Should I Charge a Consultation Fee in my Landscaping Business?

Should I charge a consultation fee?

In some of the talks I am giving at events, there is one question that tends to repeatedly come up. Should I charge a consultation fee to my prospects in my landscaping business?

I enjoy hearing the dozens of different perspectives. There are some folks pretty dead set against them and others that wouldn’t go without them.

Let me define quickly what a “consultation fee” even is.

A consultation fee is when you charge your prospects a fee to come out to their location, look at their job, and provide a quote for them.

In my 15+ years at Tussey Landscaping, we used to not charge a consultation fee. But they sure do now.

Before they were charging a consultation fee they were about $1m-$2m in revenue.

After they started charging a consultation fee, they’re over $6m.

Now granted, that growth is not all due to consultation fees of course. But it helped.

Another before/after example:

Before they started charging a consultation fee the salesperson was running all over the countryside, bidding on tons of jobs with a low close rate.

After they started charging a consultation fee, the salesperson is only talking to vetted qualified prospects, with a close rate of over 90%.

This leads me to my main thoughts on consultation fees.

What’s the purpose of a consultation fee?

The purpose of a consultation fee is not to collect money for your time spent. In fact, that fee probably doesn’t even cover the cost of labor and gas spent on going out to see the job and giving a quote.

You’re not in the business of collecting a consultation fee. Even if you charge a huge consultation fee, you’re not making money selling consultation fees.

You’re making money when you’re closing jobs and collecting deposit checks.

It’s all about the filter

The whole point of a consultation fee is to filter out the leads that were never going to buy from you anyway.

Whether the prospect realized it or not.

Like any filter, charging a consultation fee is not perfect. At Tussey Landscaping I can think of a job or two in the last ten years that we lost, even though the prospect was serious and had the cash to hire us to do the job.

But that client was just hung up on the idea of paying for a quote, and refused to do it.

So we lost the job.

I’d say that happened less than 10 times over the last 10 years.

But on the flip side, it saved countless wasted truck runs and hours spent on quotes that were never going to close anyway.

Losing those 10 jobs was totally worth it for the hundreds of fruitless runs it saved.

Every time you run out there on a fruitless consultation, you not only wasted your time on that false opportunity, but you also lose the opportunity to spend time on the next lead that was serious. Slowing down your quote turnaround time, and diminishing your chances to close the serious lead.

The point I’m making is the entire point of a consultation fee is to filter. Not the money.

I don’t care if you charge $5.

It’s the fact that a transaction is taking place that tells you this client is at least somewhat serious.

Are there other ways?

Another thing, there are more ways to successfully filter than just consultation fees. You don’t have to charge a consultation fee to filter.

A few other (very effective) methods that you can combine with charging a consultation fee (or use alone if you are against using fees) are:

• Defined availability. Meaning you have defined times you book consultations. (ie Tues and Thurs afternoons) This flips the script from you asking the client “When are you available?” to the client finding a time to get access to the expert, you. It raises your status and positions you as an expert. Not a needy salesperson breathlessly asking when the client is free, and meeting with them at 7 PM on a Friday night.
• Getting a budget from the client, and/or using a tool like this Project Planner on Tussey’s site to educate the client as to what things cost. (No client enjoys the experience of finding out what they were asking for costs 5X their budget.) If you can educate them gently before the consultation, instead of waiting until you’ve met with them and worked on their quote to inform them what they want is 5X their budget, it’s much less embarrassing for the client.
• A qualifying phone call before going out to meet them on-site to give a quote.

At Tussey, the overall lead vetting and qualifying process looked like:

• The secretary answers the phone. This person did not know how to bid on jobs or give any pricing info over the phone. She simply asked the clients what they were looking for, and if it was something the company did, proceeded to the next step.
• Inform the client that it costs $XXX consultation fee to have a designer come out and meet with them, and provide a quote. A lot of tire kickers never got past this step.
• After the consultation fee was paid, she booked a time with them on defined availability slots on Tuesday or Thursday afternoon. The latest appointment time was 5 PM. No exceptions. The client is requesting to get time with our expert. We are not desperate or needy.
• Once booked, the secretary would explain that she was sending an email out with a link to a video of the designer they are meeting, and a link to the Project Planner. They need to fill out the Project Planner before the consultation.
  • (If the client failed to fill it out, the secretary would call the client a day or so ahead of time asking if they needed more time and wanted to reschedule the consultation.) The only exception to this was past clients. Past clients didn’t need to fill this out.
• Once on site, the designer would either produce a quote with pencil sketches and paint lines on the ground or if the client wanted a 3D design, then take $X, XXX payment for a full 3D design fee and work on the design.
  • The next meeting after this was to review the 3D design and collect a deposit check. Rarely went more than 1-2 meetings after this before getting a check. (or a no, and losing the job)

This process allowed Derek Matthews, the lead designer at Tussey Landscaping to close over $5.5m in work, with over a 90% close rate in 2023.

Suffice to say, the process works.

And Derek doesn’t waste much time.

I just did a full webinar on the topic of “4 Ways to Close More Jobs” with Ray Rodenbough from Unilock the other week. In this webinar I share more perspectives and tips on the topic of filtering leads, and how to win that deal.

And win that deal profitably.

Give it a watch here.

Until next time!

Cheers!

Weston Zimmerman

SynkedUP co-founder and CEO