Mike Andes quoted $2,000 to reshape a flower bed, the customer said no, then a competitor charged $10,000 for a bigger project with trees and irrigation. Andes learned he should have offered optional upgrades on the estimate instead of just the bare minimum.
April 20, 2025
About $2,000
$10,000
Installed a whole bunch of trees, drip irrigation, and a small retaining wall.
Customer asked me to change the shape of their flower bed. And so I gave them a quote for about $2,000 for putting in some edging and extending out their flower bed and adding a little bit of dimension to it and a bit of a curve. And they declined the estimate. And I was like, oh man, too bad. You know, it would have been a one nice one day job. Could have made some good money on it. Well, turns out the next week I saw one of my competitors locally doing the work on that customer's property. And we even did mowing service for that customer. And I was just like, why are they using someone else? They declined mine. So I went to this, this competitor and we had a good relationship. And I said, he, I gave a quote to them. What was your price? And I fully assumed it was gonna be $1,000 or $1,500. And they just underbid me. But they accepted a $10,000 estimate. And what they ended up doing was installing a whole bunch of trees, drip irrigation, and then putting a small retaining wall all along the flower bed. And here I was thinking that it was price that caused them to not buy the job. When reality, I undersold the customer. I didn't actually solve their problem. How can you get around this on your estimates? You can give optional line items or you can put recommended. This allows the customer choose and select which items of the estimate they actually want to add to their job. What I should have done is I should have had an estimate for what they told me they wanted, which was the edging a $2,000 job, but I should have given them an optional addition and that was to add the retaining wall.
