MAKE $1,000/DAY | Fall Leaf Cleanups & Bush Trimming (w/NUMBERS)

Our total direct cost on this job is $599. Where'd I get that number from? It's totally wrong. Oh, what did I do? How did I come up with that number?

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It's Mike Andes, and today I'm going to be talking about how you can make $1,000 per day cleaning up leaves, trimming bushes, and doing fall cleanups. I recently talked about this, and a lot of people were saying there's just no way you can make $1,000 on a leaf cleanup. Today I'm going to break down the numbers. We're going to show some really cool footage of us trimming some bushes, doing leaf cleanups, and doing these fall property clamps that can make you a lot of money in your lawn care and landscap. Here we go.

Okay, so I'm going to actually run you through the numbers of an actual job that is a bush trimming, leaf cleanup, kind of a fall property cleanup, where we're going to trim some hedges, maybe limb up a couple trees, pull the weeds out of flower beds. We're going to remove all the leaves and any debris, like fallen branches that are in the lawn, in the flower beds around the house, like a full property cleanup. Okay, so let's go ahead and run through the numbers. So, first of all, we're going to be charging the client on our estimate $50 per man hour. We're going to assume we're going to have budgeted hours of 16 hours, which means the total labor expense for this job is $800. That's the bulk of the revenue coming this job is that $800. Now, I believe that your minimum hourly rate needs to be $50 per man hour. I used to say 40, but I have officially changed my mind to 50 because the cost of labor is going up so much with inflation. A lot of the costs that we're going to talk about later in this video are going up.

So we're already at $800 for the cost of labor, and now we're going to charge $149 for the cost of the dump fees. At the end of the day, whether you're renting land, whether you are actually taking the debris to the dump and you're being charged for it, you should be charging, number one, the cost of debris management. Okay, when I say debris management, it might mean that you're dumping on your property. But guess what? You pay a mortgage on that property. You have to manage the debris with an excavator. You have to level things out. You have to decompose it, you have to turn all of the clippings and the leaves and take care of that space. And real estate costs money. Therefore you should be passing that cost of the debris management along to the client. The dump fee should also cover any rental of space or like storage space. If you have a storage container or maybe rent some land, it should cover your rent and storage costs as well. Even if your actual direct cost of the dumping is not $149 in this case, I still want to charge 149. We'll get into why in a second.

I'm also going to charge $60 as an estimate fee on this job. Now, I'm not going to charge that before. Like before I even show up to the property, it's going to be baked in along with $800. So technically I'm going to be charging $860 on this job for labor because I'm going to bake $60 in as an estimate fee. You know, why would you charge an estimate fee? Like, what's the point of that? Because you've got to make sure you have overhead recovery. We're going to talk about overhead in just a second and what the actual profit numbers on this job are going to be. But let's first assume we're charging $60 for this estimate fee. And the reason we're doing that is to cover the cost of creating the estimate. You say, well, it doesn't cost me anything to the estimate. I just show up and I talk to the person I make it. Well, right now, yes. But as you grow, you're going to need other supporting roles to answer the phone to create the estimate, put the numbers together, send it out to the client to answer the emails and the work, change orders to actually get the job on the schedule. You're gonna eventually, as you grow even more, have to hire an estimator to drive around to properties and meet with the clients. And they're gonna have to have to have a vehicle driving around all day long. That is the cost of doing business. And as you grow, that overhead is gonna continually grow. And that's why a lot of people, as they grow their business, they don't actually make more profit. Cause they don't build in recovery. Because right now it's technically quote, unquote free for you to drive around and do all the estimates and answer all the phone calls and do all the estimates. You work 14, 16 hours a day. But that's not going to be happening. When you hire someone and they're getting paid by the hour or when they're driving a vehicle around all day long. Those are costs of doing business. And you've got to make sure that you, number one, make up for the cost of an office person. And you've got to make sure that you make up for the cost of an estimator. Because as your business grows, you're going to need those roles and those are overhead. They don't make more revenue for the business. The cost of doing business. And you need to make sure you cover that with charging an estimate fee. So the total cost in this job, when we include the labor, the estimate fee and the dumping fees is a total of $1,009 to the total price to the customer. So there's our thousand dollar cleanup. It's gonna be a one day project for two guys. So 16 budget hours should be an entire day. And let's just assume like a 30, 30 minutes of drive time there and back. So let's break down the numbers on this job because some people are like you're ripping the customer off, you're charging all these dump fees, you're charging estimate fees and you're charging crazy amounts for labor. All right, down the numbers.

