Quoting a Mowing and Mulch Round

The gate on the north side is 760 millimetres between the posts

Two hours on a Tuesday with a measuring wheel, a phone and a notebook, and what comes back to the van from the care home on the bypass is nine numbers and a photograph of a gate. The gate is the one that matters. Seven hundred and sixty millimetres clear between the posts, and the thirty-inch walk-behind you would want to put behind it is seven hundred and sixty-two millimetres across the deck alone. Two millimetres decide that the rear lawn gets a twenty-one-inch pedestrian mower for the whole of next season, and that decision does more to the price of the contract than the eighteen hundred and fifty square metres of open grass out front.

The rest of the notebook: an open front lawn of 1,850 square metres with a flagpole and a sign board in it; a rear lawn of 740 behind the gate, eleven specimen trees and a summerhouse; two entrance verges totalling 310, threaded with bollards and three lamp columns; 190 square metres of planting bed across seven island beds and two borders; four hundred and eighty metres of trim line — bed edges, fence bases, the plinth around the building, a ring at each tree. Two thousand nine hundred square metres of turf in total, which is the figure the client will quote at you and the least useful number on the page.

It is the least useful because grass does not consume time by the square metre. It consumes time by the square metre a particular machine can cover in a minute on that particular piece, and there are three different machines and three different pieces on this site. A quote built on the total, at whatever minutes-per-thousand you carry in your head from the last job, will be wrong on this one by more than any margin you were planning to make.

What a deck covers, and what the spec sheet says it covers

Coverage is a product of three things and nothing else: how wide the cut is, how fast the machine is travelling, and what fraction of that width is new grass rather than a strip already cut on the last pass or a headland you are turning on. Multiply the first two and you get a theoretical rate. Multiply by the third and you get something you could put in front of a client. The third is the whole argument, and it is the one nobody writes down.

The acres-per-hour line on a commercial mower's specification is the first two multiplied out, and the operator's manual and the sales literature will tell you what efficiency it assumed if you read to the footnote. On an open forty-eight-inch deck at five miles an hour that arithmetic gives about two and four-tenths acres an hour. Take the same machine, the same speed, and eighty per cent — a pass overlap of a few inches and a turn at each end of the run — and it gives one and nine-tenths. The mower did not get slower. Twenty per cent of the day simply went somewhere the specification does not account for.

Efficiency is not a fudge factor and it is not a confidence level. It is a physical description of the piece of grass. A long open rectangle with a headland at each end runs at eighty-five. A lawn holding a flagpole, a sign, three beds and a play frame forces a turn every few seconds and drops into the sixties, because every obstacle costs a run-up and a run-out as well as the strip it occupies; a verge with a lamp column every twelve metres is worse again. The only way to calibrate the number is to time a piece you have already mown and work backwards.

The table below is that arithmetic run out for the machines most rounds actually carry. It is worth reading across two rows rather than down a column: a sixty-inch deck at six miles an hour dropped from seventy-five per cent to sixty covers less ground per hour than a forty-eight at five in the open. Deck width buys you nothing on a site that will not let you use it, which is the single most expensive misconception in this trade.

The gate is a quotable item

Having established that the gate costs half an hour a visit, price the gate. Widening a clear opening from 760 millimetres to something that takes a thirty-inch walk-behind — rehanging the leaf, moving one post, occasionally lifting and resetting a gate stop — is a morning's work for a joiner and one visit from you. Behind it, the rear lawn drops from thirty minutes to about fourteen: a thirty-inch deck at three and a half miles an hour at seventy-five per cent covers roughly fifty-four square metres a minute against the twenty-five the pedestrian machine manages.

Sixteen minutes a visit across twenty-six visits is very nearly seven crew-hours a season, every season, for one morning of carpentry. Put it on the quotation as a separate optional line with that arithmetic beside it. Clients who will not move on a maintenance figure will often sign a small capital item that visibly reduces it, and a client who declines has been told in writing why the rear lawn is priced the way it is.

