Collaborate on Landscaping Invoice Template for Purchasing with Ease Using airSlate SignNow

Landscaping invoice template for Purchasing

how to bid landscaping jobs this video will walk you through step by step on exactly how to bid landscaping jobs for Success I've used this exact model for years and years it's simple it's proven and it's very effective I should note that this video is specifically for landscape jobs and construction jobs this video is not for how to bid Landscaping Maintenance those are way different profit margins and way different man hours involved there's so many people out there that saying you're needing different formulas different spreadsheets different algorithms and different computer programs I've done this business for a long time successfully and I completely disagree in fact I disagree so much I will show you why I think some of these things can be a big mistake and help you underbid a lot of things which is never good my belief is that you should have really good profits or do nothing at all a really wise businessman and a huge mentor to me once told me that you could sit on the couch and break even you could be with your family and break even so why would you bust your ass on a landscaping job just to break even it does doesn't make sense simply put I'm saying don't run a non-profit you need to profit from the start I've been in this landscape business came a long time and I know from experience that if you're not profiting you're going to burn out really quick it's just wasted time and effort there's many people out there that say you have to start somewhere and sometimes you have to do work for free to get your foot in the door I actually disagree there's a lot of people out there that offer business cheap to people that are newer landscapers saying do this work cheap and I'll get you more jobs down the road I know this to be false pretty much every time when someone's cheap they're usually cheap all the way through so don't fall for this trap either I know from experience that if you don't profit from the start you're going to lose energy and momentum and the momentum is the biggest thing you have going for you when you're trying to start a business and when you're trying to grow a business I truly believe it's far better to have a small Nimble business with super high profit margins than a huge business that has really low profit margins and a lot more headaches so this is the business model we're going to fall follow with this bidding system enough about that let's jump into how landscape jobs are priced I think some quick advice I could give you that would be really valuable as well would be that you need profits to recover from things you also need profits to grow you need profits to buy good equipment you need profits to attract and pay great employees you need profits to fix your trucks you need profits to save money you need profits for fun and hobbies and for many other reasons actually what's funny is being really profitable helps you to serve your clients much better it literally means you can afford to spend more time you can afford to be patient on that job you can afford to use the best materials you can afford to have the best employees there and you can afford to do extras for them too aim for fifty percent profit margins this sounds complicated but it's not it basically means that you profit fifty percent in your own pockets of the total amount you Bill your clients for example if you build a client a hundred dollars it means that you get to keep fifty dollars of that another example is that if you had a thousand dollar job it means that you get to keep 500 of it that is pure profit that goes straight into your pocket after you've paid all your expenses including labor materials gas everything all right let's jump right into this so this is our plan that we have this was a plan created by me and my team I removed um everything that was unnecessary from the plan and I gathered some totals a lot of times when you get a plan it'll show you a lot of square footage and it'll show you a scale and you'll know exactly how to measure if you don't know how to measure plans I have a different video on that and I think that'll help you a lot so first I thought I'd give you a breakdown of the plan uh currently this is a new build and there is no Landscaping there it is basically a blank slate this is all dirt this entire thing the only thing he has is is an existing covered patio the main thing he wants is a nice low maintenance yard so I think we pretty much delivered that for him so here we go um we're extending his patio so he has a little bit more area for guests and a grill and from there we're doing a concrete walkway or a flagstone stepper walkway all the way to his front driveway through his side gate that way it can make ease for him to walk through the gravel we are also doing this nice little Crusher fine walkway because he wants to put a fire pit here or something decorative eventually it was overall a different color change to add add a little bit of a difference and make this look a little bit more like a contrast and just nicer yard um he didn't want anything expensive but he did want a nice border so we didn't build this to be a retaining wall but we built it to be decorative kind of divider of blocks just one block tall with those little