As a landscaping business owner, one of your challenging problems is bringing in more clients and winning more work. After all, it’s crucial to your success. Before bidding on landscaping tasks, I usually suggest individuals understand how to start putting up successful and accurate bids.
To best bid on a landscaping job make sure you base it on the client’s budget. Your bids should be based on your client’s needs, measurements, required materials, designs, labor, equipment, and timeline. When bidding, your goal is to convince the client to consider you above everyone else; to do this, you need to be as detailed and professional as possible.
It won’t be easy to know where to begin if you’ve never bid on a professional landscape job before or are still new to bidding on landscaping projects. Below, I have 11 step-by-step guides to help you make the best bids for landscaping jobs, ensure that your bid is profitable, and obtain the project.
Get to Know Your Client’s Needs
Take the time to obtain a decent concept of what your client wants before you start estimating the property. A landscaping bid that doesn’t cover all the client requested will lose the job sooner (and waste time). If you’re unsure of the job description, ask questions and request clarification. The more information you have for the bid, the more precise it will be, and your proposal will be better and more persuasive.
Take Measurements
Measuring things like mulch, ground cover, sod, gravel, paving stones, and other materials sold by the square foot or cubic foot will help you estimate expenses more accurately. Without exact or near-perfect measurements, you may wind up with too little (or too much) product and mid-bid labor and costs, perhaps causing the work to be lost before it ever begins or making it less profitable.
Detail Materials Needed
This is one of the most relevant aspects of bidding on a landscape project because accuracy affects whether or not your project will be lucrative. You should have a thorough understanding of how much your present inventory costs the materials you need to order will cost, and a markup standard, if any, in place. If you don’t have the costs yet, wait until you do before sending the quote—but don’t wait too long, or you’ll lose out to a competitor! A site like Arborgold.com can be immensely helpful in this process. It is a landscape management software that automatically calculates inventory and material costs as you write up your landscaping quote.
Draw Your Design
While a drawing isn’t necessarily required for a landscaping quote, it can go a long way toward establishing professionalism, gaining trust with the client, and obtaining the project. This drawing will ensure that you and your client are on the same page about the project, but it will also ensure that you’re appropriately priced for the task and that your team can execute it once you’ve landed it.
Estimate Labor & Establish Equipment
Calculate how many hours and staff members you’ll need to finish the landscaping project and their prices. Include any necessary equipment and rental payments if you do not possess the equipment. Remember to account for any gas and transportation expenses.
Predict a Timeline
Estimate the length of the task and when your crew will be able to begin based on your personnel availability, inventory, and materials that will need to be ordered. You can communicate this to your client in the bid or include it in the contract after the bid is approved.
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Outline the Project Budget for the Client
A descriptive outline showing how resources will be used and how finances will be managed will help your bid. The client will see you as a professional and believe that you know what you are doing. This illustrates experience and gives the client more confidence in her skills.
Establish Your Contract
The terms of your contract will also influence your landscaping bid. Your contract will specify conditions like whether you can raise the cost of materials by up to 10%. If the initial cost is higher than expected if payment is required in part or in full before the project starts, and how change orders will be handled.
Add Finishing Touches
Depending on the professionalism you want to project, you may want to include a cover letter, a brochure, or other material about why your client should choose your company for the job in your landscaping bid. Some gardening software programs can generate a dynamic, appealing flip-page pdf landscaping work proposal.
Send it Off
It’s time to submit your landscaping bid now that you’ve finished it! It’s best if you can get your bid into the hands of your potential client as quickly as possible. Ideally, you should be able to offer the bid and receive the signed contract on the spot, but this may not always be achievable unless you have a fantastic landscape bidding tool. Instead, attempt to send the estimate to your potential client before the end of the day, if not sooner.
Follow Up
Make sure to follow up after you’ve sent your proposal! This will allow you to rebuild your professionalism and establish a reputation as a landscape firm that is responsive, engaging, and easy to work with. If you believe a competitor is underbidding you, you can alter your bid.
