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?
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.
If you are not a snow-exclusive business and securing snow plowing contracts is not constantly on your mind, then you could fall into the trap of waiting until the last minute to start working on your snow sales. This happens to a lot of landscaping companies, so by no means are you alone.
But that doesn’t make it any easier to deal with the ramifications.
The truth is, when you wait too long to plan for your snow season, you find yourself scrambling. You might not even be able to hire the right number of laborers or have all of the proper equipment lined up if you didn’t plan ahead.
Fortunately, you can prevent a lot of headaches by starting the planning process now.
As the CEO, it is your responsibility to oversee your landscaping company as a whole and make sure that it’s running as best that it possibly can. In order to ensure that, you’ve likely implemented various tools over the years, including potential software solutions. But how do you know when the tools you’ve implemented are no longer enough?
How do you know when it’s time for new landscape business management software?
