Spring cleanups, what to do and what to charge?
Spring and fall cleanups are great add on services you can offer your lawn mowing customer. For those customer you have who are on annual property contracts, they are great services to include and increase your profit. But what services should you include in these cleanups and how should customers be billed for them? That is the question asked on the Gopher Lawn Care Business Forum.
One lawn care business owner wrote “I’m getting a lot of calls for spring cleanups with seasonal lawn care. The thing I am concerned about is how should I charge for a spring cleanup and what do they include? I was planning on raking out all leaves and sticks, offering fertilization, aeration, dethatching, and some other optional services. I’ve never done spring cleanups before just fall cleanups.
I plan on billing customers for the spring cleanup at the time of completion and then bill the lawn maintenance monthly. I just need to know how to charge him for it and am curious as to what others include and offer as optionals.”
A second lawn care business owner said “the typical spring clean up for me would be removal of any left over leaves from fall, branches, and garbage from the property. Depending on when you do the clean up, I usually also cut the lawn. Anything additional is usually requested by the customer. When I show up for the estimate, I ask what they are looking for etc.”
Spring cleanups what to do and what to charge?
A third shared “When I do spring cleanups, I clean up the leaves, branches, rake flower beds out, and typically mow as that’s how I pick up the leaves in the back-yards. For the front yards I blow the leaves to my truck and use a leaf loader to suck them into my truck. I then mow the front to pick up the left overs. I also edge everything. When I am done I collect the payment if it isn’t a contracted customer and I give them a flyer and point to our site to show them our other services. This works great because people like the finished look. A few have signed contracts and others just call us for clean-ups. I would offer the aeration and other services as extras.”
A fourth added “I charge for spring cleanup separately for a new customer, but if the customer is an annual client the charge is spread out among their monthly payments.
When I perform spring cleanups I collect all leaves from the property to include flowerbeds. I edge, weed eat, and trim up to five bushes, but my prices go between $125.00 - $200.00 depending on how bad of shape the yard is in. You have to be able to estimate the amount of hours it is going to take you and then determine what you want to make per man hr. and adjust from there. When I am done, I also give the customer a flyer that outlines the other services that I offer and I have just recently built a website that I will direct them to.”
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