What a truck wrap costs a landscaping company, and when it pays back
Winter is when landscapers wrap trucks and trailers. What a wrap really costs, how many jobs it needs to pay back, and how to know if it works by spring.
Winter is when a lot of landscapers finally wrap the truck. The crews are slower, the trucks are in the shop anyway, and spring is close enough to think about.
The question is always the same. Is a few thousand dollars on vinyl a smart spend, or would the money do more in ads or a website? Here is how to work out the cost and the payback for your own company.
What a wrap costs
Prices vary by region, truck size and how much of the vehicle you cover. These are typical ranges an owner can expect to see in quotes:
- Door and tailgate lettering: a few hundred dollars. Name, phone, website.
- Partial wrap (rear half or sides): roughly $1,500 to $3,000 on a pickup.
- Full wrap on a pickup: roughly $3,000 to $5,000.
- Enclosed trailer wrap: roughly $2,000 to $4,500, depending on length.
Design is often extra, from a couple hundred dollars to more than a thousand. A good wrap lasts several years if the truck is washed and parked out of direct sun when possible.
Get at least two quotes, and ask each shop how many years the vinyl is rated for.
The payback math
A wrap does not book jobs on its own. It makes people remember your name and call when they need you. So the math is about how many extra jobs it needs to bring in.
Take a hypothetical. A landscaper spends $4,000 on a truck and trailer wrap. A new weekly mowing customer is worth about $45 a visit for 30 visits a season, or $1,350 a year. After fuel, labor and equipment, say the owner keeps 30%, or about $400 a year per customer.
That means the wrap needs ten new weekly customers over its life to pay back. If the wrap lasts five years, that is two customers a year. One cleanup or one small hardscape job can cover a big piece of it too.
Run your own numbers with your real job values. The math changes a lot between a mowing-only operation and a design-build company.
Where a wrap works best
A wrap earns the most when the truck is seen in the right places, over and over.
- Route density. If your trucks park on the same streets every week, neighbors see the name dozens of times a season. That is the best case.
- Trailer parked at the job. The trailer sits at the curb for hours. Make sure the phone number and website can be read from across the street.
- A truck that goes home with the owner. It advertises nights and weekends in the owner's own neighborhood.
A wrap does the least when the truck spends most of its time on highways at speed, or parked behind a fence.
What to put on it
Keep it simple. People read a truck in about three seconds.
- Your name, large.
- The main service in plain words: "Lawn care and landscaping."
- The phone number, large enough to read from 50 feet.
- Your website.
- One line for the towns you serve.
Skip the long list of services, social icons and slogans. A busy wrap is a wrap no one reads.
How to tell if it is working
Most wraps never get measured. Here is how to track it without new software:
- Ask every new caller where they heard about you, and write it down. Add "saw the truck" as an option.
- Watch branded searches. In your Google profile performance report, look at searches for your company name. A wrap often shows up as more people searching your name in the towns you work.
- Use a unique web address. Put a short page like yourname.com/truck on the wrap and track visits to it.
Give it a full season before you judge it.
When to spend the money somewhere else first
A wrap sends people looking for you. What they find decides if they call. If your Google profile is thin, fix that first.
The median landscaper on Google has 7 reviews, and 55.6% have fewer than 10. Landscapers with a website hold a median of 13 reviews, against 2 for those without. Someone who sees your truck, searches your name and finds two reviews and no website may move on. The benchmark report shows where you sit, and the reviews guide covers how to build them this winter.
Answering matters too. If the calls from the truck go to voicemail while you are on the mower, the wrap pays for your competitor's work. The calculator shows what missed calls cost over a season.
The short version
- Lettering costs a few hundred dollars. A full truck and trailer wrap can run several thousand.
- Work out what one new customer is worth to you, then how many the wrap needs.
- It works best on dense routes and trailers parked at the curb.
- Keep the design to name, service, phone, website and towns.
- Track it by asking every caller, and fix your profile first if it is thin.
If you want help getting the profile and phones ready before spring, the free 14-day trial covers any service, no card required. Text or call (801) 701-3271.
Steven has spent the last several years running growth campaigns for local service businesses, landscaping and lawn care companies among them, and builds the benchmark datasets on this site from public Google listings. About the editor