New lawn care owners shouldn't bundle services into monthly packages until they know how long each job takes. Track time on every visit first, then use that data to set prices that don't undercut your labor. Bundle later, once you have real numbers.
Should I be offering package services when trying to get my business off the ground? Personally, I didn't. When you're just getting started, there's so much you don't know yet, like tracking our time on every property and how long the budget hours are going to take. So to package this stuff together in like one price or one monthly price, I don't think the most ideal. You may either overcharge way too much and not get the customers, or you might undercharge way too much and then you're basically working for super cheap labor. I would cut it up into individual services. And then from those services, we can start to gather our data. Like, for example, trimming the bushes. All right, well, how long is this going to generally take me? If it's going to take me 30 minutes, just a guess, that's how I would start to slice this up. But the thing is, is you're not going to have that data when you're going into this to know that it's going to be— take 30 minutes to trim those bushes. You're gonna have no idea. You're gonna be like, oh man, it's gonna be like 10 or 15 minutes, and then you're gonna start trimming, it's gonna take you 45 minutes to an hour. That happens all the time. It's so easy to trim the bushes, but the cleanup takes so much time, and it's really hard to account for that stuff. So I would actually cut it up into individual services. That way we could start to track the time on those visits, and then we can gather the data to figure out that down the road. I'm okay if you want to package the services down the road once we have that data and we know how much each job is going to take.
