Mulch

The five numbers a mulch price is made of

Every line further down the sheet is arithmetic on these five. Get them right once, at the top, and the rest of the page can't be wrong. Get the burden wrong and every number under it is wrong in the same direction.

Sell price per yard

$120

Material cost per yard

$40

Crew base wage

$23/hr

Labor burden multiplier

1.35

Burdened hourly cost

$31/hr

What a $23 an hour employee actually costs

$23 is what lands on the check. It is not what the hour costs you. Payroll taxes, workers' compensation, liability insurance, and everything else attached to employing a person push that hour to roughly $31, a burden multiplier of 1.35. That gap is eight dollars an hour, every hour, on every job you have ever priced off the wage.

This is the number most people get wrong, and it is the worst one to get wrong, because it hides. A mulch job priced against $23 an hour looks profitable on the estimate and comes in thin, and nothing on the invoice explains why. Once the burdened hour is on the sheet, the rest of the page has a chance of being true.

A wage is what you pay. A burdened hour is what you sell. Only one of them belongs in a price.

Turning 35% margin into a man-hour budget

Here is where the percentage becomes a stopwatch. At $120 a yard with $40 of material, the labor the margin allows works out to about 1.2 man-hours per yard. Three guys on an eight-hour day are 24 man-hours, which buys 20 yards. So the 35% you wrote on the estimate is a statement about the day: that crew has to move 20 yards of mulch before dark.

Say it out loud on the tailgate and it stops being an accounting number. Everyone on the truck knows whether 20 yards in a day is normal for them, and everyone knows what happened by three o'clock. If the crew does 15, the job made something, just not 35%, and the sheet tells you exactly what instead. That's the loop most shops never close: the margin is checked once, at the estimate, and never again.

Price or speed: which lever actually pays

There are only two ways to make more on a yard of mulch. Charge more for it, or install it faster. On this sheet they are not close. 8% more price returned about $10 a yard. 11% faster returned about $4: less than half the money, for the harder thing to do.

That ordering matters because speed is where most owners push. New wheelbarrows, a tarp system, an earlier start, a conversation about hustle. All of it is real and all of it is worth less than eight percent on the quote. Run your own numbers and the ratio may differ; the sheet will tell you which lever is worth your season instead of leaving it to instinct.