Summary: How to stand firm on your lawn care prices - GopherHaul 73 Lawn Care Business Book Show. http://www.gopherforum.com - Hello everyone, this is Steve here and welcome to GopherHaul. If you haven't started your business yet, what are you waiting for, if you don't start your business this year, you'll be at least one year older when you do, so get started today. Today we have a great topic to talk about. We're going to be talking about how to stand firm on your lawn care prices. Before we dive into that, I want to point out a few tools to help your business grow. I have just released my latest book and ebook entitled Lawn Care Business Bidding Tips, Upsells, And Disasters To Avoid. It's available online at book stores like amazon. https://www.createspace.com/4026703 This book and ebook is full of information on the entire lawn care business bidding process, including many examples. It also talks about upsells you can consider offering and how to avoid common mistakes lawn care business owners make that can turn a job into a disaster. It is a huge book at 596 pages, so with this book, you will have plenty of reading for a while! Also if you have an Android phone, visit the android store and search for the GopherHaul Lawn Care Estimators. There are six different ones that cover different types of jobs you may be bidding on. Such as lawn mowing, snow plowing, pressure washing and mulch jobs. Take the guesstimate out of your estimate with these lawn care business calculators. Now back to our topic. There will always be a certain group of lawn care customers out there who think your estimate price is the price they can start bargaining with you at. At times you may want a job more so than others and because of that, you may be willing to be a little more flexible on the price. However there are going to be other times when you are pretty busy and don't need to get every job you bid on. Here is an example of how to hold firm on your prices from the Gopher Lawn Care Business Forum. It may help you in dealing with customers who want to haggle. One lawn care business owner wrote "I wanted to try and promote a new service just to see what kind of response I would get so I ran an ad last Friday for post hole digging and amazingly enough, I got a pile of inquiries from it. With a little research on my part I found I have very little competition for post hole digging. There is a local fence company that offers it and rental stores have the equipment to do it. But after checking online, through the phone books, I found the one company that digs post holes is three times my rate. The way I look at it, if I am grossing $90 an hour plus and making, in my case about 50% profit before depreciation and taxes, then I am fine with the price I am charging. Now I know we all have clients that try to beat us up a little on pricing, sometimes it's a game, I guess today I don't want to play. Three prospects wrote back to my reply saying they needed a better price. This really got me mad, so I went out for a walk to cool down before I wrote them back with the following..... "Thank you for your reply to my estimate. I am already the cheapest in the city for this service, in fact I believe there is only one company in the city that offers it. The equipment we use to perform this job is over $28,000, so in short, no I can not and will not offer a better price. You can try a rental unit (hand held or tow) a mini excavator like ours can be rented for $450.00 a day plus $150.00 transportation from various rental companies in the area I if you'd like. Before you attempt this, I should warn you that I have done some research and am shocked at the number of personal injuries and back issues that happen by people using the rental units. It would seem mainly due to a lack of experience." With that email. I wanted to get my point across without being too strong. From that, I received two email replies both with about the same wording. They wrote: "I understand, and would like to hire you. Let's schedule a day and time when you are available next , thanks xxxxxx or call me at xxx-xxxx" So I think there are times when we really have to stand our ground and not roll on pricing. I may be in a little different situation than most in that if I don't get new jobs it's not the end of the world, we have lots to do. I was just looking for something different to do with the excavators I have. When customers get themselves in a mess, quite often they try to make their problem ours. Watch for this as they will sneak this in. It is not our problem and if you allow a client to make it your problem, you are headed for disaster.So until the next time we meet always remember to dream it, build it, Gopher it!
