A lot of tree care companies stay busy but never seem to grow. The reason is pretty simple: Their overall ticket price is simply too low.
That doesn’t mean you should just double your rates tomorrow — that’s unlikely to go well. You’ll probably just start closing fewer sales. Instead, you need to approach this problem carefully and deliberately, using one or more of the strategies we’ll share below.
The Importance of Increasing the Cost of Your Average Job
When you were just starting up your tree care company, you were probably happy to get any job you could. To get a foothold in your local market, you had to not only hustle but offer rock-bottom rates to close sales.
Those days are thankfully long gone. You now operate a legitimate tree care company that you’re trying to scale.
But you can’t do that if your average job estimate is too low. Even if your crew stays busy all day, week in, week out, you’ll eventually run into the following problems:
- Razor-thin margins. Every time you send your crew to a job site, it costs you money in terms of labor and fuel costs. If your average ticket price is too low, you simply won’t generate the kind of profit margin needed to cover these expenses and create growth.
- Wear and tear on your vehicles, tools, and equipment. The value of your tools and equipment decreases every time your trucks hit the road, your lifts roll off the trailer, or your chainsaws cut through a branch. You have to generate enough profit from each job to cover this kind of depreciation and the associated replacement costs.
- Employee burnout and turnover. The only way to stay afloat with low prices is to increase the number of jobs on the calendar. But sending your crews all over town chasing one low-paying job after another will wear your team out and lead many to seek greener pastures.
- Difficult clients. Though exceptions occur, customers looking for the cheapest work possible are often the most challenging. They’ll fight you for every nickel and dime, and they’ll often want you to take shortcuts that put their trees and your crew in danger.
All of these things will prevent you from generating the kind of revenue you need to create game-changing growth. But by increasing your average ticket price, your crew will start generating significant money every time they leave the shop.
Seven Strategies for Increasing Your Average Project Estimate
The following strategies may not be instant game changers, but they are effective and practical approaches for increasing your average job price.
1. Offer Strategically Bundled Services
Instead of providing quotes for a single service, start offering multi-service bundles that cover everything homeowners and commercial clients need.
For example, rather than simply quoting a potential client for the removal of a 65-year-old water oak, provide them with an option to have the tree removed, the stump ground, and the tree replaced with a higher-value, longer-lived species.
Many customers will be willing to pay more to have a true turnkey solution, rather than having to tackle stump removal and new tree installation later on. But most importantly, this kind of sales strategy shifts the conversation away from a cost-per-task model and toward the overall value you can provide them.
You could also offer other bundled service packages like:
- Root crown excavation, radial trenching, and mulching
- Risk assessment, pruning, and cabling
- A single large tree removal, several small tree removals, and brush removal
2. Promote High-Margin Add-Ons
There are a number of services you can provide clients that offer real value yet don’t cost you very much in terms of labor or materials. These kinds of high-margin services can quickly boost your average ticket price.
Mulch delivery is a great example. Instead of paying to dispose of your mulch or offering it for free for pickup, implement a paid mulch delivery and spreading service. The mulch will not only help support their trees (making the customers happier in the long run), but it’ll also pad your bottom line in the process.
A few other high-margin add-ons to consider include:
- Tree growth regulator administration
- Tree fertilization
- Pesticide or fungicide injections
- Root zone aeration or decompaction
- Lightning protection installation
These are all services you can provide quite easily, but they’re essentially impossible for homeowners to do themselves.
3. Use Tiered Pricing and “Good/Better/Best” Options
Good/better/best pricing models (sometimes called “Goldilocks pricing”) help leverage human psychology in a way that helps boost your overall ticket price without losing budget-minded customers (if you’d still like to keep low-margin jobs on your calendar).
This kind of tiered approach subtly encourages customers to select the mid-tier option; the “good” and “best” options primarily exist to calibrate their thinking. Some customers will certainly stick to the most affordable option, while others will opt for the premium choice. But the bulk of your customers should select the mid-tier option, which you’ll carefully design to offer the best possible margin.
For example, you may offer the following tiers:
- Bronze Package: Basic removal; debris left onsite
- Silver Package: Removal with cleanup and stump grinding
- Gold Package: Removal, cleanup, stump grinding, replanting, and soil remediation
Most customers will likely select the silver package after seeing that the bronze package will saddle them with additional work, while the gold package includes services they may not need. This means you can dial in the price for the silver option at a level that provides a juicy margin.
