I've been landscaping for close to 25 years, and I've run my own business for about ten of them. In that time I've lost more money at the kitchen table than I ever lost on site. Not from bad work. From bad quotes.
The jobs looked profitable on paper. The crew did a good job. The client was happy. And somehow there was less left over at the end than there should have been. Every time I went looking for the leak, it was in the quote.
These are the five mistakes that cost me the most, and what I do about them now.
1. I forgot things
I can't tell you how many times I've sent a quote, the client's accepted it, and then halfway through the job I've realised I forgot something. They think I'm doing it. It isn't in the price. So it comes out of my margin.
It's never the big stuff. Nobody forgets the retaining wall. It's the skip bin. The tip fees. The extra labour when the only access is a narrow side path and every bit of soil goes out by barrow. Cleaning and sealing the new paving. The pump for the concrete pour because a truck can't get anywhere near the backyard. The soil that takes up a lot more room once it's dug out than it did in the ground.
None of it feels worth listing when you're pricing at 9pm after a day on the tools. Add it up across a year, though, and it's the difference between a good business and a busy one.
What I do now: I don't trust my memory. Every quote gets run past the same list before it goes out:
- Access: can a machine get in, or is it hand dug and barrowed?
- Spoil: how much is coming out, how many bins or truck loads, and the tip fees
- Fill and materials: delivery, plus an allowance for compaction and waste
- Machine and pump hire
- Site protection and clean-up
- Drainage, sealing, edging, the finishing bits
- Permits and engineering
- Subbies, with my markup on top
2. My scope was too vague
"Supply and install paving to backyard." You see scopes like that all the time. It's not a scope. It's an argument waiting to happen. Which paver? How many square metres? On what base? Who's removing the old concrete? Does it include the step down to the lawn?
When the scope is vague, the client fills in the gaps with what they hoped for, and you end up doing it for nothing. Every "while you're here, could you just" comes straight out of a margin you priced for a smaller job.
What I do now: I write the scope with enough detail that we cover ourselves and the client feels informed about what we are responsible for in the build. Then a short list that have saved me a lot of awkward conversations: what's NOT included. Rock in the ground, unknown services, council fees, plants beyond the schedule. If I can't know a cost until we start digging, I say so and show it as a separate allowance instead of hiding a guess in the price. And when a client asks for extras on site, they get a price in writing before we do the work.
3. I was too slow
For years I was the landscaper getting the follow-up texts. "Hey, you came and looked at our job two weeks ago, just checking on the quote." And I hadn't started it. It wasn't that I was lazy. I'd been on the tools all day, I'd see a client on the way home, eat dinner quickly and head to the office to work on quotes that were already overdue.
The trouble is the client isn't sitting around waiting for you. If they've had three landscapers out, the one who gets back first, and looks organised doing it, is in front. I put myself in the client's shoes: if I had two sparkies quote a job and one never got back to me, I'd be wondering what he'd be like once he was actually working at my place.
What I do now: I try get the quote out the same day. One of the first times I managed it properly, it was a smallish job, around $15,000. I drove round the corner so I wasn't sitting out the front of their house, talked the job through on my phone, and the proposal was with them within 15 to 20 minutes of me leaving. They came back within two days to go ahead.
4. My payment terms were an afterthought
Landscaping means paying out before you get paid. Materials, machine hire, subbies and the guys' wages all go out the door well before the job's finished. If the payment terms are buried at the bottom of the proposal, you end up funding the client's backyard out of your own account.
What I do now: the payment schedule sits up front, where the client sees it before they say yes, and I have regular milestone payments that keep the job moving and the money flowing:
- A deposit before we start
- Progress payments at clear stages
- The final payment on completion
I line those stages up so the client's money arrives before my big outgoings, not weeks after them. Rules on deposits and progress payments for domestic building work differ from state to state, so check what applies where you work.
5. I didn't charge enough
This one cost me more than the other four put together.
After a few years in business and when i knoew something wasn't right with my numbers, I rang a landscaping business coach. I wasn't in the headspace for full coaching but I paid for a couple of hours where we went through everything I should have been counting on a job. All the overheads I'd been leaving out. Something clicked and I knew that this was one of the reasons I was always short at the end of the month. I still look back at what I used to charge an hour for labour and wonder how I did those jobs at all.
What I do now:
- I know my real hourly rate, with every overhead in it: the ute, fuel, insurance, tools, the admin and the hours nobody pays for. If you haven't worked yours out properly in a while, use our free hourly rate calculator.
- I price from the same rates and markups every time, not from how busy I am or how nervous I feel about winning the job.
- I don't do discounts. When a client asks what I can do on the price, I'm happy to help change the scope, but the rate stays the rate.
Why we built Willow
Every one of these mistakes gets worse when quoting gets squeezed into the end of a long day. That's the whole reason Yasmin and I built Willow. I talk the job through on my phone after the site walk, and it asks me about the things I used to forget, like access, pumps, sealing and permits. It prices from my own rates and turns it into a proper itemised quote for me and a super professional proposal I can send to the client before I've left the street. It's not perfect, and I still check every line, especially the labour hours. But it's a lot easier than starting from scratch at 9pm.
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