lows Keystone blocks um we do have a synthetic lawn this one will be a pet Turf for his dogs the sun will set in this location so we do have a tree here for future shade and we do have a few other things that are going to be really nice as far as plantings go we have a bit of cobblestone here just to break up this whole vast sea of gray gravel and we do have some plantings here that are evergreens to block the view from his neighbors in this direction um things here flower at different times of the year and it's a nice simple low maintenance yard Okay so I also printed out a little 3D copy of this so you can understand a little bit better what's going on with this yard you can see this is the existing home this is his extension of patio walkway leading past the side gate a little bit of color differences some nice plantings we do have some landscape lights and this nice little border to separate the tan gravel from the gray and to add a nice planting area so this is what it's going to look like okay so starting out if you are brand brand new to doing something like this and you're ready to rock and roll the best thing I can do is tell you to gather all these totals and call a few other local landscapers who are kind of a one to two man operation and try and get prices try and get prices over the phone similar to this so you know that your prices are more or less in the ball bark range I don't want you overestimating and I don't want you underestimating so that's the best way to kind of cheat the system and try and use other people to at least tell you what's kind of kosher for your Market also when you're new I recommend that you figure out a rate that you want to pay yourself ideally it would be at least double to Triple of what you're making your previous hourly job the benefit to this is that if you happen to get injured or something happens in your life you can at least pay someone else to do this work for you and you won't lose money for everyone else I'm guessing you have a team of at least a few people one or two people or more and what I want you to do is make sure that you figure out a daily rate I want you to figure out a daily rate for your team I have horrible handwriting but bear with me that includes all payroll all attacks matching all work compensation all insurances and anything else Etc so I'm going to break this down for you a little bit as a hypothetical showing you what happens if you have about five people so I'm going to scoot this aside we're going to say we have one employee who is making twenty dollars per hour let's say then let's say we have two people who are each making about Seventeen dollars per hour then let's say we have I don't know another two people that are a little bit newer to your company and they're kind of getting nestled in and they're at fifteen dollars per hour these are just hypotheticals so this one person during an eight hour day is going to make 160 dollars these two people each when you combine them is about 272. these two people at this rate for eight hours is about 240 dollars as a total you're looking at 672 dollars for one day and that's just labor okay got that piece great now let's say the taxes on this because a lot of employers depending on the state you're in you have to match taxes and pay other things on them so on average on this 160 I'll plan to pay about 33 dollars on this 270 I plan to pay about 50 57 dollars and on this one I'll plan to pay about fifty dollars this is a hundred and forty dollars on tax now let's take a few other things um we also have our workman's comp I'll say comp is let's just say it's about fifteen dollars and then we have our insurance foreign is going to take a little SEC so we're going to take our total monthly insurance bill I'll take a total so a total let's say our total monthly we're spending with trucks and everything about 2k per month well there's about 20 days of working days average in a month so we're going to divide that by 20 days when we do that when we divide 2000 by 20 we end up with a hundred dollars per day we want to deal with working days not all the days of the month because there's weekends and we're not charging for our weekends basically so when you take this hundred dollars this fifteen dollars the 672 and this that's a grand total of 900 twenty seven dollars that's our total daily rate for our team and as your team changes and as your team fluctuates this is going to change and you always need to be aware of this number right here this number is very important okay so now we know our total daily rate for our team this is the most important number let's move on I'm going to grab a new paper for you guys okay so what I do with the job like this is I like to break apart this job and give my clients everything in pieces let me Zoom back and show you why let's say we give a customer a bid that has one number on it and it's 25k let's say this customer is going to instantly be like wow what the heck this is crazy but if we give them a bid a better bid with something that's 5K 10K 10K 2.5 k and 2.5 k oh well that's 30. but you get the point so this in total we're not going to mention it but this in total is 25k this is going to make a happy client because they can see the breakdown of every single cost itemized out and it becomes much more difficult for them to argue and price with that because