Deck time is roughly half of what you are selling

The mowing calculation ends when the blades disengage, and the visit does not. On this site there are four hundred and eighty metres of trim line to strim, a hard-edging circuit against the drive and the bed lines, three paths and a set of steps to blow down, a trailer to unload and reload, and a gate that has to be propped every time a machine goes through it. None of that scales with turf area, which is exactly why an area-based quote misses it: strimming scales with the length of the edge, blowing scales with the hard surface, emptying boxes scales with how fast the grass is growing, and the trailer is a fixed cost paid twice whether the site is a quarter of an acre or four.

Do not take those figures from anybody, this page included. They are the numbers on this site most specific to your own crew, your own machines and your own habits, and they are cheap to measure: a stopwatch, three consecutive visits, and a note on the job sheet. What you will find, on most suburban and institutional rounds, is that deck time is somewhere near half the visit and never much more than two-thirds of it. On the care home, fifty-seven minutes of mowing sits inside a visit of roughly an hour and three-quarters for one person — and it is the other forty-eight, not the mowing, that decide whether the season pays.

One line in the table below behaves differently from the rest. Travel does not belong to this property at all; it belongs to the round. A site fifteen minutes off the Tuesday run costs half an hour of driving the client's grass had nothing to do with, and a site reachable on foot from the previous job costs nothing — which is why the marginal property on a tight street is worth taking at a figure the same property in isolation could never justify.

The bank the manual will not let you mow, and the hours a strimmer may run

Two of the constraints on a mowing quote are not commercial at all. The first is the machine's slope limit, which is stated in its operator's manual and is a property of that specific mower — its track, its centre of gravity and whether it is a seated ride-on within the scope of BS EN ISO 5395-3 or commercial turf equipment built to ANSI/OPEI B71.4. Do not carry a number between machines. Above the stated limit the bank is not a mowing job, it is a pedestrian job with a strimmer on a lanyard, and pedestrian work on a slope is several times the time per square metre of anything on the flat.

The second is the operator. A round with four hundred and eighty metres of trim line puts a strimmer in somebody's hands for a long stretch of every visit, and hand-arm vibration exposure is capped, not advised: the Control of Vibration at Work Regulations 2005 set a daily exposure action value of 2.5 m/s² A(8) and a daily exposure limit value of 5 m/s² A(8), with exposure evaluated by the method in ISO 5349-1. Exposure rises with the square of magnitude, so the ceiling is eight hours multiplied by the square of the limit divided by the tool's declared vibration, and on some older two-stroke machines that ceiling is under two hours. That is a scheduling constraint on the whole round: it decides how many trimming-heavy sites one person can be given in one day, which decides how many people are on the van, which is the largest single number in the quotation.

Noise runs beside it — the Control of Noise at Work Regulations 2005 in Great Britain, OSHA 29 CFR 1910.95 in the United States. The machine's own sound power label comes from a different regime again, the one Directive 2000/14/EC established and the Noise Emission in the Environment by Equipment for use Outdoors Regulations carried into UK law, and what that label will not tell you is when you are allowed to start. Permitted hours on a residential estate come from local authority conditions and statutory nuisance powers, or in the United States from a municipal ordinance, and a site nobody may begin before nine does not fit the same shape of day as the rest of the round.

Growth sets the frequency, and the calendar only approximates it

Grass grows on soil temperature and moisture, not on the day of the week, and the interval that matters is the one that keeps a single cut removing no more than about a third of the leaf. Take more than that and you check root growth, expose stem, and leave the pale scalped finish that generates the phone call — and you also take longer doing it, because a heavy cut clumps, blocks a deck and needs a second pass. Frequency is therefore a technical decision before it is a commercial one, and BS 7370-3 is the document to point a facilities manager at when the conversation turns into a request to halve the visits.

In practice a UK season runs from March to November and is not uniform inside that. Fortnightly through the cold shoulders at each end, weekly through the flush, and — on a fed, irrigated sward in May — an honest look at whether weekly is holding at all. Twenty-six visits across nine months is a reasonable shape for an unirrigated amenity site in the south; a fed lawn under irrigation on a long growing season is a different count entirely, and a drought August can hand three of those visits back. Whatever you choose, choose it explicitly and write the count into the schedule, because a client who has agreed to twenty-six visits and a client who has agreed to a monthly figure will remember two different contracts in July.

