Contractors & Irrigation- A New Match: Irrigation Installation

In particular, more contractors who have traditionally focused on just landscape services have been expanding into irrigation. A recent survey conducted by Lawn & Landscape magazine found that more than 40 percent of landscape contractors now offer irrigation installation and maintenance services.

BEST FOOT FORWARD. People want attractive landscapes. They drive past a neighbor’s yard, note the healthy lawn, attractive beds and impressive trees and want the same. This can, at times, simplify the landscape sales process.

The same is rarely true with irrigation systems, however. While homeowners may realize the benefits of such a system from a convenience standpoint, it’s unlikely that they see any correlation between the presence of a professionally installed system and a healthier landscape.

But once a customer has been convinced of the need for an irrigation system, what matters is winning the job.

“The most important thing on the sales end is the quality of the materials you work with,” noted Lance Adler, president, Adler Irrigation Systems, Evansville, Ind. “For example, I take different types of pipe or insert fittings to meetings with customers and explain to them how some are solvent welded together to produce a better fit.”

Day’s Landscaping, West Newbury, Mass., deals primarily with high-end residential customers. “The residential market is usually the most profitable because these customers are looking for more detail, and quality in the work and service means a great deal to them,” claimed Norman Day, president.

To Day, a contractor’s reputation is the key to successes. “Customers wants to know they can trust whomever they’re working with,” he said. “This means you have to really talk to them and find out what their needs are during the sales process, and propose a plan that takes care of their needs instead of just selling what you want to sell.”

Martin Thomas, president, Hydroscapes, Dayton, Ohio, targets high-end residentail customers, but since his company doesn’t sell landscape services it partners with area landscape companies to generate business. “We work with two or three of the best landscape companies in our market who don’t perform irrigation work themselves,” he explained. “Typically, we work with the contractor but for the homeowner, so there’s no subcontractor markup involved and it’s still a coordinated installation.”

For other contractors, the commercial market is the customer of choice. “We offer potential customers a couple of properties around town that they can go visit to see the importance of irrigation,” explained Scott Hundley, co-owner, S&S Creative Landscapes, Bentonville, Ark. “We also give them examples of similar jobs without irrigation so they really get the point.”

THE BOTTOM LINE. A real challenge on any job is submitting a price to the customer that is low enough to win the job but high enough to ensure a profit.

“I’ve tried to come up with a simple method of price per square foot or price per head for 28 years, but I keep coming back to time-and-materials estimates as the fairest and truest method,” remarked Day. “The price of a foot of pipe changes drastically if we’re doing a football field vs. a detailed perennial garden requiring all hand labor.”

Adler also bases his pricing on material costs. “We do a design for every system we estimate so we can take every head, every fitting and every valve and price it all out,” he noted. “A lot of contractors bid on a per-head basis, but I think you can be burned this way. Going through the design helps to anticipate everything that might come up.

“Doing a design for every estimate does take a little more time, but it also produces something we can give to the customer to show what we’ll be doing,” Adler added.

As Adler noted, per-zone bidding is popular with some contractors. “We have broken down every cost that could be included in a zone,” explained Hundley, who said the typical zone costs $700 to $750. “From there, I know my material and labor costs, and I just plug it all into the computer.”

DOING THE DEED. All of the challenges with selling and pricing irrigation work only lead up to the real work - installing the system.

“There are three components to a quality irrigation system: the design, the mechanics and the products used, and I would put them in that order of importance,” asserted Thomas. “The product can usually be changed if necessary because there’s so much available on the market, and the mechanics of the system are actually something the homeowners could do themselves. But the system’s design is the absolute key.”

Thomas said the influx of new contractors offering irrigation services has created a problem. “Everybody seems to get into irrigation work by focusing on equipment,” he noted. “What people need is the knowledge of how to do this work, and that’s tough to learn on the job. If you start performing installations in the spring and you’re making a mistake, that might not become apparent for three or four months until it gets dry outside. Then you’ve got a real problem.

“There are some important design principles and rules to be learned, which takes real caring about the work,” Thomas affirmed. “That’s what this industry lacks.”

One key to installing systems as efficiently as possible can be the crew setup, which seems to offer almost as many options as there are for pricing the work.

“We’ll have five or six guys on a crew,” explained Hundley, assigning them to digging for utilities, trenching, cleaning out the trenches, gluing pipe, setting the heads and backfilling. “That crew can get a residential job done in one day, but it’s taken us awhile to get to that point,” he said.

Adler tends to go with smaller crews. “Two experienced technicians can handle a residential job by themselves, but our crews usually have four people with a supervisor, a skilled person and two laborers,” he added.

When it comes to servicing irrigation systems, those interviewed were uniform in their desire to maintain as many of the systems they install as possible. “The first year’s service and winterization generally come as part of the installation price, so contractors need to realize that they have to be able to provide this service as well,” commented Day.

“I’ve eaten a ton of money on some jobs, but no matter how bad the problem is, you have to fix it,” agreed Hundley. “Your reputation is too important not to.”

“We have a production manager to oversee the installation, but he works very closely with the service manager because it’s that service manager that does the final delivery of the system to the customer,” explained Thomas of his way of transitioning into the system maintenance.

For companies offering irrigation and landscape installation, contractors generally recommend keeping the crews focused on one area or the other as much as possible.

“Irrigation employees tend to be more mechanically inclined, whereas the landscape employees have a love for horticulture and a better understanding of plant requirements,” according to Day.