they can see exactly where all your costs are going it also helps people who are trying to budget more and who might do this in phases or people who might want to do certain aspects of this themselves and hire you for certain things okay so now that we got that covered let's Dive In here's our bid I do this the old school way by paper all of my jobs do this for my average job this only takes me about five to ten minutes per job even less if it's something really simple so you'll see how fast this goes but I'll walk you through it and initially it'll go slower because I'm of course teaching you how so let's dive in um first I usually always start with the prep work um for me I think it's always best because a lot of times your prep work and your demo are a cost that a lot of people don't look into and that's a cost that can kind of jump up and sneak up on you so prep this yard the Builder actually prepped all of this where this home is in the county of this film is they actually make the Builder prep this so this is prepped my prep is zero dollars um if it was in there um the rest of the planning I'll show you will break that down but for now the prep is zero now the next thing I usually move on to is irrigation now the irrigation I do this yard actually comes with Irrigation in the front yard back out here way out here there's irrigation all I have to do with my team I've done a bunch of homes in this neighborhood I know all I have to do is tie into this valve box that they have ADD plus one valve and basically Loop a drip line all the way around okay so I know from experience and if not you can kind of do some testing and figure this out slowly but I know that I can make this one drip line installed in one day with one team and add everything with the valve box that I need so we're going to jump in here to air irrigation all right so we know that this is going to take one day so that equals 920 seven dollars wow my handwriting 927 dollars now I know from parts that my parts I know from experience of my parts are about six hundred and fifty dollars so to be honest this number I'm going to bring up my trusty calculator a lot of people make fun of me that I use calculators but I don't want to add those numbers up I have better things for my brain to do so 927 plus 650 is 15.77. so that's my total cost got it okay so now I know that on all of my work I need at least 50 percent margins on everything so that would mean that I basically just mimic this number so all right down 1577 for me times two so we're looking at 31 54. this is my irrigation price that I'm going to bill my client for Haley said I'm going to quote my client for okay so next up let's price up all these plants all righty okay so actually I'm going to put it like this just to make it easy for plants I go through and I go through size as biggest to smallest and I'll show you why so I can see we have one Autumn purple Ash here had a two inch tree this is two inch that's a pretty big caliper tree I'll look through and there's no other two inch trees so I'm gonna write down that I have one two inch tree and those are usually 250 dollars a piece got that so now my next biggest size I see is a 15 gallon it's here if I have 15s here and I have 15s here so when I go and count I have one two three four five fifteen gallon now I'm going to take my calculator a lot of people make fun of me using a calculator but I have way better things for my brain to work on so I know that these 15 gallon plants might cost are 115 on average one one five times five equals 575 okay now to clean things up a bit I'm going to scratch through all the plants I have done and I'm going to see what my lowest plant is in size from here it's the five gallons I'll just draw a circle next to all these five gallons looks like we have one two three four five six seven eight nine ten plus five so 15 plus 3. so let's say 13 plants 13 5 gallon and I know that these are 35 each on average so 13 oh 13 times 5. 65. oh what am I doing sorry okay I have 13 times 35 dollars per plant is 455 dollars okay next up we have one gallons we have this one and this one so we have two plus one three one gal these are eleven dollars each so that equals thirty three dollars let's add all of this up so we have 250 plus 575 plus four five five plus thirty three this is one three one three that's my plant cost all right I'm gonna add in here about two dollars or about not two dollars two hundred dollars and soil and I know that my team can all of these plants and deliver them all in one day that's an easy job for them they can do that many plants the more you do this the more you realize what your teams can do per day with everything with me as a per day cost so when we go back through this and we won't need our 3D thing any longer okay so so I have a day of Labor so I'll just say 927 for one day got it now basically I'm going to think is there anything else that we need to do with that honestly I'm gonna have two trucks I'm gonna have my fourman's truck and one of my other trucks running so I'm going to consider that by the time we deliver all this that we're going to use about a hundred and twenty dollars in gas so I can't think of anything else we have the irrigation covered we have the plants that we're now covered so we're going to Total that up so we take the 1313 plus 200 plus 927 Plus 