The commonest way this goes wrong is the fortnight in May. A site skipped for two weeks in the flush does not cost two normal visits, it costs nearer three: the cut is heavier, the deck clogs, the clippings have to be collected rather than returned, and the finish is worse than the visit before. A client wanting the shoulder-season interval to run through the peak is asking for a different specification, not a saving, and that belongs in the schedule at quotation stage where it can be pointed at later.

Clippings are the other frequency-linked decision, and it is a genuine cost line rather than a preference. Returning the cut to the sward costs nothing and recycles the nitrogen; collecting it means box stops that scale with growth rather than area, a trailer, and somewhere for it to go. If that somewhere is your own yard, the movement is a waste transfer: in England and Wales the duty of care under section 34 of the Environmental Protection Act 1990 and carrier registration under the Waste (England and Wales) Regulations 2011 apply to a landscaper's green waste exactly as they apply to anybody else's, and elsewhere the equivalent local regime does. Price the disposal route, not just the emptying.

From crew-minutes to the figure the client reads

Everything above produces one number per visit and one for the spring: call the visit a hundred and five crew-minutes on this site, and mark that as yours to prove with a stopwatch. Twenty-six visits is 2,730 crew-minutes, or forty-five and a half crew-hours. Add the mulch day, the hard-edging circuits and the leaf clearance the autumn schedule commits you to, and the season has a crew-hour total defensible line by line. This page stops at the hours deliberately. The divisions that turn a crew-hour into a rate — the year's overhead and the billable-hour divisor it is spread across — are done annually rather than per property, and doing them badly costs far more than any measuring error on a lawn.

How that figure is presented matters nearly as much as its size. A per-visit price is transparent and it punishes you in a wet year, when the sward wants thirty cuts and the client agreed to twenty-six. A flat monthly figure across the season smooths your cashflow and the client's, and it invites the question every March about why April costs the same as July. Both are defensible; the version that fails is a monthly figure with no visit count behind it, because the moment there is a dispute neither party can say what was bought.

Whichever shape it takes, the arithmetic behind it should survive the meeting. Asked why the rear lawn costs what it does, the answer is a gate width and a coverage rate rather than a feeling about the site — and that answer wins work a lower headline figure loses, because the low figure has visibly nothing behind it.

What the schedule has to say out loud

A maintenance specification is not a covering letter, and BS 7370-1 exists partly because grounds contracts fail on scope rather than on price. Almost every argument in the second half of a season traces back to something both parties assumed and neither wrote down. The list below is not a contract; it is the set of items that, left unstated on this particular property, will each cost you a visit or a client.

1. The visit count, the months it spans and the intended interval in each part of the season, stated as a number rather than as a frequency word.
2. The cutting height, and whether it changes between the flush, high summer and the last cut of the year.
3. Whether clippings are returned or collected, who disposes of them, and what happens on the visit where the sward is too heavy to return.
4. Which areas are mown by machine and which are strimmed, named piece by piece — the rear lawn behind the gate is a different specification from the front lawn and should read as one.
5. The trim-line and hard-edging rotation: every visit, alternate visits, or monthly, and against which edges.
6. The growth exception: what happens if weather stops the grass, and what happens if it will not stop growing.
7. Leaf clearance in autumn, priced separately, because it is governed by the trees and the wind rather than by the mowing schedule.
8. The mulch top-up: which beds, the target depth, and that the volume is set by a residual measured in spring and not fixed at signature.
9. Access — gates, keys, codes, parking, where the trailer stands, and who moves the cars on the day.
10. What is not included at all: hedges, pruning, weed control, irrigation, snow, and anything with the word additional beside it.

Where a round quietly stops paying

The losses are rarely dramatic. A round bleeds through properties measured as one lawn that are three, through sites where the deck on the trailer never actually fitted and nobody re-priced, through travel between two jobs that were adjacent until one was lost, and through a mulch line reordered every spring at the installation volume. Each is small and each repeats twenty-six times.

The correction is the same in every case and it costs nothing but discipline: record the actual crew-minutes on the job sheet for the first four visits of the season, on every property, and compare them with what the quotation assumed. The sites that are out will be out consistently and in the same direction, which is what tells you it is the estimate rather than the day. Fix the estimate at the next renewal with the measurement in your hand, and put the gate on the quotation while you are there.