Mike Andes demonstrates how to price lawn-mowing jobs remotely by tracing lawn areas on satellite imagery inside Copilot CRM (demo uses a business labeled "Bob's Burger and Brew"). He traces areas to get total square footage (example: 3,547 sq ft), then uses a pricing matrix (currently in Excel; planned to be built into Copilot) to produce weekly/biweekly prices and budgeted hours. He explains adjustments to the square-foot pricing for factors like edging, gates, irrigation, vehicles, and overgrown first visits, and recommends saving measurements to the customer record to deliver fast phone estimates.
Questions this video answers
3,547 sq ft
$40 weekly (baseline for <5,000 sq ft)
$60 biweekly (baseline for <5,000 sq ft)
Charge $1.33 per minute per man on the first visit (speaker verbalizes this equals $90 per hour and gives a 3-hour example totaling $270)
Chapters
Today I'm going to show you exactly how we price jobs using square footage from a satellite image for our lawn care and mowing services. You don't have to ever go to a property again. You can do it all from your office, from your cell phone using copilot. So go ahead, let's go and jump into the CRM. This is copilotcrm.com and I'm going to show you exactly how to do this. So this is going to be Bob's burger and brew. It's actually a restaurant. If you look at the street view, you can see it's in a big parking lot area. There's grass around the edges. Unfortunately, this image doesn't let me get any closer. But let's go ahead and jump into this area. I didn't want to do a residential house. I'm not putting anyone online. But I'm going to go into the satellite view and click area and I'm going to start measuring the perimeter of all the lawn areas. Now, you can do this on your cell phone. You can do this at night before you go to bed and they send out the estimates or you can do this literally in the driveway of a customer after visiting them if needs be. But ideally you're literally doing this over the phone or after you get an estimate request form from the client. You, you can just fill this out really fast so you can see. What's really nice about copilot is I don't have to do separate image, separate shapes. I can literally just trace all the different areas of lawn. And this area here, there's quite a bit of spaces. I'm going to go here, cut around this. Great. Now, if you're going really, really fast and you want to be doing this on the phone, sometimes you might skip little areas that are like 50, 100 square feet because it's actually not going to move the needle much in terms of pricing. Now coming in just a couple months, we're going to have what's called price matrix inside of the Copilot CRM. However, right now it's giving me 3547 as my square feet down the road, we're going to what's called price matrixes. Probably by the time you're watching this in a couple months, we'll have this. We're going to automatically push the price out from here based upon our matrix of values that you've put in the back end. But for now, let's go and just use, in case you're not using copilot let's go ahead and use Excel. This might be something that you would want to build. And that is a place where I can come in here, I can put the exact square footage I just got, which is 3547. I'm going to go here 3547. And based upon that price, it's going to immediately spit out my bi weekly and weekly mowing price with my budgeted hours. And what that is pulling from is this rate matrix down here. And this is again what we're going to build into Copilot here in the next couple of months. But for now, it can literally give you, give me all of my pricing based on the square footage of the lot. It also gives me all my other pricing for dethatching, corporation overseeding, etc. But literally it's going to give me the price for my weekly service based upon a certain range of values. And that value is simply square footage. Now, in this case, 5,000 square feet is the minimum price that I am going to be at $40. So anything less than 5,000 square feet is going to be $40, because we already know that it's under 5,000 square feet. I already know it's going to be $40. Prefer a weekly service, $60 for biweekly. Now, this is the stage, though, where you have to use a little bit of intuition. Because when I look at the street view, I know that there's gonna be a lot of vehicles that have to edge around and. And like, it's not gonna be super easy. There's all of these gaps, there's sidewalks to edge around. There's a lot of edgeable surface because the perimeter with all the sidewalks and the flower beds, so it's absolutely going to be an additional charge. And this is why I'm not a huge fan of just using the square footage. You're gonna have to look at this property like, okay, is there potentially if this is a residential property, is there gates? Is there irrigation? These are things that we ask over the phones when the customer's calling. We talk while we're measuring the property we are asking about, do they have pets? Do they have an irrigation system? Do they have an invisible fence? Do they have a. And usually we can see if there's a gate or if there's a fence because that's going to limit the size of mower that I get into the backyard. So in this case, even though my pricing matrix is telling me that I'm going to charge $40 for weekly and $60 for bi weekly, I might end up spending or charging what, $50 or $55, simply due to the fact that there's going to be a lot more edging on this property versus a property that was just completely rectangle and you could go back and forth on the mower. I'm going to go ahead and save measurements to that property so that customer always has those measurements affiliated with their account. And now let's go ahead and talk about why this is better than going and visiting the customer in person or walking around their property or even just doing a drive by, because doing a drive by estimate makes sense. You just drive by the property, kind of look around, make sure everything's good. You're looking for. Basically what we just talked about here. Are there fences, are there gates, are there cars? And a lot of edible surfaces. But the thing is, if I have to spend 20, 30 minutes driving to someone's house, you know, driving around their property, if I have to talk to them for 10 or 15 minutes, I can save all of that time simply by doing it over the phone, or at the very worst, get the estimate request form, come into your email and then you do that, do it that night. I could literally do 10 or 15 of these in one hour if I'm doing them via square footage, versus doing maybe one or two per hour if I'm going to the property, meeting the customer and talking with them in person. There's going to be a little bit less accuracy on this type of measurement tool versus being in person because you'll see every single thing in live time, whereas this image is probably a year or two old. However. However, the loss of accuracy is made up for in the speed gained because I can get this estimate to the customer within a matter of minutes or potentially live on the phone versus having to wait a day or two before I can route in their actual in person visit and going to their property in person. So by the time they've tried to call five other providers and look for a lawn care quote, I've literally already been able to give them the price over the phone, get their credit card information on file and get them on the schedule and ready to go for next week for their first mowing service. Now, another big downside that I always thought of was the fact that the first visit, I don't know how long the grass is, what if it's overgrown? What if I get there and all of a sudden it's a foot and a half tall and it takes me three hours instead of the expected half hour to mow the lawn the first time. Well, it's solved by charging a permanent pricing on the very first visit. So if you look back here on the pricing matrix, you can see here for this specific location, we charge $1.33 per minute per man on the first visit. And so that way if lawn is going to take three hours on the very first visit, I'm going to charge $1.33. That's $90 per hour on that first visit. So it's going to be $270 for that first visit. That's three hours times $90 for that first visit. Because overgrown and honestly most of the time customers never even bat an eye at this because the only reason they would is if they know the grass is crazy overgrown and they're trying to take advantage of someone by doing pricing over the phone. Now I was very hesitant to switch from in person estimates where I'd go and meet the customer and walk on the property. I was very hesitant to switch from that over into doing pricing per square foot. However, watch this video here for even more in detailed reasoning as to what you can do to protect yourself from overgrown lawns and gates and all the other factors and reasons and the excuses that I made as to why I could not do this type of pricing.
