ledge
Free sheets · a video series

Are You Pricing This Right?

How to price landscaping work from the numbers up. Each episode takes one thing you sell and works the whole price on one sheet: what the material costs, what an hour of labor actually costs you, what the margin you think you're making turns into in man-hours, and which lever is worth pulling. Print the blank sheet, watch, run your own numbers.

Watch the playlist on YouTube ↗Listen to The Debrief on Spotify ↗

The Debrief is every sheet talked through, line by line, for the drive to the job. The hosts are AI, made with Google NotebookLM from the scripts; the numbers are mine.

Sheets ready now

EP 01 to 05
Mulch pricing sheet
EP 01Video
Mulch

You charge $120 a yard and think you're making 35%. That 35% isn't a percentage. It's a stopwatch.

Blank·Filled·Calculator →
Sod pricing sheet
EP 02Video
Sod

$450 a pallet for Zoysia, $275 of sod. You think you're making 35%. You have never made 40 points on sod. It isn't mathematically available.

Blank·Filled·Calculator →
Steel Edging pricing sheet
EP 03Video
Steel Edging

$7.50 a foot, $3.25 steel. The best margin per foot in the series, and 40 feet of it makes 9%.

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Decorative Gravel pricing sheet
EP 04Sheets only
Decorative Gravel

Texas Black looks like mulch and installs like mulch. It's 4 times the material and 5 times the weight, and priced by feel you're making 10 points less than you think.

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How Much Work Can You Lose pricing sheet
EP 05Sheets only
How Much Work Can You Lose

Four times the series has said price beats speed. So how much work can you lose at a higher price and still make the same money? More than you think, and ten bids will tell you.

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Coming, in order

EP 06 to 22
EP 06Artificial Turf$11 a foot, $3.25 turf. Looks like 70%. It isn't, and the reason is five things you install on every job and never put on a quote.EP 07CMU Retaining WallUnder 4 feet you don't need an engineer. Except 4 feet is measured from the bottom of the footing, so the wall you can build without a stamp is about 24 inches.EP 08Segmental Retaining WallSame 24-inch wall, dry-stack block. No footer, no mortar, no grout, and within 34 cents of the mortared wall in material.EP 09Paver PatioThe pavers are 63% of your material and the fastest thing you'll do all week. The cheapest layer is the most expensive thing you do.EP 10Margin vs MarkupIf you mark your jobs up 40%, you are not making 40%. You're making 28.6%, and nobody tells you, because the invoice looks fine.EP 11OverheadTwo companies, the same patio, the same money out the door. One books 26% gross margin, the other 37%. Which one is making more money? Neither.EP 12Don't Finance the JobSame $40,000 patio, same profit, same crew. One company never goes under. The other spends 10 weeks $28,000 under water on a job it's making money on.EP 13Mobilization and the MinimumThree guys, eight hours, 24 man-hours. About 14.7 of them are production. This is where the other 28% went.EP 14What You Bought vs What You BuiltYou sold 1,500 square feet of turf. You bought 1,742. The gap is the one line item nobody has, and the only thing in this series you can prove from invoices you already own.EP 15How Many GuysHow efficient is your fifth guy? Nobody knows. So we don't calculate that. We calculate what he has to beat, and that's one division.EP 16Pricing Plants by a MultiplierTwo plants off the same invoice, same pot, same hole. At 2.5× one makes you 15% and the other 37%, and nobody chose that.EP 17Four Inch or SixSame trench, same crew, same day. One line is 4 inch, one is 6. One markup on both means two margins you never picked.EP 18Moving DirtFour driveways, one estimate. 3.3 hours on one, 43.8 on another, and every number was wrong in the same direction, including the good ones.EP 19Count the LegsSeven yards of loam. Delivered, or send the guys? Twenty years of feel, written down.EP 20Did We Make What We SaidClose the loop on every job without a timesheet, an app, or asking a crew to write down what hour they spent on what.EP 21The YearEvery job this year made what it said. The year is short $67,000, because every rate was a guess about a count, and only the year can check the count.EP 22Where AI Plugs InA dollar-store calculator has never been wrong. The most expensive software in the world gets 1 + 1 right 999 times out of 1,000. That one time is the whole video.

Prices are mine. Yours are different. The math is the same.

Who made this

Ledge is software for landscape design-build. These sheets are the thinking underneath it.

The first ten shops run Ledge free; we make money only on payments. No SDR, no discovery call script. If you want to see your own jobs run this way, you get Edgar.