Mike Andes teaches landscapers how to handle price pushback. Ask what the client can spend, offer 10% discounts for off-season work, or shrink the scope to fit their budget. Only discount if you have spare capacity or they shift timing.
When I first started my landscaping business, I thought I would never, ever negotiate on price. And if a customer said something was too expensive, honestly, I just kind of hit a roadblock. I'd be like, hey, yeah, you need your mowing service or you need your landscaping service, and you might have a different service that you can't sell. As soon as the customer says, I can't afford it or that's too expensive.
This video is going to give you the tools and exactly the answers you.
Need when someone says the price is too high. Because I guarantee you, you can close the deal and, and you can bring down the price and you'll still make money.
Now it's easy to say, never change your prices, Never go discounts, never give any sort of money off whatsoever. And I actually don't agree with that. I think I'm willing to negotiate if I'm trying to grow and I need the work, because I need the work more than I need that top dollar profit margin. But if I'm booked out like six, eight weeks into the future, I have tons of leads pouring in. Yeah, don't discount your prices. But here's one way to look at price negotiation. And then whether or not you, you should be actually discounting your services, I am willing to give a discount if someone else is willing to concede on timing. For example, it's the middle of spring rush. I'm super busy. I'm booked out five, six weeks, and I have leads pouring in. I can't get to the work. I'm super overwhelmed. Someone's like, oh, this isn't gonna work for my budget. Hey, I'm willing to give them a 10% discount if they're willing to do the project in the middle of winter. Hey, it's gonna be like six or seven months. But if you're willing to concede on timing, willing to give you a discount.
Why?
Because I need as much work in my off season as possible. So if you can take time insensitive jobs and push them into your off season from when you're really busy to when you don't have a lot of work coming in, I'd recommend that being a time when I'm okay with discounting. Now, if someone also says, hey, it's not inside my budget, things are too expensive, or, you know, you're, you're too expensive or whatever it might be. The other thing that I can do is change the scope of the work. So the thing that really ties this all in together, though, is like, you got to know their budget and so whether you're doing follow up phone calls or customer says, hey, I got to think about it, this is a little too expensive or whatever. I need to know what their budget is. It's above my budget. Okay, great. What is your budget? If they give you a number, then I can work with them because I can either delay the project off into my off season or I can change the scope of work to fit inside their budget. If they say their budget is $5,000 and my estimate, my current proposal is $7,000, that's fine. I will work with them on what is included for their budget, the 5,000. So that's why again, we were going to have the estimate split up in as many chunks as possible. And maybe I just cut back on how many trees I'm installing or how many, how many yards of mulch or I don't include a certain area of the project in order to fit inside their budget. So I'm okay with conceding on price, but I'm only going to concede if they're willing to move it into the off season or if they're going to actually cut out things from the job itself and reduce the scope of the work being done. The only other time to discount is if you have massive amounts of excess capacity. So excess capacity is going to be coming in the form of capacity. You have a whole bunch of trucks, you have a whole bunch of employees. You could do way more work than what you're currently doing. That's the only other time I would reduce the price and give them a discount to get the job on the schedule. So if anyone ever tells you that you'll never move on price, realize that if a customer is willing to work with you or if you're in the position where you need to get jobs on the schedule, that's when I'm willing to discount. Assuming I know what their budget is, I can close the deal. Especially if I'm on the phone doing a follow up phone call and get the deal closed immediately.
I mentioned that one of the reasons you would lower your price is if the customer is willing to move their job into the off season.
When you don't have as many jobs and you don't have as many leads coming in.
But in the perfect world, we wouldn't have an off season, we'd have leads coming in year round, we'd have revenues staying consistent year round, and we would have a trailing off of our profits at the end of the year. If you have that problem, I want to help you solve it.
I believe it is the Achilles heel.
Of every home service business. And for that reason, at Blue Collar Summit this coming January in Seattle, we going to fix it once and for all. I'm going to give you the tracks, the resources and the templates to make sure you get leads, revenue and profits year round. Go to blue collarsumpit.com and book your tickets today.