4. Incorporate Visual Tools in Estimates
Adding a bit of polish and pizzazz to your estimates can help distinguish you from the competition, solidify your position as a true tree-care expert, and justify slightly higher prices.
Best of all, there are scads of ways to do this. You could, for example:
- Incorporate drone photos in your estimates
- Share Resistograph or tomography results for high-value or historic trees
- Produce annotated tree maps outlining risks and recommended mitigation services
- Include tree-value charts that help justify investments in pruning and other services
These kinds of visual assets will help foster trust with your clients and — most importantly — help them understand that your $5,000 quote isn’t arbitrary.
5. Create Long-Term Tree Care Plans
Did you know that securing a new customer costs at least five times as much as keeping an existing customer (and in some cases, it may cost as much as 25 times more)? This means that it is critical to build a viable retention strategy into your basic sales pitch.
The best way to do this is by offering long-term tree plans. This not only helps generate ongoing, high-margin work, but it also helps keep their trees healthy and looking their best — a true win-win scenario if there ever was one.
There are countless extended care package ideas that may work, but a typical example you could offer homeowners, HOAs, or even municipalities would include:
- Annual inspections
- Priority storm response
- Annual mulch application
- Routine pruning (perhaps every third year)
These kinds of programs not only generate recurring revenue on their own, but they also ensure that you’ll be the first call these clients make when they need tree care. Additionally, you’ll have a myriad of opportunities to recommend additional work, as you notice hazardous or ailing trees.
6. Offer Permitting & Compliance Help
It’s almost always important for tree-care companies to obtain helpful credentials, such as ISA certification. In addition to boosting your authority (which helps increase your overall ticket price on its own), certifications can open the door to more jobs.
For example, some municipalities require tree removal permits to be issued before a tree can be removed. And these permits must usually be submitted by a certified arborist.
Tree care companies that don’t have a certified arborist on staff must outsource this work to someone who is ISA-certified. This creates a number of headaches, ranging from lost work (the customers may simply decide to go with the certified professional) to the time and effort required to find an independent arborist who’ll complete the permit for you.
But if you have an ISA-certified arborist on staff, you can charge a premium to handle the tree removal permits. This will boost the ticket price of the job by $200 to $500, while only costing you an hour of labor. But at the end of the day, most homeowners will be happy to pay 5% or 10% more to avoid bureaucratic headaches or face the need to track down another arborist themselves.
7. Improve Your Branding
Of all the ways you can increase your overall ticket price, the easiest path for most tree-care companies is to simply invest in better branding. In fact, professional branding is often the difference between companies that scale and those that spend all day fighting for low-margin jobs.
Professional branding not only helps position you as the leader in your service area, but it also communicates your expertise to potential customers before they’ve even submitted an inquiry form. This allows you to raise your rates without losing customers, and it may even allow you to win customers who wouldn’t have even considered you previously.
Best of all, a branding investment is a one-time expense that provides long-term, ongoing value. Every time a potential customer visits your website, receives an estimate, or sees one of your trucks driving around town, they’ll subconsciously view your company as a premium service provider, offering reliable, safe, and expert-caliber service.
Let ORB Tree Service Marketing Help Increase Your Average Ticket Price
You can start implementing a number of the strategies discussed above on your own. You may need to have a sit-down with your team to get your ducks in a row or have some new promotional materials printed, but you can probably figure out how to do these things on your own.
Developing new branding, on the other hand, requires professional guidance, as it will entail everything from strategic discussions about unexploited service gaps in your market to a website redesign.
That may sound daunting, but this is a no-pain, no-gain situation. It’s not easy to stop chasing small, low-margin jobs and competing with every Chuck-in-a-truck in your zip code.
If it were, everyone would do it.
Instead, you have to find a growth partner who can help provide the kind of guidance you need. That’s exactly what ORB Tree Service Marketing does — we help tree-care companies message more effectively, project a more professional image, and earn those high-ticket jobs that allow for true, sustained growth.
Contact us today. We’d love to discuss your marketing and brand-positioning needs.
Sources & References
- Harvard Business Review – “The Value of Keeping the Right Customers”
Cites research showing that acquiring a new customer is 5 to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one.
https://hbr.org/2014/10/the-value-of-keeping-the-right-customers