120. that's 25.60 25.60 if I wanted a 50 margin I would double that instead with the plants I'm going to realize that there's some warranty so just because of that I'm going to put 3K for me total cost on the 3K for me so these plants are going to be 50 5 60. so that's the plants so we got the prep free we got the irrigation for 31.54 we have the plants for 55.60 now let's move on to the next part for the next part I'm going to do the concrete extension okay this concrete extension is 20 and a half feet by eight feet I don't price a lot of things by square foot but my subcontractor that does the concrete for me he does price everything by square foot so I do so we'll do two 0.5 times 8. that's 164 square feet so we have concrete is 164. okay my concrete guy he charges me eight dollars per square foot for for a great room finished concrete like that times eight is thirteen twelve so he's gonna charge me 1312 and I'm gonna make 13 12 for me so we got 26 24. foreign now I do know that in my market this is kind of a cheap price actually so I could very well get at least 3 000 for this but for now I'm going to just leave it at 26.24. I think that's pretty nice to basically make 1300 bucks for him coming for a partial day basically for free okay next up is the turf we have the turf on here so the turf is a little tricky because in reality it's um or on the plan it's 426 square feet but I'm gonna have to buy a piece of turf that is this big oh that's a horrible drawing and then cut out all the edges to make that happen if that makes sense so I also have some waste I still have to basically kind of charge for that waste just so I know I don't lose my ass basically for the turf I actually do have a Turf subcontractor he charges me um a pretty good rate for Turf actually less than my guys do put it in and he specializes in Turf so that's kind of nice but here's the deal he could just flake out one day and not have this and I could have this Turf that I need to and I need to make money on so instead I'm going to measure this Turf and figure out kind of what we're doing um I do know that my turf measurements are on one of these Pages for you okay so I know that this Turf measurement is 30 by 15. trust you can a calculator 30 times 15 is 450. so 450 square feet now my turf I know that the turf I'm using on that specific yard is four dollars per square well actually his his Turf is 350. 350 per foot so I know that 450 times 450 times 3.5 15.75 turf then I know that I'm gonna have to rent a tamper for 250 dollars temp I know that I'm going to have to bring in Crusher fines as a base course and those are going to be about 400 by the time I have my team deliver them base then I have about 100 in nails then I also have to do this steel board border that steel board is about 172 dollars and then I know that my guys actually can this whole thing in one day so I'm going to add one day rate and I'm going to think what if something messes up with this and we have to redo this so I'm actually going to charge a day and a half on this I think that's going to be a smart way to go because this is one really long day and instead I'd rather be safe than sorry so I'm going to do 927 times 1.5 1390 okay 13.90. what else we gonna need um I actually don't have a Turf broom so I'm going to say broom is it's a hundred dollar rental from a local place here then we have infill for 400 dollars and that's it so I'm going to add all this up 1575 plus 250 plus 400 plus 100 plus 172 Plus 13.90. Plus 100 plus 400. so we have 43.87 now I think that's already a pretty big price but I really like to make my 50 margins so I'm going to add 43 87 for me I'm going to times this by two that equals 87.74 so that's for the turf great so we have our concrete we have our turf we have our plants we have the prep work at zero and we have the irrigation we're almost there okay so let's work on the gravel portion now so this plan you can see that we have tan gravel back here we actually have totals so the tan gravel is 638 square feet the smoke Crusher finds right here is 232 we have cobblestones here for 74 and we have the gray the whole gray across the whole yard is 13.87. okay so for me this is all about matching up these different materials um the gray is 35 dollars per ton the tan is 72 dollars per ton the smoke is actually 35 as well per ton and the Cobble is 55 per ton okay so you can call your local gravel place to figure out mulch or gravel thickness and how much you need for it so let's break this down all the gray is 13 and 1887 square feet so 1387 and I'm going to put this in two inches thick for this particular job two inches thick unraveled that size I divide by 120. and I need 11.5 tons equals 11.5 times 35. dollars per ton times 35 so it's 404 plus 100 delivery charge equals 504 then we have my tan is 638 [Music] 638 divided by 120. 5.3 I'll say 5.5 times 72 . 5.5 times 72. it's 396 plus delivery equals 4 96. then I have the crusher is 232 divided by 2 that's 2 tons 35 is 70 plus the delivery equals 170. then the Cobblestone is different okay so for the Cobble this one actually divides by 50 because we're doing it four inches thick so we have 74. divided by 50. 