All right, so the labor in this job, let's assume $20 per hour is what we're going to be paying our employees. So we have, we have 16 budget hours on the job. That's how long it's going to take on the job. But we also need to assume that there's some drive time, maybe it's 20 minute drive there and back, but then they got to load and unload some of the equipment and the debris, etc. So I'm going to go ahead and assume 18 total clocked hours for this day. Okay, so 18 clocked hours, multiply that by 20. I'm gonna come up to $360 for the cost, the direct labor cost of this project that's gonna go to my employees. Now If I'm using P4P pay for performance, I'm gonna give a fixed number, which really helps here because it doesn't matter how long the job takes. If they get done really early, they make the same amount of money. If they take way longer, they make the same amount of money. So that really helps P4P sense or pay for performance where the employee, instead of getting paid by the hour, they get a percentage of the labor revenue. But let's go ahead and assume you don't use P4P and we're paying the employee $20 per hour. And it's gonna take them 18 man hours, so nine hours each, eight hours on the job site, and a drive time of one hour there and back.

Now let's talk about direct cost of dumping, because let's assume in this scen that I don't have a big shop and I actually have to take the debris to the dump and I've actually got to go there and pay them to get weighed and I have to get dumped out and all the rest of it, $50. Let's assume $50 in this job is gonna cost just for like dumping a whole dump trailer of debris, all the leaves and the branches and all the shavings from the boxwoods and the branches, everything. Big pile of debris in the back of a dump trailer that we're gonna go take to the dump. And, and we're going to have to pay $50 because of the gross weight of the vehicle. So if we add up the direct cost of labor, $360, and the actual direct cost of the dumping itself at the dump, it's going to cost a grand total of $410. And you're like, this is great. I'm literally making like 59% gross profit on this job because I'm charging $1,009 and I'm only having to pay $410 in expenses. Sounds great, but this is the part that a lot of people forget about. And this a lot of times this is the kind of math that a customer is going to run in their mind. Like, man, this person's ripping me off. They're going to only have to pay like $400 and I'm going to have to pay a thousand. This is crazy. Let me break down the numbers though, because a lot of owners, in their mind, they can't justify it and therefore they charge less than $50 per hour. They don't charge an estimate fee, they don't charge dumping fees. But let's break down the real math because there's indirect labor, alright? So indirect labor we're gonna assume is $40 per hour. Because the indirect labor comes in the cost of you as the owner typically, or the most experienced person going out and doing the estimate, talking to the customer, answering their phone call, going out and meeting them, walking around their house, showing what bushes you want trimmed, all of that stuff. That's indirect labor, meaning it doesn't actually go into the job itself, but takes that labor in order to actually get the job on the books, in order, on the schedule, sell the job, talk to the customer answer the phone, the office person. All that indirect labor we're gonna assume is two hours. Alright? That's like driving the customer's house, talking to them, selling them on the job, answering questions on the phone, sending the bill at the end of the month or at the end of the day, charging their credit card. All of that labor, whether you are doing it or an office person doing it costs money. And you're like, well, no, I don't have to, I don't pay myself, so I don't know. At the end of the day you've got to look at this as indirect labor. And let's assume $40 per hour for two hours on this job. That's $80 of indirect labor cost. Now let's assume the cost of fuel is 20 bucks. I think I'm being pretty generous here because it's probably going to be more like 30 or 40 by the time you include all the hedge trimmers running all day long. And then you got this big truck and a trailer like $20 is very conservative. So $20 for the cost of fuel. Let's assume that $50 is the storage of your trucks for just one day. Okay, so maybe you're renting a shop space or maybe some storage facility and you're paying 1500 bucks a month. You divide that by 30, that's $50. So $50 for storage of your shop space and your trucks and your equipment, etc. Now let's assume $30 is going to be taken off of this job for the cost of liability and auto insurance. I think this is very conservative because again, if you're going to pay for a couple trucks and your business liability insurance, you're going to be looking at least, you know, $500,000 a month. If you have a little business with a few trucks, few employees, you're making 3, $400,000 a year. You're going to be looking at around $30 per day towards this cost of insurance from this one job. Now let's look at the cost of the equipment, the equipment maintenance and the dump trailer. Because I got to get this double axle dump trailer that's going to be able to dump thousands of pounds of debris to the dump. Therefore, I might have to pay, you know, eight, $9,000 in order to get this big dump trailer, maybe a 7 by 14. Whatever it is, I've got this big dump trailer and it has a limited lifespan. It takes time to actually recoup the cost of buying that massive trailer. Also the equipment I've got hedge Trimmers, I've got blowers. I've got rakes and shovels. And $40, in my opinion, is actually a really good deal for just what we're allocating in terms of cost on this one job. Because we've also got to maintain all this equipment. We've got to grease the wheel bearings. We've got to replace the tires on the truck and the trailer. We got to do the oil changes. We've got to make sure that everything is primed on the chainsaws and that the chains are sharpened and replaced. All of that for 40 bucks. That's probably