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Five important tips for more successful landscape job bids
Be consistent
It’s all about consistency when bidding better—consistency in how you measure your job sites and consistency in the work cost data you use.
Know your actual job costs
You must include precise labor and material costs in your task costing spreadsheet or software. Make sure you collect your material’s prices as accurately as possible, as they can vary depending on the purchase period.
In the case of labor, a reasonable estimate requires understanding the exact number of hours it takes your teams to accomplish a job and appropriately price that work. Don’t forget about extra expenses like travel time, cleanup, and demolition. There are also variations in usual labor expenses depending on the type of crew or technician you want to use to execute the job. Slight differences in average labor expenses can have a significant impact on profitability.
Measure the profitability of your won bids
It’s crucial to keep track of your won and lost bids and your close rate. Do you know how well the successful bids perform and whether they are profitable? Do you know whether you’re winning profitable jobs or jobs with low margins? Assess how you might be able to remedy the problem in future bids if jobs aren’t performing as expected.
Keep track of the opportunities you’re passing up, and write down why you think you’re missing out. Be open and honest about how you could improve your bids in the future—it could be more than simply a price issue; the client could be concerned about the service or communication you’re delivering.
Improve the speed and accuracy of estimates
Are you bidding correctly for what’s being requested? This is a relevant question to ask yourself during the bidding process. For commercial clients do you have a good understanding of the RFP (Request For Proposal)? Follow the RFP’s instructions, listen to the client’s demands, and produce a clear, thorough offer that satisfies the client’s requests so you may compete in the bidding process.
The speed of your procedure and system can also influence whether or not you get the job.
Articulate value beyond the price
What else can you offer in addition to the bid? Among the value-added details that could be included are the following:
· Before and after the bid, there is service.
· The service comes with a warranty.
· Installation strategies that are unique and result in a higher-quality product
Make it clear to your clients that landscape maintenance and building projects aren’t just low-cost services; they’re investments in their homes or businesses. It will cost the client more to redo poor-quality work than to get the work done the first time.
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Frequently Asked Questions
How to determine a homeowner’s landscape budget
Clients are reluctant to give a budget amount, and contractors understand that they are flying blind without one.
The time to have this conversation is at your initial consultation after walking the site, discussing ideas, taking notes, and reviewing their goals and objectives. It would be best if you had a rough sense of the project’s cost after walking the site and discussing the extent of the work. Try telling your client your price; if you do, your client will be forced to reveal their project budget. Start with low pricing to get a sense of what your customer offers.
You can purposely give the customer a low, bare-bones budget amount while simultaneously letting him know that things can go rather expensive depending on the client’s budget.
What types of Proposals will I Receive When Putting my Landscaping Contract Out For Bid?
When you submit your proposal bid, you will receive four different proposals. They are as follows:
- The High Bid: These are the highest bids in the auction.
- The Low-Ball Bid: The super-low bid is the polar opposite of the typical high bid.
- The “Jack of All Trades Bid: A bidder who does a little bit of everything submits the “Jack of All Trades” bid.
- The Incomplete Bid: An incomplete bid will not be ready to go, packaged neatly and beautifully, and with all of your questions answered.
To learn more on how you can start your own landscaping business, check out my startup documents here.
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Meet Shawn Chun: Entrepreneur and Landscape Business Fan.
I’m a happy individual who happens to be an entrepreneur. I have owned several types of businesses in my life from a coffee shop to an import and export business to an online review business plus a few more and now I create online resources for those interested in starting new ventures. It’s demanding work but I love it. I do it for those passionate about their business and their goals. That’s why when I meet a landscape business owner at a job site, driving down the road or anywhere else I see myself. I know how hard the struggle is to retain clients, find good employees and keep the business growing all while trying to stay competitive.
That’s why I created Landscaping Business Boss: I want to help landscape business owners like you build a thriving business that brings you endless joy and supports your ideal lifestyle.