Understand your value and build confidence
BY JULIA HARMSWORTH
D oes pricing a project give you a headache? If so, you’re in good company. Leading landscape designers, architects and contractors told Landscape Trades they either struggle or have struggled with pricing. It’s common to make mistakes, undersell or feel awkward raising prices — especially when you or your client are uncomfortable talking about money. “Pricing for us is frequently a challenge,” said Neil Dawe, president of Tract Consulting, a landscape architecture, urban planning and civil engineering firm in St. John’s, N.L. Often, this challenge stems from a lack of clarity around what a client wants. Tract receives a lot of proposals, and they’re not always comprehensive. Before they’re even able to estimate the price of a design, the company goes back and forth with potential clients to evaluate the project’s scope of work. That’s a lot of emails. Dawe noted that young companies entering the marketplace will often underbid on a project: “When we started off 26 years ago, we knew we were coming in low. And the reason we did it was to try to get ourselves known. It’s hard to get work when nobody knows who you are. Once we got known, we brought up our fees.” Other professionals share Dawe’s sentiment and offer their own experiences with pricing — how they realized they were undercharging and built the confidence to ask for what they’re worth — to help professionals tackle pricing from a new angle. The wake-up call Brendan Wilton, CEO of Trim Landscaping, a full-service landscape design/build company in Halifax, N.S., agreed that young companies often undersell. It’s not unheard of for veteran companies, either. “It’s very easy to make a mistake, which results in underselling,” Wilton said. He believes companies undersell because they either don’t understand their value or they don’t understand their costs. These are often “soft” costs that don’t come per job, like your office administrator’s salary or time spent communicating by email. At the start of his career, Wilton and his business partner, Matt, undersold over and over again until they realized what things cost. “We made the mistakes, and everybody does, and that’s perfectly OK,” he said. Eventually, Wilton and Matt sat down and had the conversation: Are we charging enough? How do we justify a price increase? If you’re not sure if you’re underselling, look at your financial statements. Wilton said these can cue the wakeup call — learning you didn’t make as much as you thought you did, or if you spent a lot more than expected. Then, find
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MAY 2025 | 29
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