1.448 equals 1.5 times 55 1.5 times 55. eighty two dollars and I'm gonna just have my team go and pick it up so I'm gonna say a hundred dollars next up we have fabric for this many square feet that much square footage means my fabric I know it's one big roll my one big roll is 178 dollars next up I also know that I have 70 linear feet of these so seven I'm gonna say block 70 feet equals get my calculator 70 times 0.65 because each block is about a foot and that's 0.65 so 40 wait 70 times oh no not 0.65 sorry 1.65 so 115 dollars a block I'll just round up and say 120. okay so for this project that's pretty much all the materials minus that little Boulder there there's a little Boulder I know one medium Boulder equals 72 dollars everything seems about 72 dollars today great and I know from experience that my team can move this much gravel in about a day and a half and by the time they lay this out really nice and put in the steel that's pretty much two days so I have two days nine two seven nine two seven times two that's eighteen fifty four that's my labor now I'm gonna also um add that steel board into that's about a hundred dollars in steel it's okay to guess if you round up I think that's always fine so I'm gonna include these steppers as something additional on the gravel but for now we pretty much have the whole gravel pretty much priced up so let's total this up 504 plus 4 9 6 Plus 170 plus 100 plus 178 Plus one two zero plus 72 plus 1854 Plus 100. so 35.94 for me 71.88 done that's my gravel price 71.88 okay now the steppers I know that that might counted it out that many steppers is 700 and four dollars and my labor to put that in surprisingly those take a long time so that's a whole day rate especially with delivery 704 24 is 16 28. so 1628 plus that's kind of a bonus I'm just going to say 1K for me so 26 28 for the steppers now let's bring on another piece of paper [Music] the only other thing that I think we have on here to be honest is the lighting now um I did the steel board edging totals just to let you know but here's the lighting um these little green dots I have on the plan so my team can see them easily those are up lights uh the red ones are reddish orange ones those ones are path lights so those alone shine down and um yeah so we still have a Transformer we still have a photocell and actually that's at this location on the house there's a plug right there for me so let's dive in with that so we're gonna go in here lighting okay so I know I measured this whole thing out this lighting wire equals 250 line feet exactly almost on the dot so that's a perfect 250 foot roll that equals 110 dollars now my timer I took the total of each of these lights and I know that each of these lights so let's see we have 5 and 10. so we have 15 lights 15 lights times six um the draw on them is six Watts or six amps I forget it doesn't matter if you need to know that but um so I need 90. so I'm going to get 120 watt timer 120 timer is um that timer is about 89 dollars at a Home Depot he just wanted the Home Depot brand once um to keep it nice and simple and to kind of save on costs so we have the wire we have the timer um the timer does come with a photocell okay now the fixtures so the five up lights you can look on Home Depot's website those are 36 dollars each and the 10 path lights those are 42. so 5 times 36 I don't want to do that in my head 5 times 36 180. and 10 by 42 is 420. now I also know from experience this is easily a one day job for my team I'm going to consider it a one day job just to be safe labor 9 27. this rate is to make sure I don't lose money because I'm also including insurance I'm also including numerous things in here so just another quick reminder 110 plus 89 plus 180 plus four two zero plus nine two seven twenty six so I'm going to round up and just say 2K for me that way after some gasoline and maybe a couple testings and warranties or maybe throwing in a bonus light in there I'm going to basically think that that could happen for free pretty nice so that's going to be 37 26. for lighting so let's just break it down and figure out the total of this I would send him when I go to send him a proposal here's a quick hack here's our prices basically so what I would do here's all of our prices okay I would go smallest to largest so I would go on here and find out what is the smallest number the smallest number is actually this concrete one so I would do this number one and so basically let me do a quick breakdown you want to give something small and ramp up and then something big so these are the big ticket items and these are the medium ticket items and these are the small ones people most people remember the beginning and the end does make the biggest impacts in a proposal and in First Impressions and last Impressions it's just human human nature really so what I try and do is find the number one then I'll find the second cheapest and that's these steps right here so this is number two I'm actually gonna put this last okay so we'll probably put that I'll break this down for you so we're gonna list this we're gonna list the concrete first for the 26 24. then my next highest price I'm going to say as the irrigation so I'm going to say irrigation is a 3154 that's done then my my biggest ones are the turf the gravel and the plants I'm going to basically go into my plants for the 55 60. so we got that we got that next I'm going to go up into my gravel well actually I'm going to go into my turf you can see I'm ramping up 87 70. okay now we're going gravel 70 188 