Regardless of if your business is only made up of a few employees or hundreds, if you own a landscape company, you know how crucial it is to set the right price for each project. Inaccurate project pricing can cause issues with achieving profit margins and sometimes cause inconsistencies between invoices and estimates. A nightmare can come to life when your business has spent more on completing a job than what’s been paid.

Additionally, setting a project price that’s competitive with other landscape companies is important if you want to win more jobs. Ultimately, knowing where the market’s at and how to set proper pricing will impact your bottom line.

SatQuote is measuring and quoting software that stores data from previous jobs, generates accurate data alongside high-resolution imagery, allows your business to design concepts and set pricing to create quality quotes that sell.

Why setting the right price for your landscape job matters

So, why is it important to set the right price and how will this benefit your business? It all comes down to making money! Businesses don’t want to spend more than what they’re paid to complete a job. Keeping record of resources needed to complete a job and labor costs can help make future projections and potentially save a lot of money. Additionally, it’s crucial to keep an eye on the market to determine competitive pricing and outbid other businesses.

The more consistent the pricing and the more accurate the data is, the better. Without consistent pricing and accurate data, businesses….

• may not keep record of accurate job pricing to find out how much to budget for another job or consider performance history.
• may not have accurate data about the costs of labor.
• may not have a projection of how many resources are needed.
• may not offer competitive pricing.

This is where SatQuote can step in and save your business ample time and money. Store data from previous jobs, generate accurate measurements and labor costs, and automatically include profits and markets into project estimates with SatQuote.

Best practices for project pricing

Tip 1: Find out what resources you will need.

The first thing you should look into is how many resources are going to be required for a job. Business should take into consideration factors like:

• How many people are going to be needed to get the job done
• How much your business will pay employees for labor
• How much materials (like sod, mulch, gravel, wood, plants, etc.) will be needed to cover the required area
• The kinds of equipment will the team need. Can the equipment arrive with the crew or does your businesses need to pay for additional transport for equipment like a tractor?

Having a thorough idea of how much all of this is going to cost will help businesses set an appropriate price to complete the job successfully and also achieve profit margin.

Along with future pricing adjustments comes an understanding of when businesses will need new equipment, stock up on resources and keep track of frequent customer types. Having this data from previous jobs stored in SatQuote will help businesses accurately estimate cost of labor and resource pricing.

Tip 2: Customize pricing to fit the customer’s needs.

Next, what kind of pricing can businesses set to fit the customer’s individual needs? As a professional landscaper, this is nothing new—every project is different. Things to take into consideration for pricing include the location of the project, the soil type, any obstacles in the landscape that might get in the way like trees or large boulders and site conditions or hazards.

This goes hand-in-hand with the first tip as it will help build a better idea of what to expect at a job site to quote properly.

As a measuring and quoting software, SatQuote can help set quotes that sell. Additionally, it will streamline resources and pricing so that businesses have insight about which types of jobs yield the most profit.

Tip 3: Take pricing from previous jobs into consideration for future estimates.

As previously mentioned, having a clear record of previous jobs can help with future projections of other job pricing. Maybe certain problems arose at a previous job that cost the team extra time and money like not having enough resources—if businesses keep a record of this, they can prepare for it next time and have plenty of resources ready when it comes time to complete the project.

Having a record of when you may have underquoted or over-quoted a job will help so businesses can better estimate budgets in the future.

SatQuote stores data from previous jobs, allowing businesses to keep record of any under- or over-quoted jobs for future pricing adjustments.

Tip 4: Consider markups and profit margin.

This is one of the most important things that should done for businesses: factor in markups and profits. The whole point of the project is to make money. In addition to calculating the right amount of resources and labor, aim for a certain profit or markup so that businesses can do more than break even.

When using SatQuote’s online measuring and quoting platform, profits and markups will automatically be included in project estimates. As an online software platform, businesses can use SatQuote anywhere. Use SatQuote’s software to reduce job site visits when creating estimates. In turn, this saves both the business and customer’s time.

For more information about using SatQuote to keep record of accurate data, create high-quality quotes and streamline processes to determine labor needs and the amount of materials and costs, check out How to Win More Bids with Your Landscape Project Proposal.