A landscape estimate isn’t just about getting a price on paper. It plays a big role in whether you win the job and whether that job is actually worth taking on. On the customer side, the estimate helps explain the scope of work and builds confidence in how you price your jobs. On the business side, it’s what tells you if the numbers make sense financially once labor, overhead, and scheduling are factored in. When an estimate is done right, it helps you win the right jobs, ones that make sense for your customer and your business.
Of course, all of this also means that when something goes wrong on a landscape estimate, the problem can snowball fast. Even small errors can escalate into major profit loss once the job actually begins. In this article, we’ll break down the most common estimating pitfalls faced by contractors, how your business can up its landscape estimate game, and how the right landscape estimating software can help.
What Could Be Going Wrong?
Each time you build a landscape estimate, it should get more and more accurate. If jobs are still missing the mark (running long, losing margin, or creating cashflow pressure), something in your estimating process isn’t working. Before you can fix the problem, you need to identify exactly where things are going wrong.
Mistake #1: Misunderstanding Labor Hours
Labor is usually the largest cost driver in a landscape estimate. If you lowball labor man-hours, or fail to consider how logistics impact labor, you’ve already thrown off that estimate in a big way. It’s easy enough to show up to a consultation, eyeball the property, consider the job, and say, “That will take about three days,” and then use that number on the bid.
But many contractors fail to consider details like picking up and handling materials, dumping waste, drive time, etc. Often, these details can add an additional 10-25% of man-hours on top of how long it takes to do the actual job itself.
Mistake #2: Overlooking Efficiency and Non-Production Time
Efficiency is a massive factor in doing jobs, doing them well, and doing them on time. The more efficient you are, the less time you waste and the more money you make. Losses in efficiency, then, can really build up across crews and across seasons, causing problems for your business.
A big factor in efficiency losses is, again, logistics. When you fail to factor things that are unbillable like setup, cleanup, and time spent coordinating materials and crew responsibilities into your landscape estimate, you’re committing crews to necessary work that doesn’t generate revenue, creating labor costs that aren’t recovered in the price of the job.
Mistake #4: Overlooking Costs
Overhead expenses like insurance, vehicles, administrative labor, software, and facilities are rarely tied directly to the cost of a job, but the money for these expenses needs to come from somewhere. If they aren’t paid by the customer, then they are paid by you. Don’t overlook these costs when creating your landscape estimate.
A common hurdle for contractors is figuring out how to factor costs like a new truck, insurance, marketing, and other overhead into their estimates. This is most often done by applying an overhead recovery markup to your base job costs. Your costs + overhead recovery = your breakeven rate. You can then add your profit margin to the breakeven number to find the true price you need to charge your customer. In SynkedUP, overhead expenses are automatically applied to your job costs as an overhead recovery markup, helping ensure your pricing stays profitable.
Likewise, be sure to remember to factor equipment and equipment usage costs into your landscape estimate. These costs include the equipment itself, but should also account for depreciation, maintenance, fuel, and transport.
Mistake #5: Outdated Material Pricing
You might have noticed: prices are going up. Very few things have remained at the same price over the last few years. Material costs can change quickly and dramatically, and relying on outdated price lists or assumptions when creating your landscape budget could create immediate cost overruns. You don’t want to end up in a situation where you’ve told a customer their project will cost $5,000 in materials only for the materials to be $6,000. Instead, be sure to review material prices regularly and adjust your pricing accordingly.
Mistake #6: Not Considering Job Conditions
Every job is different, and so is every job site. Assuming the same conditions from one project to the next can end up costing you, because it ignores the real-world variables that affect how much time and labor a job actually requires.
That’s where Murphy’s Law comes back to bite you. “Everything that can go wrong, will go wrong,” especially on outdoor projects where so many uncontrollable elements can impact the work. Things like accessibility, terrain, weather and weather exposure, and soil conditions should be considered when creating a landscape estimate. Each component directly affects how long the work takes, the equipment required, and how crews can safely and efficiently move through the site.
Mistake #7: Estimating Each Job From Scratch
One of the biggest mistakes a contractor can make is failing to systemize the landscape estimating process. If you make every single landscape estimate from scratch every time, that means a higher likelihood of missed line items, forgetting things, and inconsistent pricing from estimate to estimate.
Manual estimating also means a much slower turnaround time on that estimate. Time is money, and in this case, that’s pretty literal. The longer it takes you to turn a quote around for a customer, the less likely it is that that landscape estimate will lead to an actual sale.
How to Build a Better Landscape Estimate
If you want a landscape estimate that holds up in the field, it starts with the process behind it. A few smart adjustments can make a big difference in how accurate your numbers are and how confidently you price work.
Get Your Numbers in Order
The numbers you use are the building blocks of every landscape estimate you create. When you rely on rough guesses and assumptions to come up with those numbers, it leads to inconsistent and inaccurate estimates. The worst part about this is that when it is wrong, you likely won’t know it until much later (if ever), and you won’t know what to do to fix it. Instead, build a system for estimating that relies less on gut feel and more on consistent cost structures and repeatable processes.
For any system you use to create a landscape estimate, the basis of that system should be actual, provable job data, based on your crew’s track record for how long it takes to get a job done. These aren’t the only numbers you should be paying attention to, however. Be sure to account for labor hours, set production rates, double-check material and equipment costs for accuracy, and consider real-world job conditions when creating your landscape estimate.
Don’t Dilly Dally
As we noted above, faster quotes increase your chances of winning a job! Delivering a speedy landscape estimate is super convenient both for you and the customer, but it’s also a business advantage. When you take too long to produce a quote, that delay reduces your momentum, and makes the decision whether or not to accept the job feel less urgent to the customer. Lightning-fast quotes, on the other hand, capitalize on that momentum.
Set yourself up for success by giving your business the ability to quickly create and send a professional, accurate landscape estimate. For example, with estimating templates, you can quote before you even leave the driveway. Leave the consultation with a deposit, not a to-do item for when you arrive back at your office.
Think of Your Estimate as a Framework, Not Just a List of Expenses
Sure, a landscape estimate is often a list of expenses, but it’s also your way of attempting to sell your business and what it can do for potential customers. To that end, your landscape estimate should position you, the contractor, as a professional who knows what you’re doing. The focus should be on helping customers understand and choose the scope of the work, not get them bogged down in every little pricing detail. Details kill deals!
Making a Landscape Estimate Has Never Been Easier With SynkedUP
There are several traps a contractor can fall into when creating a landscape estimate, and those mistakes can set you and your business back in a big way over time if you’re not careful. Instead, it might be time to take your estimating process and systemize it, enabling a better, more accurate, and faster landscape estimate every time. Let SynkedUP provide that system for your business!
SynkedUP, a software solution built by contractors, for contractors, takes the guesswork and inconsistency out of estimating, making it simple and repeatable. When you need to create a landscape estimate, you just use our pre-built templates to enter measurements and add items to your estimate.
From there, the software instantly calculates costs, overhead, and margins, avoiding costly mistakes and the need for manual calculations or markups. With a single click, you can generate a beautiful, professional proposal, and get notified the second the customer receives and opens it. You also have the option of creating individual line items, so you can give customers more options or upsell them on additional work or add-ons.
By turning estimating into an easy plug-in-play process, SynkedUP helps users cut their estimating time by up to 90%, without sacrificing accuracy or attention to detail. Customers will receive landscape estimates in minutes instead of hours or days, upping your chances of securing jobs.
To find out more about how SynkedUP can help you take your landscape estimate process to the next level, contact us to schedule a demo today!