so we got this covered we got this covered and we got this prep covered now I think from here we have everything except the lighting and the last steps of course so lighting 37 26 and then we have our steps lost steppers is 26 28 you can see my prices went from low right here to medium too high it basically goes low to medium to high that will help you get more jobs so let's set it up and just see what this job is out of curiosity so we have 26 24 plus 31 54 plus 5560 Plus eight seven seven zero Plus seven one eight eight plus three seven two six plus two six two eight thirty three six there we go so this yard this everything on here this person is going to spend about thirty three thousand six hundred fifty dollars a lot of these are hypotheticals just to show you where I get my numbers from just to show you how you can get your numbers from um this is probably whether you think it is or not about your industry standard um for me I can get about 33 35 000 for a yard like this all day every day this 33 000 um as you can see by the number of breakdowns of days you can see I have one day two three so it's three days we'll say four to watch over the concrete five six seven eight so we have eight working days that's about two weeks so there's 33.65 or 33 650. in two weeks this is not unrealistic this is a big number and yes this is a lot of money to make in two weeks this is why I'm in this business if you're ever in doubt about what to charge break it down rework all the numbers do it over and over again take your time be really slow price shop the best price call other landscapers see if that sounds right do Googling to see what common square footage pricing is I wouldn't tell you to go by square footage on most things but at least you can see it as a range just to see if you're kind of on the right track and just to make sure mostly that you're not lowballing yourself okay so let's do something else fun with this so I'm going to grab my calculator we're at 33 650. I'm going to divide that by two because I know I'm running pretty much 50 profit margins that's 1680 16 825 and profit wow foreign two weeks you can see or let's do this let's just divide that by eight working days that's twenty one hundred dollars per day twenty one hundred dollars in my pocket after all my expenses per day I don't know about you but that's a lot of money per day especially pocket especially putting in savings and you want to know the fun part this is for one job if you have multiple teams or multiple subcontractors you can do numerous jobs like these at any given time right now at the time of this filming I'm doing between three and eight jobs at any given time are moving and going on through different processes like gliding like gravel like concrete I have numerous concrete subcontractors going to do all this concrete on every single job before my team even gets there I even have one subcontractor that just goes and does this irrigation loop on all these standard yards on every yard before my team even gets there then you start buying things in bulk I'm getting this turf at a bulk price I'm getting this gravel at a bulk price you can see how this really starts to add up I really hope this motivates you I really hope this explains to you how this little tiny job could make me sixteen thousand dollars in less than two weeks this is absolutely achievable and if I can do it you guys can do it uh fun fact about me I live in the second to Forest state in the USA so if you're in the United States and you see me doing this that means without a doubt you can do this I started from somewhere too if you follow my videos and follow my my plans this is absolutely possible if you think that this is valuable if you guys think this info is valuable wait till you see what my private coaching group does that's a quick little insert to let you know that I can help you achieve this faster I can show you the way and walk you through step by step exactly how to get these projects exactly how to do these designs if you'd like and exactly how to make this much money this fast this is easily possible this is just the beginning so please go to my website look up the free resources please like And subscribe this video and please please please talk to yourself about joining my coaching group for doing more profit like this next up I thought it'd be really valuable if I provide you with a few tips of things not to do don't charge by square foot a lot of people in this industry charged by square feet what happens is you could have a set square foot rate but that could be for a front yard or it could happen in a backyard and be twice the distance it could be up a hill it could be on a slope and things can vary a lot so that's a good way for you to lose money I think it can be a good base just to double check your numbers but for now don't assume discharge by square foot if there's some intuition that a client is kind of crazy or kind of needy really just a little bit different someone that you're not getting along with or someone that seems abrasive or hard to please just don't work for them life is too short don't lower your price as much you can instead add a lot more value so if someone asks for a discount mention something else you'll include for free that's usually the best way to go about things than lowering your profit rates referring to projects