Everything on this site about pricing is free and stays free. This page is about the point where a guide can’t take you any further, and what I built for that. TradeNavigator is now live.
The guides here will take you a long way. You can work out what gardeners typically charge, set your own hourly figure from what your business actually needs, build a price for a job, check it before you send it, and keep a note of how each job went so the next quote is better. None of that costs anything and I’ll keep adding to it.
What a guide can’t do is price your hedge. It doesn’t know your van, your round, your tip fees, or what the last three hedges like it actually took you. It can give you a method and an illustrative example. It can’t give you a number for the job in front of you, and it can’t tell you whether that number works for your business this year rather than for the gardener in the example.
After years of doing this, the problem I hear most from gardeners who are already busy isn’t that they can’t price work. It’s this: I can put a price on the job, but I’m not always confident I’ve priced it properly. You’ve got a number. You’re just not sure it’s the right one, and there’s nobody to check it against except your own memory.
TradeNavigator is a separate tool built for exactly that gap: pricing and quoting, done properly, rather than trying to run every part of the business. You describe the job in front of you. It sets that against evidence from comparable completed gardening work, and against what your own business needs each job to earn, and gives you a price to consider with the reasoning behind it. Not one objectively correct price, because there isn’t one; a better-informed decision, with the evidence in view. When the job’s done, you record what actually happened, so the next similar quote has better evidence behind it than the last one.
That’s the same method the guides teach, applied to your real jobs and your real numbers instead of an example. It doesn’t replace your judgement about the customer, the access or the weather. It gives you something solid to set that judgement against.
It’s built by me, the same working gardener who wrote these guides, for the same reason I wrote them. I undercharged for longer than I’d like to admit, and I wanted something I could check a price against before sending it.
TradeNavigator is live, and you can try the full product free for 14 days, no card needed, with your own jobs and your own numbers. Founding Membership is £10 a month for the first 50 genuine founding members, and standard membership is £19 a month.
The free method gives you everything you need to start applying this properly on paper. If you haven’t already, work out your own recovery requirement using the five steps in what your gardening business actually needs to earn, then start holding real jobs against it the way the quoting guide describes: estimate, quote, do the job, write down what happened, compare. That habit is the thing TradeNavigator is built around, and gardeners who already have it get far more out of the tool.