what it's going to cost, at least on this job. Truck payment. Maybe you don't own the truck outright. You own all equipment, and you've got to pay for the maintenance side for that and recouping the initial cost. But now maybe you have a truck payment of, I don't know, let's say maybe 400 bucks a month. Well, there's your truck payment. $15 a day. Let's assume $15 a day is going to go towards the truck payment. Well, now, if we're charging credit cards, we want our money right away from the client. Well, that's going to come at a cost, too, usually 3 to 4% if you're going online and they're processing that payment over your CRM. So that could be $35 more for just credit card processing. Now, if we assume, well, hey, we're gonna need software to have a CRM and track our our time and to be able to invoice the client and be able to keep track of everything in the office. Let's assume $10 a day for that because, you know, at least 300 bucks a month for your software. Now, payroll taxes and workers compensation, because guess what, you don't just pay the cost of labor. You got to pay payroll taxes and workers comp. And I'm very, very, very conservative when I say $20 a day for this, at least. Now let's assume that we actually have to do some marketing for this client and in order to get them as a customer, our customer acquisition cost, let's say it's $50, which is not super bad. $50 customer acquisition cost. If we have to spend some money on Facebook ads or Google Ads or maybe run some direct mail or door hangers, whatever it might be. Let's assume a $50 customer acquisition cost. So $50 for marketing. If we add up all of the direct costs like our labor and our dumping fees, along with all those indirect costs, our Total cost on this job is $760, which, if you take that out of our $1,009 project, all of a sudden we're making a $249 profit. Not so bad. But the 24% profit margin, and we're assuming that really everything went right. The guys got the job done in the right amount of time. It didn't take them way longer. There wasn't a call back to the job where the client's like, you know what? I want this bush trimmed back a little bit more. Actually, we're assuming that there wasn't any bad weather and slowed us down. We're assuming that there wasn't any flat tires or, you know, crazy broken equipment, things going wrong on the job site where we had to now go rent the equipment because we had to get the job done, but something broke. So assuming everything went right in this job, we made 24% profit margin. And I know for some people, that is a great margin. That's fantastic. But what people, a lot of times will be able to hide behind is the fact that they are not paying themselves as indirect labor. Because as the owner, we maybe help out on the job a little bit, but we might go do the estimate, but we don't really charge or take a salary. So it's not really a cost. There is a cost to the business. And if you're gonna grow and one day hire those positions out, you're going to need to recover that cost in the form of estimate fees and dump fees. So do not feel like you're robbing people when you're charging $1,000, $1,200 for a property cleanup that takes a whole day for two guys. And you're hauling away debris, and you have equipment there and chainsaws and hedge trimmers and blowers and a dump trailer and a big truck. There's cost of doing business. And if you know those numbers and you understand your numbers and. And you look at the end of the month and you realize you're not making very much money, you can have confidence to raise prices, confidence to charge at least $50 per hour, because guess what? $20 per hour in this labor market is the going rate. Plus you've got to have all the taxes and the cost of paid leave and paid time off. I didn't talk about benefits and all these other costs that go into running a business. So make sure you're charging what you're worth. Make sure you're covering your indirect costs that I just mentioned. I only mentioned probably half of there's a whole bunch more they're going to go into running your business. You've got to make sure that you're not just looking at, oh, I made $1,000 in the job, $400 in labor. I made 60% profit. That's not how it works. And furthermore, when a client comes back and tells you that they're not taking account, all the things that go wrong in your business, all the times when you actually lose money, a job, because Instead of taking 16 hours, it takes 25 hours because something happened wrong, or you started getting into a bush and start trimming it, it takes way longer than you expected, or you end up hauling away way more debris than expected. The dump fees go through the roof. These things happen all the time in your business. You need to know your numbers and you need to charge what you're worth. You need to make sure that you're looking at what are your indirect costs, the things that are hiding, little things that are hiding behind you. Working 14, 16 hours a day, you're trying to cover up all the patches of indirect labor that would otherwise be having to hire to someone else. You're just working like mad, fixing and patching all those holes. I hope this was helpful. If it was, make sure you check out landscapebusinesscourse.com lawncaremedia.com where you can actually get these instant quote door hangers so you can go door to door, actually write out what the price of these jobs are going to be and actually sell some of these. Leaf cleanups, fall cleanups, trimming bushes. This is the time as we head into September, October, November, December. This is the time to make some money and I hope this was helpful for you. I'm Mike Andes. We'll see you tomorrow. Hey, everyone, Mike Andes here. Thank you so much for watching the video. If you haven't already, click the links below to check out lawn Care media where you can get door hangers just like this for a variety of services for lawn care, landscaping, fertilization, irrigation, fall cleanups, and the list goes on and on and on. You can get all there and customize these and make money mowing lawns, doing landscaping services. We'll see you there.