don't talk about an end date the reason being is that if you finish sooner people will ask for discounts and if you finish longer people will be upset provide just general ballpark guidelines do not give one huge price for everything give numerous prices for each item for me and my business I'll give a price for lawn I'll give a price for irrigation I'll give a price for the trees and so on and so forth this is for two reasons it's a lot easier for a client to digest numerous different numbers than one big number and it's also a lot easier for clients to see where all the costs go and it's less negotiating power for them and it just is more profitable people usually succeed more when they break things down and people are much at much more apt to say yes don't guess on anything I know this sounds crazy but please don't guess on any numbers this is where money gets lost quick side note the busier you get the higher your profit margins need to get to compensate for that demand the slower you get the lower your profit margins need to get for me they ramp up in the summer and ramp down in the winter more or less by about 10 percent if there's anything at all you need please comment below or message me through Instagram don't let your nerves get the best of you you are worth a lot you need to Value yourself like I value you I know you can do this so put in 50 profit margins and hit send do it for yourself do it for your future I have done this a long time if you do this you'll understand why I've done this a long time I'm just simply asking you to trust me if you have a landscaping job or a construction job make sure you have 50 margins and hit send another tip I can give is that you should hustle to get so much business that it doesn't matter when people say no that's the whole goal of the game to get the high-end clients and leave the cheap people to other landscapers or they can just do it themselves straight up don't worry about the competition there's always going to be someone you cheaper than you and it's a losing game don't assume that materials have remained the same price this whole covid thing has proven that materials can fluctuate a lot and that's a good way for costs to be all over the place you don't want to play that game if you're enjoying this video please hit the like button please hit the Subscribe button right now before we move on that would mean a lot to me it helps me keep my momentum helps me keep creating these great videos for you guys okay next up I'm going to give you some tips on exactly what you should be doing you should charge for gas and you should charge for your driving time you should provide as much detail on pricing as possible on materials on square footage everything it means more to your clients it's much more clear for your clients and it's less for things to get messed up later especially when prices change or people make change orders basically with that just remove all possible assumptions if the prices you send get approved please figure out a legal contract and have your customer sign it to help cover your ass on your proposal you can also have a bullet point item that says if it's not directly mentioned it's not included this helps people from adding on little things and saying Oh I thought that was included that's the number one thing to basically lower profit margins and for clients to get a ripoff on top of you Clarity is always key especially when bidding things you want to make sure that there's as little assumptions as possible going into this if there's any uncertainty on what the customer is wanting or exactly what materials are to be used or what prices certain things are for materials I would call and make sure you gain certainty don't guess on things make certain when itemizing prices you should list the smaller ticket items up front then the medium priced ones in the towards the middle then the highest price items in the middle then ramp it down again and do the medium price ones towards the end and the another batch of lower ones towards the very very end people always remember the first things and the last things as the biggest impression so I've noticed my conversion rates of people saying yes to my estimates have gone up quite a lot when I've ramped it up like that you should call the client as soon as you send the proposal and tell them to check their inbox and just letting them know that everything is in there you should also assume different warranty costs and what the likelihood of you warrantying whatever you're installing is because that might affect your pricing as well okay so I hope that whole breakdown of everything showed you exactly what to do exactly what I do and why we're all doing it I hope you feel more confident so give this all a try and let me know in the comments how it goes for you I'm incredibly excited to hear all about your successes if you'd like to see an example of my proposals you can go on my website or you can message me and that'll show you a direct copy of my proposals that are just fill in the blanks you can fill in the highlighted blanks I've given you and send your estimate away you can find that at landscapersacademy.com it's under resources again please like And subscribe this video please comment below on any other videos you'd like me to create happy to do this for you guys cheers to your success