Stop Guessing Your Prices: The Man-Hour Rate Masterclass
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Hello and welcome to the Green Industry Podcast, your go-to guide for building a more profitable and thriving lawn care and landscaping business. Your host, Paul Jameson, is the author of five best selling books, including Cut That Grass and Make That Cash, and his latest, Level Up Your Money, all available on Amazon and Audible. Now, get ready for more expert insights and practical strategies. to boost your business and level up your life. Here's Paul Jameson.
Are you guessing your prices or do you actually know your numbers?
Why are lawn care owners still guessing their prices?
You've ever taken on a yard or any landscaping job, you work your tail off. I'm talking you're sweating, you're putting in the effort, and then you feel like you made absolutely no money, or even worse, you lost money. Well, you are not alone. I have been there many of times. And uh today I'm gonna chat with Naylor and Jonathan Potoshnik. They've been there as well. So my friend Jonathan Potosnik, we we nickname him JP. He's absolutely uh legendary. And in today's show, he's gonna drop a pricing masterclass revealing In my opinion, in his opinion, it just this is the single most important metric that we must track. And that is our man hour rate. So grab a notepad. Guys, this is so important. Uh take notes if you are able to.
If not, listen to this and make sure you remember this because this can and will change the financial trajectory of your lawn care business forever. Without further ado, here's my friend, JP. Somebody's in year one, Miss Miss, like, how much do you charge? Nine out of ten times they underprice it. Give us a tutorial on how to price a service.
I wouldn't get too worried about underpricing it. You're gonna do it. There's just no getting around it. Underpricing is just part of the game. That's how you learn. The key is that you fix it as quick as you can. To be very specific about what you're asking, what we're trying to figure out is in the beginning, where do we even start? The idea is that when I don't know how to price, what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna just start by looking at how do the big guys charge? The guys that I aspire to be, the guys that we believe by guys I mean comfort. Companies. You know, these bigger companies that I would aspire to want to be them someday, or they seem to have lots of employees and they have a reputation for pretty good work and their trucks are wrapped and all these things that I want someday.
What do they charge? Because what they're charging is how they got all that stuff. You can't go hire Jim for 70,000 bucks a year if you're charging half of what the Company, you know, your competitors are you just can't do it. It's physically impossible. What they're charging represents the work they've done to figure out what's it gonna cost to hire the right people and build the right company and have people in the office and all that. So that's a great place to start. And frankly, if you start there and actually do that, you're going to be making wild profits because you don't have any of the costs that these guys have yet. You don't have Marion The office, you don't have an op manager, you don't have a big office, you're probably not paying workers' comp.
I mean, who knows what you're not doing yet? That's all margin. So it's a beautiful strategy because now you've got money to really go grow this thing. But what do most people do? They don't do what I just described. They're charging way under market, and then they can't understand what's wrong with them, why they don't have any money to hire Bob in the field and Mary in the office. Office. Well, I just told you why. It's really that's the solution. So now let's just wherever your pricing is, whether you took that advice or you didn't take that advice and you just kind of made up the pricing. This is now gonna be the advice that nobody really wants to hear because it's not fun. But if you really care about the pricing, then this is advice to let pay attention to.
There's a couple metrics that I would charge or track. One metric would be I want to know what I'm making per man hour.
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Chapters
4 chaptersSpeakers
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