5 Crucial Steps to Raise Your Landscaping Prices (Without Losing Clients)
It’s time to raise your landscaping prices. The cost of doing business goes up every single year, which means your prices should increase regularly, too. But raising your prices on clients can be a terrifying experience: what if you make them mad? What if you lose all your best clients?
I’m going to show you the time-tested method for raising prices. This is the 5-step method that multi-million dollar landscaping businesses to raise prices every year, because it helps you keep your best customers, make more money, and grow your business faster. This method takes all the emotion and stress out of raising prices, and turns it into an easy, automatic process for your business.
1 - Calculate Your Prices (the Right Way)
As a best practice, your pricing must guarantee a profit on every single job. Otherwise, you’re giving away your time for free. This might sound obvious, but I can’t tell you how many owners I’ve seen who have priced too low and don’t even know it.
The easiest way to guarantee profitable prices is to time yourself on the job and use this formula:
(Hourly Wages + Overhead Costs) x (% Profit) = Your Price
For example, if a job takes you 2 hours to complete, and you want an hourly rage of $25/hour, your formula might look like this:
($25 x 2 hours+ $30 to cover fuel and maintenance) x (10% profit) = $88
This formula will make sure you always make back your wages and overhead while guaranteeing a profit. The key is knowing how long it takes you to do each job. If you can boil a job down into man hours, you will ensure you always get the money you deserve.
For a more detailed guide on how to find these exact numbers, check out this guide to pricing the right way.
2 - Time Your Price Increase
Once you know how high to price, it’s time to inform your clients about your price changes. This is the scary part, and there is risk involved, so we need to be smart about it.
The worst time to increase prices is during the busiest selling season (usually around spring for lawn care, and late summer for landscaping). The best practice is to avoid price increases this time of year because everyone is marketing. Your competitors are trying to poach your clients, and you don’t want to give clients a reason to leave.
When is the Best Time to Raise Landscaping Prices?
The best time to raise your landscaping prices is in the slow parts of the year. Most likely, that means in the middle of the winter—when nobody is thinking about lawn care anyway.
That way, your clients don’t immediately feel the pain of a price increase. Many clients will forget about the price increase by the time your busy season rolls around.
The second best time to raise your prices is when you have too many clients already. This means your marketing is working, and people are flocking to buy from you. You are in demand. So raise your prices!
3 - Raise Prices on Your Worst Clients First
If you can, test your price increases on your worst clients first:
Clients who are hard to work with
And your least profitable clients
You can already afford to lose these clients, so you might as well try out your price increase on them first. Best case scenario, they accept the price increase and become great customers. Worst case scenario, you learn a lot from their reactions.
The idea is to test your messaging and see how they react, so you can adjust your messaging for the more important groups.
4 - Send This Professional Price Increase Email
You must notify your clients of a price increase. The good news is this email can be a great opportunity to prove how professional you are and to remind them why they chose you in the first place.
We wrote you a quick template that you can use in your own business:
Landscaping Price Increase Email Template
Dear [FIRST NAME],
We love having you as a customer of [BUSINESS NAME]! Recently, we’ve seen our fuel, maintenance, and billing expenses increase, so we are making a small change to the price of our [SERVICE]. The price of [SERVICE] will increase from [OLD PRICE] to [NEW PRICE], starting [DATE].
This change will ensure we’re able to continue to provide our best, highest-quality services to you and the rest of our customers. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact our team at [CONTACT INFO]. Thank you for your support!
Sincerely,
[Lawn Care Business Owner Name]
[Lawn Care Business Owner Signature]
5 - Set a Date for the Next Price Increase
One last step.
Once you’ve sent the email to all your clients, and you’ve updated their prices, set a date to increase prices again. Some landscapers do it every year, to keep it automatic and to make sure it happens in the “background” where clients are less likely to get annoyed by a price increase.
Either way, you must set a date and a reminder in your calendar, or you run the risk of forgetting to raise prices. With inflation rising every year, that means you will lose more money every time you put off raising your prices, so don’t let that happen!
The Best Practice for Raising Your Landscaping Prices
Your services are extremely valuable, and you deserve to stay profitable and keep growing.
Raising prices is a best practice for all landscaping businesses, including yours. It’s a fact of life that costs increase over time, so most clients will understand why you need to raise your prices. Anyone who doesn’t understand probably isn’t worth the effort!
