A big part of succeeding as a contractor comes down to knowing how to estimate landscaping jobs quickly, professionally, and accurately. Whether or not you win the job may very well come down to when you deliver the estimate, how you deliver it, and what it contains.
Your estimate is your road map for how your team plans to get the work done. In it, you set up the scope of the job, your pricing, your measurements, your materials; basically everything you need to execute the client’s vision, and execute it well.
I’ve been in this industry for a long time, and I know how much it matters to get those little details right. So today I’ll share some tips on how to estimate landscaping jobs and win the bid in the process.
Gut or Data?
So what does it take to consistently estimate work that leaves you with money in the bank?
A lot of contractors live by this rule: “Go with your gut.” There is some truth to that. When you’ve done this job long enough, and done it well, you develop certain instincts that newer guys won’t have yet.
For some landscapers, knowing how to estimate landscaping jobs means estimating from the gut. They’ll sit down with a job, flip through their mental rolodex of similar jobs they’ve done in the past, land on a price that “feels right,” and call it an estimate.
You Have to Know Your Numbers
There’s a problem with that method, though. It has nothing to do with skill. An estimated guess, based on years of experience, is still a guess. Your “gut” doesn’t know how to:
- Calculate your overhead expenses and divide them by the payroll hours you pay out per year to find your overhead expenses per man-hour
- Add that cost to your direct labor costs to find your breakeven rate, or the amount of money you need to charge per hour before making a profit
- Add your profit margin
Experience is valuable, but knowing how to estimate landscaping jobs accurately will always require real, actual, math. Start with knowing your numbers. Your numbers, not anybody else’s. That’s the best way to be sure that your estimate reflects your real costs, includes all the line items and expenses you need to cover, and protects your ability to make a profit.
To see how knowing your numbers works in action, check out SynkedUP’s free labor rate calculator here. Enter some basic data about your company, and our AI assistant uses it to find the best hourly rate for your business.
Start With a System
Here’s another problem with basing how to estimate landscaping jobs in gut feel and experience: nothing gets written down, or passed on.
Let’s say you’re a contractor who’s been doing the work for the better part of two decades. You use your memory, your experience, and your gut to estimate landscaping jobs.
Most of the time, that method works. Maybe sometimes a job finishes and the profit in your bank account looks smaller than you were expecting, but that’s life, right?
Are You the Bottleneck in Your Own Business?
But what happens when you go on vacation? Or take a couple days off to spend with family? Or have to step away unexpectedly? Can your business still run without you there running it?
You never recorded or systematized your process, so it lives entirely in your memory. That makes you the only person at your company who actually knows how to estimate landscaping projects. Without you around, maybe estimates don’t get created or sent out at all.
Or maybe they do, but because your team doesn’t have a handle on how to estimate landscaping work, they send out estimates that leave out important line items, or don’t account for labor costs or overhead expenses.
So the estimate gets sent out, priced way too low, and the customer accepts. Now you’re basically guaranteed to lose money on a job you haven’t even started yet, because nobody else has the knowledge, the experience, or the processes that you have.
One person cannot carry an entire landscaping business, even the most hardworking, experienced, and knowledgeable contractors in the industry.
You are not your business. If you don’t want the company to live and die on whether you’re there to handle everything, you need an actual system.
Start by documenting the one you have. Train your employees on it, and keep the information they need in a place where everybody who needs to can access it. Efficient businesses run on smart systems, and those systems start with repeatable, documented workflows.
What Does Your System Need?
Want to know how to estimate landscaping jobs with repeatable systems? Then you need templates, and you need production rates.
Estimating Templates
An estimating template is basically a list of all the resources needed (materials, equipment, labor) and a proposal description, saved in a reusable form. You can use spreadsheets to make your template, or even better, landscape estimating software built for this exact purpose.
The idea is to give yourself somewhere to start every time you need to build an estimate. If you already have a template ready, then you can use it to plug in the specific details of a specific job, and your estimate will be ready to go in minutes.
Production Rates
Production rates are where templates really come alive.
A production rate is just a formula for how long it takes to complete a task. If a landscaping company does a job installing pavers over an area that covers 1,020 square feet, and that project takes 179.5 man-hours to install, the production rate of the job would be 5.7 square feet installed per 1 man-hour.
Instead of doing the calculation manually every time to come up with how much base rock you need for a patio job, you do the calculation once, turn that into a formula so that you can input the measurement (such as square feet), and bingo, you got magic at your fingertips.
Once you establish production rates, you’ll be able to just plug in dimensions and measurements for the job you’re estimating. Then you can sit back and let your production rate do the hard work of calculating the correct amount of labor hours and materials.
Want to see this in action? Check out SynkedUP’s free production rate calculator here. Enter your company’s real data, and the system will calculate your production rate, which you can then save and use to sharpen future estimates.
Why Speed Matters
Want to know what factor decides whether a contractor wins a job, more than anything else?
It’s not experience. It’s not professionalism. It’s not even a question of who offers the lowest price. 60-70% of the time, the contractor who gets the job is the one who responded first.
Maybe your business does great work. Maybe it does the best work. But if it takes you days or even weeks to actually build an estimate and get it in front of prospects, nobody’s going to hire you to do that work.
They probably don’t even remember your company, because they already accepted one of the other estimates they received while you were still building yours.
Knowing how to estimate landscaping jobs like a pro means knowing how to build and send that estimate while your business (and the job itself) is still fresh in the prospect’s mind.
But Don’t Forget the Details
I say that speed matters in delivering an estimate a lot, because it’s true. But don’t lose sight of this, either: You cannot sacrifice accuracy or attention to detail for speed.
Let’s say you do a consultation with a homeowner, who tells you that they’ve also been looking at other landscaping companies. So you decide you have to get the estimate in front of them, ASAP.
But your business isn’t set up that way. You’re the only one who can build estimates, since you don’t have systems in place, or templates and production rates to guide your estimating. But you know you have to get that estimate out, fast, so you slap something together, and send it to the client a couple hours after the walk-through.
Good news! You win the job.
Bad news! You don’t have a system for estimating, so in your haste, you forgot to account for overhead, and you skipped a couple of line items. So you end up bidding the job way too low, and even though you win the gig, you end up losing money.
Your system prevents that from happening. Invest the time in building it, and you’ll save hours of estimating time. And probably make more money, too!
How to Estimate Landscaping Jobs Like a Pro With the Right Software
Knowing how to estimate landscaping jobs accurately across your entire operation means knowing your numbers instead of just going off your guts, building repeatable systems, and getting the estimate to the customer fast.
All of that is easy to say, but much harder to make a reality. It takes consistency, it takes focus, and yes, it takes some math. But it gets a lot easier with the right tools, like landscape estimating software.
That’s exactly why we built SynkedUP, an all-in-one landscaping software built by contractors, for contractors. To give people a smart, automated system for winning, estimating and tracking jobs so they don’t have to build one from scratch.
SynkedUP takes your company’s job data and centralizes it into one accessible system. The system then takes that data and plugs it back in to help you calculate production rates, set accurate prices, and more.
With SynkedUP, you can even build and send estimates in minutes before you leave a prospect’s driveway after a consultation. Our new AI to Estimate feature takes that one step further. Just use SynkedUP to record all the details you need during a site walkthrough, and it uses that info to build a fast, accurate estimate.
Want to learn more about all the ways SynkedUP can help you run your business while protecting your profit? Book a call today!