Hazelford Funding, a small-business funding service in Lebanon, Tennessee, wrote this guide for landscaping and lawn care companies in Wilson County, TN. It walks through how to bid a landscaping job: measuring the work, costing labor, equipment and materials, adding overhead and margin, and setting payment terms. It also shows how to spot the cash gap a job creates before you commit.
Why the bid is also a cash plan
Price is the obvious part of a bid: cover costs, add margin, stay competitive. That is half of it. The other half is timing. A landscaping job spends money on day one, when materials are bought and the crew starts, and collects money days or weeks later. A bid that ignores timing can win a profitable job that the business cannot afford to carry.
Wilson County, TN has a lot of small landscapers to compete with: 63 landscaping employers in 2023, 69.8% of them with fewer than five employees (County Business Patterns 2023), plus 364 landscaping businesses without payroll in 2024 (Nonemployer Statistics 2024, a separate count). Pricing carefully matters.
Step 1: Measure and scope the work
Walk the site and write down quantities: square feet of turf, linear feet of bed edging, cubic yards of mulch or soil, number of plants by size, square feet of pavers or wall face. Note access issues, slopes, drainage and anything that will slow the crew. Photos help when you price the job later.
Step 2: Cost the labor
Estimate crew hours for each task, then multiply by the full hourly cost of each worker: wages plus payroll taxes, workers' compensation and any benefits. It is easy to price labor at the wage rate alone and lose the margin they thought they had.
Illustration only
A three-person crew costs $27 an hour per worker fully loaded, or $81 an hour combined. A bed renovation estimated at 22 crew-hours carries about $1,782 in labor. These figures are an example, not a typical wage.
Step 3: Cost equipment and materials
Equipment has a real hourly cost: the payment or depreciation, fuel, maintenance and trailer time. Work out a per-hour figure for each major machine and charge it to the jobs that use it. If a mower or loader is on equipment financing, the monthly payment divided by the hours it works each month is a good starting point.
Materials should be priced at what you will actually pay, including delivery, plus a waste allowance for mulch, soil and plants.
Step 4: Add overhead and margin
Overhead covers the costs that are not tied to one job: insurance, the office, phones, software, the owner's time on estimates. Spread it across jobs as a percentage or per crew-hour. Margin comes on top. Write both down separately so you know which one you are cutting if you lower the price.
Step 5: Set payment terms that match the costs
For installation jobs, a deposit that covers materials keeps the business from financing the customer's project. For commercial maintenance, invoice terms can be 30 days or more. Before you sign, ask how and when the client pays, and write it into the contract.
See the cash gap before you commit
Illustration only: a commercial client signs a maintenance contract worth $4,800 a month, paid 30 days after each invoice. The crew costs $3,900 a month and starts immediately. The business carries about two months of crew costs, roughly $7,800, before the first payment arrives. That gap is the number to plan for.
Gaps like this are what a line of credit is for: draw when the crew starts, pay down when the invoice clears. The landscaping funding page covers equipment and payroll options in more detail.
Lawn care equipment financing inside the hourly rate
An owned machine still costs money every hour it runs. Pricing that cost into bids keeps the equipment paid for by the jobs that use it.
Illustration only: a zero-turn mower costs $14,000 and is expected to run about 900 hours a year for four years, 3,600 hours in all. That is about $3.90 an hour in machine cost, before fuel at roughly $4 an hour and maintenance at $1.50. Charging about $9.40 an hour for the mower on every maintenance bid covers it whether the machine was bought with cash or through equipment financing. The figures are an example, not an offer.
The same method works for a skid steer or trailer. The equipment financing page explains how a financed machine's payment compares with that hourly figure.
Common bidding mistakes
- Pricing labor at the wage alone instead of the full cost per hour.
- Leaving out travel time between Lebanon, TN and the job site.
- Ignoring equipment costs because the machine is already owned.
- Accepting long payment terms without pricing the wait.
- Bidding a job the crew cannot start on time.
County business figures for the area are on the Lebanon, TN page.
