How Much MONEY Do Landscapers REALLY MAKE ?!? 4 k

so if you're just tuning in here's everything that you missed in video number one today we're going to be talking about how to understand your pricing and put together your proposals we want to show you what the project is first and then at the end of the video what i'm going to do is i'm going to break down ways that you guys as contractors can put together a proposal that protects you but also makes the comfortable be really makes the customer be really comfortable about what they're getting so let's just dive right into it [Applause] [Music] now today's project has four basic components a patio burying drain tiles and a tiny retaining wall and re-grading a backyard in each one of these four components we're going to break these down further [Applause] [Music] now to make our life a little bit faster and the bids to go a little bit easier when we do a paper patio installation we have a basic package that it always includes and that includes willow creek pavers six inches of recycled class five and one inch of pull of pulverize of screened sand and the reason we do this formula this way is because then we're not calculating material costs for the pavers material costs for recycled class five and the cost for sand on an individual project by project basis once we put these three numbers together we know that one all we have to do is go out to a job site and measure it to come up with the overall bid for the patio portion of the package landscaping package now if there's circumstances such as difficult access or we need to deepen the base or we need to do demolition or removals those get added on to our paper patio pricing completely separate but our standard patio pricing package usually averages anywhere from 23 to 33 dollars per square foot depending on some of those conditions now our pricing includes a plastic edge restraint to hold the patio in place but also all of the labors and materials needed to do a standard installation but here's where things get a little bit tricky and we need to point this out it also includes waste you're going to see us make a cut for a semi-circular patio the product that gets thrown away gets charged to the customer it was delivered for their job site it was handled for their job site and according to the accounting it needs to be applied to their job site we will actually go so far as to leave the blocks for the customer if they ever want them to replace them if anything ever happens to one of their blocks or we'll haul them out and toss them away those blocks really aren't beneficial even though they may be in good condition they're just considered waste at that point and gets charged to the project now let's talk about cutting pavers real quick and how to charge for those if we're doing an inlay or creating a custom shape out of the pavers then we can charge for that service but when we're butting up to a structure or something like that then we don't charge for cutting those pavers because we don't know how many of those papers we're going to need to cut let me explain when we come up to a door like you're seeing here some of these papers will get cut some won't but when we're cutting a radius or a curve or we're doing an inlay we know exactly how many feet that we're cutting and we know exactly what we've got to do beforehand and it's up to us to make sure that we include that price as a line item in the bid or at least point that out that it's included in the initial bit is there gas in it now an important thing to point out is that any pavers that remain palletized do not get charged to the project those get returned back to the factory but once the pavers come off from the pallet get installed into the ground and even if they get cut and removed from the project once they've been handled they get charged to the job now here's an interesting fact we don't typically charge a line item for a saw cut like you see right here the only time we actually charge for a saw cut is if we have to bring a saw out to do a specialty cut at a customer's request and what that means is if we're demolishing a patio but they want a certain portion of it partitioned off and saved and we've got to do a saw cut to do just that job for them then we'll charge the line item for that saw i just just couldn't get that four more black plain [Music] now almost every project we do will have some grading and excavation that comes along with it now the excavation for the actual paver patio itself is included in our price per square foot as long as we follow those standard guidelines that we talked about earlier but the grading up to the patio is never included in it even though it's almost on it's on almost every project the reason we don't include it is because it's never the same the excavation for beneath the patio typically doesn't change it's a six inch cut plus one inch for sand plus uh three and three quarters inches or however thick your pavers happen to be where you are so that cut always stays the same but the grating up to the patio is always variable some people have a steep drop off some people may have a heel coming into a patio and so we line item the grading and the restoration separately from the excavation for the paver patio uh now this may be something specific just to minnesota but here we can't hard pipe a downspout extension underground because if the pipe underground freezes it will freeze all the way up the house and rip the entire gutter off the house so we always put catch basins below the downspouts when we're daylighting out that area [Music] so we ended up having quite a bit of dirt left so we were able to kind of regrade back here and up off the side of the house and there was a big freaking crater over here kind of where joey was standing and whatnot so we were able to bring that up for him you know level it out and we got a real real nice pitch coming down here to get all the water running away and back down into the pond we did not fill in any of the pond we know you can't do that we didn't do that yeah that's that got the drain boxes in on either side with kind of how we had to do them with the grade we couldn't put it right under the existing downspout so he's going to get one of those flex ones or whatever and get it going down in there and run over there and we only have these ones on the ends of those right now because it's supposed to rain like a son of a gun tonight and uh he's not sure if he's gonna get the seed down so we'll do what we can to keep this from getting really really muddy back here and uh that's that that's all i got i'm gonna be on to the next one all right guys let's break this bit down now there's always more than one way to bid a project but i'm just gonna walk you through the way that the simplest way that i would do this one the first thing i would do is compartmentalize the patio and let's just say that this patio was 25 feet long and 15 feet wide i would multiply 25 by 15 and that gives me 375 square feet now that's kind of a mid-sized project it's not small it's not big so i would price it at a mid-size range let's just say 25 dollars a square foot so 375 square feet times 25 dollars a square foot gives us 9 375 dollars now we buried two downspouts we could do that either on time and material or we can measure out how many linear feet we had and use the formula that we talked about in the previous video between 11 and 18 per linear foot now in this case we're just going to say it was 13 per linear foot a nice easy dig shallow depth we don't have to go crazy so 125 linear feet times 13 gives us 1 625 now at the end of the video you've seen how we were grading everything out and what you missed is we did bring a load of black dirt in so that re-grading of that yard was a little bit more than a day's worth of labor plus some hand labor so that was seventeen hundred dollars we imported a load of black dirt we charge a flat rate fee of 450 dollars with delivery we had two mobilization fees we had a skid loader and a mini excavator each one of those was 250 dollars both ways so that's a total of five hundred dollars for that and then in the previous video we built a little teeny tiny small boulder retaining wall took us a couple hours to source all the boulders to put that together graded out we used a little bit of fabric we're gonna charge 130 dollars for that so the grand total for this project that you seen would come in roughly in minneapolis saint paul twin cities area at thirteen thousand seven hundred and eighty dollars now in the beginning of the first video i was talking about 300 000 job in three weeks well the thing is once you start getting used to estimating jobs you can look at a job and almost tell exactly how much that thing is gonna cost so a three hundred thousand dollar job if we're looking at this one it's a thirteen thousand seven hundred and eighty dollar job a three hundred thousand dollar job would be 21.77 times larger than this project that would mean i would fill up this customer's entire backyard with pavers their entire side yard with papers their entire front yard with pavers and then i would be going over into the neighbor's yard and doing paving work for them as well so you can see how the it's some things just when it feels off it might be off well what i'm not i'm not saying anybody is lying but what i am saying is where those projects are those massive jobs where the they're not really installing a whole lot are in an area where they can command a massive price so there's a number of psychological factors that play into effect when you're bidding these projects and it's more than just understanding your numbers it's also understanding your geographical location and knowing your own worth and i hope this video has helped some of you guys out if you guys want me to start breaking more of these jobs down like this i sure can god bless go get him you guys and hopefully we'll see at another one hit that 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