Production Rates

Across the industry, contractors understand that in order to make money, maximizing time is a necessity. In terms of landscape maintenance, issues of downtime and travel time tend to cut into productive hours on the job. Since contractors can’t always bill for the time it takes to load up a truck or drive grass clippings to a dumping site, making sure they get the most out of the hours they can bill is essential.

To meet this challenge, most maintenance contractors put together charts of production rates, usually in acres per hour, for each piece of equipment they have – especially their mowers. “When I bid on a commercial property, I look at it from a sense of ‘How much acreage do I have?’” explained Dan Standley, president, Dan’s Landscaping & Lawn Care, New Orleans, La. Taking this approach allows Standley and other contractors to divide up a property based on what type of mower would cover each area most effectively. After determining the sizes of each of those divisions, contractors can refer to their production rates and figure out the amount of time needed to complete the mowing job.

“A lot of people perform their own production rates,” Standley mentioned. “We try to go out and see how long it takes to mow 1,000 square feet. If you use your mower and your operator, performing your own production rates really helps vs. what manufactures might say. That’s the real world vs. in print – sometimes it’s a big difference.”

These production rates help contractors create hour budgets for their crews and also accurately calculate their pricing in order to get the most money for their time. Like Standley noted, creating your own hour budgets may be beneficial since you’ll be able to tailor the calculations to your own properties and your own crewmembers, but to get started Lawn & Landscape has put together a chart of production rates for your reference.

Good luck and happy mowing.

The author is Assistant Editor of Lawn & Landscape magazine and can be reached at lspiers@lawnandlandscape.com.