out, but. Right. But even just whacking it down, it looks so much better. And then they picked up the weeds. So it was clear when they were done. Yeah. The property management company is having us just mow, I think right now. Let me just check. Well, just MOW does not provide the yard care in this yard. Totally. I promised that that was part of the rent here. Okay. So I actually ended up talking to the tenant who's not the client for us in this case. The client that we're serving is the property management company. Sounds like the property management company is kind of cheap and they only want us to mow. And so our guys specifically did not, you know, do the weeding of the beds. So the thing is this. It's such a small property, it literally takes us three or four minutes to mow this backyard. We're charging $45. So I'll probably just go ahead and include this because it'll take all of a minute and a half to finish the beds. So at the very least, we'll knock them down. I don't think we'll charge anymore, to be honest with you. By the time it takes, just the time of us sending a new quote, getting accepted and like rescheduling the job with new notes is going to take less time than just be like, we will get the dandelions in the corner. That is approximately 3ft by 3ft. So I'm approximating whether or not we should put budget hours as 0.0001 on that job or not. The very first day that I opened this shop right up here, the companies before me at this shop had all gone out. They came in and said, well, best of luck. You're gonna need it. Drove up to me and said that to me. I was 18 years old, just started Augusta. Actually, I would have been 19. Because we got this. And this is the shop space right here. And we got kicked out of from our landlords because we were growing too fast. Oh, look at that. That's our landlord out there spraying weeds.

Oh, man. We were actually gonna rent out the bigger part of the property too, and grow the franchise inside of the barn area. But they didn't like all the. All the traffic and creating the potholes in the driveway. But God forbid we driveway. So now they have someone very happy with them. Why? Because they're out of business. There's no traffic. This is a very, very high security Birch Bay Village. This is what you call like middle class, upper class. What's it called? Like middle upper. That. That's what Birch Bay Village is. On one side you have literally double wides and trailers. The other side you have three million dollar houses all in this gated community. It's like the Gestapo, though, in terms of the speed limit. Oh, whoa. Look at this. That is an intense sign. They've really upgraded their thing. Look at. They even got a little fancy. They used to have golf carts when I used to be a. I think they submitted the wrong address on their client form. Sick. That means we're gonna have to get out and talk to people. Dude, this is Mike with Augusta Lawn Care. How you Doing? I'm sorry, who is this? Mike with Augusta lawn care. Oh, yeah, Yeah. I was just trying to find your place here, and I think I might have the wrong address on my work order here. 8256. She submitted an estimate request form and was one digit off. All right, so we're at the right place now. Okay. It's a rental. Little overgrown. If we're gonna be mowing this next week, for example, it's gonna be very overgrown, a little wet. I don't know about weeding. We need to do weeding. Oh, brother. Are we on a goose chase? Let's find out. Let me call this one.

Hi, this is Karen. Sorry I missed you. Please leave your name and number after the dial phone. Okay, so I have a solution. I think I have a solution. Okay. Karen. Coming after you. Coming after Karen.

I tried to give her a call, but.

It'S gonna be 4708. 40. Thank you very, very much. 08. You're a lifesaver.

Oh, man. What's the point of having a front gate? Literally, you can just get in.

Hi. Are you Karen? Oh, cool. I'm just here to give you an estimate for the. The bush trimming. It sounds like. Cool. So I'm assuming just kind of maintaining it where they're kind of currently at. Exactly. And this one, it's got some dead stuff. Maybe if they could round it off for me. Okay. Yep. Yeah. Those ones kind of are tip growers, so us trimming it won't necessarily take. They remove the dead spots, but at least we can shape it. You can shape it? Yep. For sure. All right, so just these ones right here then, basically, actually. And a little bit of weeding. Okay. In the front beds there? Yeah. Are you thinking, like, maybe twice a year, just kind of coming through, or. Okay. Okay. Yeah. And also, I have. I don't know if you can do it or not. I'll show you. Go for it.

I had a friend come and massacre this. Uh. Oh. And should have left it, but now because of the way it is, I think it better get clipped down. Okay, awesome. Thanks so much. I appreciate it.

Now we got ourselves what you call a referral baby. So I'm gonna go drive over to her friend's house and get her on board now too. Okay. We are currently literally just idling, and I'm speeding by 20% over the speed limit. And I have to go, like, half a mile all the way to 47. We're at, what, 12?

Hello.

Now? It's few and far between. I Think we're wrong? I think she wasn't home. Do you know what she was needing?

We don't do spraying. I would recommend her to all season. All season spraying. His name is Gordy. He's really good. Have a good one. Karen. Clean up and remove the BlackBerry patch and mowing behind.

The blackberries and the small site, you know on Starfish Lane by our stormwater farm. We need to clean that area up. Alright. So they want us to clear this whole BlackBerry patch out. It's kind of like a HOA owned area I think. And back here they got a stormwater pond, a bunch of cattails and all the rest of it.

Honestly the easiest way to do this is gonna be with like a skid steer or a track look at track loader.

It's pretty thin, it's about to 8 to 10ft wide and it's kind of like a C shaped here and you can walk behind it here. This grass, it looks like it's a marsh but it's not, it's dry.

So you should be able to walk in here no problem and get from it behind as well.

All this grass, we're going to weed whack it down as well and just get as low as we possibly can like down to hopefully at 3 or 4 inches all down in here. Alright. So in the comments below if you had to do this all by hand, wee whacking this grass which is about knee high, which is not saying very much and do the BlackBerry bushes that are above my head. Again not saying very much. Probably What? That's probably 8, 10ft tall and bigger than Zach. How's that sound? Let's go. So that job we're gonna give the guys a lot of budget hours so they should easily be able to crush it and on that day make a good 30 plus dollars an hour simply because it's pretty brutal work. But it'll still be cheaper for the customer and honestly less of a headache from a project management standpoint than having to go rent a flail mower or a brush hog for the skid steer and then worry about big trucks and everything to get there. Whereas now they can hop in a pickup truck with a couple weed whackers, couple attachments and finish the job. And they'll make most of the money because it'll be all labor revenue. Also because we went out to the property and actually had to do an est, not a recurring job, we do charge what we call an E fee, which is an estimate fee. And like do you charge for estimates no, we give free estimates. But on the estimate pricing, we do bake into the pricing, a estimate fee. Now, at this location, we're in profit mode. We're not trying to grow massively. And so we are okay with a 40 to 50% close ratio. And therefore, we charge $100 for e fee. So that estimate, technically, we added an extra $100 for us to go show up to the property and take a look at it. All right, we made it back to the office. We completed all five of those estimates. Took us about an hour and a half. But if you'd like to see a whole lot more of those estimates being done, make sure you subscribe, because next month, I'm traveling down to North Carolina, South Park, North Carolina, to start a location from scratch. And we're going to have to do a whole lot more estimates because our goal is to be able to grow a $300,000 annual revenue business in just 30 days. Make sure to subscribe. And check this video out here for when we started. Four new locations in a matter of just one month.