# Pricing Commerical Plowing



## Ritz (Dec 3, 2009)

New to Commerical plowing!! Looking for some help! I have a restaurant parking lot One side of restaurant 15160 Sq FT ,other side of building 9540 Sq Ft. 300 FT side walk in front of property.Is there a industry standard to price by Sq Ft. or push also salting I,m in suburb of detroit .


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## Weeded! (Nov 13, 2009)

How about this formula:

($ Cost per plow divided by 3)
+ ($ cost of the four wheel drive you bought instead of 2WD for doing maintenance divided by 3)
+ ($ annual maintenance and repairs on plow)
+ ($annual wear and tear on the truck due to plowing and salt)
Total up all these numbers.
Multiply by 130% (or some other number of yours) to cover Overhead and Profit

Divide this number by the number of hours you expect to plow this year (I like to be conservative).

Add this number to your hourly rate for COGS, overhead, profit (Your normal billing rate).

Add some for having to get up at all hours of the night and plowing endless hours.

Multiply this number by about 25% for non-billable hours getting ready, getting to the job site, checking back as needed, potential damage to site to cover.

Just a brief guideline. If you are putting down chemicals then that is something to factor in as well as you should be able to, in my experience, make a higher profit margin on the chemicals than the plowing, though we only get 1 event per year to push here in Virginia.

As far as "what can I get" - I would not play this game with plowing. Price at what you need to make money. You can very quickly spend more than you are getting paid if you go by this rule.

I have found that giving EXCELLENT service at MY prices has gotten me far with my snow clients. They will use me for snow instead of their lawn maintenance companies because I have proven myself by being ready and treating their money and their parking lots as if they were mine.

I would be interested to know what number you get. If you push 5 times and get about 15 hours of pushing each time then I figure $150 per hour. Like I mentioned, if you put down chemicals after plowing this can add about $75 or more per hour to your revenue, so if you went to $125 or $110 if need be then you would still be ok. But there are big carrying costs to chemicals as well. I try to get $200 per hour when doing chemicals, but again, we are only treating 3-5 times per year and plowing maybe 1 or 2.

Hope this helps.


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