[start2finish]

From a LCO owner's point of view, I would consider working with a designer/contractor, it may very well be a good working relationship.

My first questions would be payment schedule?

also a unspoken concern would be scheduling priority. After you do several installs, you would command a better priority in our schedule. Not saying it would be difficult to work with us, but if we are doing regular business, I might devote an entire crew to your work. And big things bring all our assets in.

We are far away, but this is how I would approach it.

[Dale Wiley]

So I sub my crew out at my lowest acceptable net profit rate....$ 41.00 per hour.

You step on that for another 30%.

$ 53.30 per hour, or $ 13.30 per hour.

Job entails 100 hours. You make
$ 1,330.00 plus whatever design fees,and margin on materials.

Seems pretty slim to me. Gonna have to do about 4 of those jobs a month to make 3K take home.

Can you really add that much value to a landscape crew ??

[Lawn Lad]

As a landscape company we use subs to fill in where we don't have time, primarily on hard scapes. I've been adding more subs to our list trying them out on projects and I keep going back to the same guys. But I'll tell you that subs will bump a lower paying job for the great one they just landed. You come second in their book unless you keep them busy full time or have built a great relationship, generally based on the fact that you keep 'em busy.

It takes time to build a pool of competent subs, and more time in my opinion before I'd trust my reputation solely on the subs ability to complete the project for the customer and for me to collect the check.

I'd start by doing the installs yourself and have a crew of your own that stays with you for a while. Sub out the larger parts of projects where needed and do the smaller detail oriented work to control your quality. Build your portfolio and reputation. As you do more work you'll find other contractors that you can feed more work to and you'll grow into. If the relationship falls through you'll have your crew to step in and keep things moving. You can keep your crew busy doing the annual follow up/maintenance of your previously installed work and doing finish up details of your new projects. You don't have to run more than two or three guys in this capacity - one project at a time. While your crew if finishing one job your subs on are on the next. You'll be bouncing back and forth between the start of one and the finishing of the last - while selling three or four jobs in front of that. You'll keep yourself plenty busy.

[agla]

How much does a contractor want to be a subcontractor? Well, if it means better projects and/or better profits the answer is very much. If it means sharing profit and/or being hassled by someone trying to micromanage them, the answer is very little.

That means that it is much easier to get the under experienced, those with unestablished reputations, and those having a more difficult time getting good work than it is to get very well experienced, busy companies with good reputations. It does not mean you can't get the good guys, but you have to have something that attracts them.

This means you either have to be landing truly high end jobs (find me a landscaper who says he does not do high end) that are well designed with lots of profitable amenities to attract the elite contractors, or you have to have the ability to get the best out of those developing landscapers. Either way, it is your experience, skills, and abilities that will allow this to work successfully and you better know what you are doing or you will get eaten for lunch by either the contractor, the client, or both.

You can read postings on any of the many forums to do with landscape design. You will see zillions of posts by people who want to be landscape designers and those who are trying to make it in the business. The single hardest thing that they don't anticipate is that people are looking to have the job taken from design right through contruction. They don't want to switch horses in mid stream by having to find a contractor. This means that design/build is king. It also means that the aspiring designers wind up doing only little gardens that they are capable of building rather than complete jobs that they dreamed of designing. There is not one amongst them who does not fantasize over designing grand plans and hiring contractors to make them real. The problem is that they are not capable of managing the contractor or the job and the contractors do not have some kind of hero complex that makes them want to step up and donate their time and efforts in training these people.

The only way to become a designer and project manager of significant landscapes is to do it for established companies that already do it and then move latterally into doing it for yourself, or to be a successful design/build and dissolve the "build" part of the company (most likely by selling the company and re-emerging as a design company).

It is a tough row to hoe. The key word in the paragraph above is "latteral". This is not an area where you can start with simple low rent projects and grow into higher end work. Once you establish what you do, it is pretty difficult to sell above that niche. People in the mid to higher end market want to reach up to a successful company to do their landscape rather than reaching down to give someone an opportunity.

You have to have a portfolio of built work at or above the level of work you are trying to market.

And there is very good profit in this both in design sales and in management. The overhead is extremely low, designing at the professional level averages at $90 per hour and most homes require about 30 hours of design time for just a plan without construction documents. Jobs more often than not are over $100k. That is if you are marketable in that niche.