Did my neighbor’s garden the other day as my first solo job for a new business venture. 400 sq ft garden with pretty terrible weed infestation as well as a 100 ft plastic border. It took me a little over a day to finish everything since I got caught in some rain. I charged $800 total for this job. I’m in Louisiana. Do you think this was a good price or should I have charged more? I made about $550 on it.
by CheapPerspective2058
6 Comments
Understandable people have different preferences and the work you did looks extremely clean and has vey well defined edging and texture the before is *chefs kiss* for native fauna and flora
It looks great to me. How did you clear out the weeds without damaging the nice surrounding plants? I think $800 is a fair price but I’m ignorant about pricing so that’s from a customer standpoint
> I charged $800 total for this job. I’m in Louisiana. Do you think this was a good price or should I have charged more? I made about $550 on it.
Your $550 is your (own) gross profit. You have two ways to determine whether it was a good price – you can do a top down calculation (what the market will accept) or a bottom up calculation (what your business can accept). Given you’re new to the business, do a bottom up calculation that includes your time and attributes the per hour figure you would need to pay a labourer to do the task.
e.g. if you would need to pay someone $30/hr to do this and it took 10 hours, you now have an adjusted gross profit of $250. You now need to subtract a proportional amount of insurance, consumables, depreciation and other incidentals from that figure to get to your true profit margin. Ideally that profit margin (after taxes!) is at least 20% or ~$160 on this job.
With something like this, and thinking about the work that I do at home, the quality of the work may be judged not only in how it looks at the end of the day but 2 weeks later. That may be a better indicator of how effective you were at weed pulling.
It’s nice work…. even if I liked before better 😉
$800/day labor + $65/yd mulch + $125 delivery + plastic edging are rates in my area. I’d probably clear $1000 for that little bed.