Blog

Have you been thinking about going paperless? Besides being an eco-friendly option that will support your efforts of being a good steward of the environment, going paperless can also boost your efficiency tremendously. A lot of landscape businesses get bogged down by paperwork—whether it be sorting and filing incoming paperwork, sending outgoing paperwork like invoices, or even manually entering data from paper into a computer system. All of these take up time and labor.

Going paperless can help you eliminate wasted paper, cut costs, and ultimately streamline your operations. Plus, it is something that your team members and customers will appreciate.

If you’ve been pondering going paperless, here are a few considerations for you to keep in mind.

There’s no question that the coronavirus pandemic has made business challenging for many landscape business owners. Although our industry was lucky enough to ultimately be deemed “essential” across the country, when state shutdown orders first began, many were left scrambling to figure out where their business stood. And even though many continued to work, it meant following new protocols and adapting to a lot of changes. Office staff was required to work at home and many safety changes were made in the field.

It’s what many have been calling the “new normal.” 

Labor is a critical element of the profitability of your landscaping business. If you aren’t charging enough for labor, you’re going to hurt your bottom line. But how do you know if you’re falling short? 

As a landscaping operations manager, you have a tough job simply based upon how much you oversee. You are the one that keeps the day-to-day “show” running and there are certainly times when that can feel like a lot. So often, you are the liaison between the crews, the office staff, and sales. Plus, you need to make sure that everything is operating smoothly with the schedule.

Successful sales are driven by metrics. As a salesperson, you recognize that numbers are everything. Whether sales are up or down is the heart of what it is that you do as a landscaping sales manager. The fact is, you could have an amazing sales team but if you aren’t staying on top of how your jobs are performing, as well as what’s coming into the pipeline, then things can quickly start to go awry.

The most successful landscape businesses are those that are able to make real-time decisions. They recognize if a job is profitable—or not—and can make important changes before it’s too late. A company like this paying attention to “daily numbers” and not waiting until the end of the month to review vital metrics when it’s frankly too late to act.

Monitoring your landscaping company’s metrics is the way in which you keep your finger on the pulse of your business—and there’s no denying how essential that is to be successful. 

Numbers are such an important aspect of running a company and can literally make or break you. In fact, poor financials is one of the main reasons that businesses ultimately fail. Research indicates that of small businesses that failed, 82 percent failed because of cash flow problems. 

The key to preventing problems such as this comes down to knowing your numbers. But which metrics matter most? What are the ones that you need to be looking at weekly?

We’ve rounded up a list of the most important metrics that every landscape business owner should be reviewing each week.

Accountability in the workplace is vital to any healthy and successful landscaping business—but it is not something that just happens. Instead, business owners must be incredibly intentional about creating and also supporting leadership positions in which team members are held accountable.

Of course, that’s easier said than done. We recognize that leadership accountability can be time-consuming and even difficult to implement, which is why we turned to Jason New, executive coach, speaker, and peer group facilitator with McFarlin Stanford, a management coaching and recruiting firm based in Dallas in order to find out some of his best tips. McFarlin Stanford believes that accountability is a key aspect of leadership that all landscape business owners should be paying attention to.

Learning a new landscape business software program can be challenging, even for the seasoned user of technology. Whether you’ve already had a software program and you are switching to something new, or you’ve never had landscape business software before, there will undoubtedly be learning curves to overcome.

Chances are you've used QuickBooks for landscaping, at least at some point in your business. Most landscape contractors have. Actually, most small business owners in general, have—after all, it is not industry-specific software. QuickBooks can work just fine for many businesses in their early stages. But as your business grows, your software needs are most likely going to grow, too.