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Do you feel as though your underperforming employees are dragging your landscape company down? If you do, you’re not alone. A survey performed by a leading staffing agency found that underperforming employees are a major concern in businesses across the country.

In the survey, respondents reported the managers at their companies spent an average of 17 percent of their time on underperforming employees. That’s nearly one day out of every week.

The problem is, managing underperforming employees is not only time consuming, it can also lead to a decline in morale among other employees. They may feel neglected or may even be influenced by the negative attitude of one or more of your underperformers.

You rely on your people to get the job done and to keep your landscaping business profitable as a result. But in order to do that, they need to actually show up!

Unfortunately, employee absenteeism is a real problem and the landscape industry is certainly not immune to it. How many times have you had no-shows that have left you in a total bind for work that day?

But it’s not just failing to show up, it’s also punctuality. It might not sound like a big deal that an employee occasionally shows up 5 or 10 minutes late. After all, you understand that traffic sucks. But what if it’s happening a lot more often than you realize? That lost time is costing you real dollars and could actually be a potentially detrimental problem. Particularly if it starts to impact other employees and make them late getting out of the yard each morning.

What your crew members are doing (and how efficient they’re being) can make all the difference in terms of how profitable your landscaping business is. Unfortunately, field workers often make blunders that can have a negative impact on profit.

If you’re worried that your crews are experiencing problems—maybe even some you’re not aware of—then you’d probably like to know what they are and how you can avoid them. So often these errors turn out to be happening right under a business owner’s nose and he or she had no idea.

Here are 8 of the worst field mistakes that you should be on the lookout for:

When it comes to growing the revenue of your landscaping company, you’d like to see a goal-crushing sales team jump in and make things happen.

Of course, you may be tired of hiring the wrong people. You’ve been there before. You’ve hired a salesperson for landscaping and assumed they were going to do a great job only to find it didn’t work out. It shouldn’t be this hard to find a good fit. You’re likely tired of a high churn rate in your sales department and tired of spending money on candidates that didn’t ultimately work out.

You may want to know how to hire a salesperson that will truly be successful within your company.

One-on-one meetings are a critical form of communication within your landscape company. And it’s no secret that open and ongoing communication is one of the keys to successful management. Even so, it is safe to say that one-on-one meetings are drastically underutilized within the landscape industry.

Jim Cali, executive coach, consultant, speaker, and peer group facilitator with McFarlin Stanford, a management consulting firm based in Dallas, says that he is a big believer in one-on-ones mostly because “they work.”

Are you worried that your landscape company has become stagnant? Are you seeing a decline in new growth or has it tapered off completely? If so, then it might be time to refresh your business with some new approaches.

With the incorporation of some marketing tips for your landscape business, you can get your business revitalized in a way that will keep you moving onward and upward.

At Include Software, we’ve gone through many of these processes ourselves and worked closely with hundreds of landscape companies that have used these tactics to push through to the next level of revenue.

You may have heard the expression that a happy worker is a productive worker. While you might have implemented some efforts to build a stronger company culture, you could still be wondering whether you’re doing enough.

Considering the fact that a positive company culture not only helps you to retain your existing employees but to recruit new ones as well, it’s definitely an important piece of the puzzle.

The landscape industry is unique in the fact that its lowest paid employees have some of the greatest power in their respective companies. While they’re certainly not the ones making major business decisions, their actions can have a big impact on the overall success—or failure—of the business.  

Why?

Because laborers are the ones on the front line. In fact, they probably have more interaction with your customers than anyone else in your company. And that’s a big deal.

Put simply: The people at the bottom of your organizational chart are the ones that should be the best at representing your company. Regardless of your marketing efforts, your branding, and any other efforts you make to present a certain “image” of your company to the public, if you have crews that are dressed sloppy, are careless when they work, have poor interactions with your clients, and cause other issues, it’s going to negatively impact your business image.

Do you find that your landscaping equipment is costly to maintain? While most landscape business owners recognize that their equipment maintenance costs are high, they might be unsure as to exactly what they’re investing in it. That may be the case for you. In fact, you might even be wondering: Is this equipment costing more to maintain than it’s worth?

If you feel like you make decisions on equipment maintenance more on emotion rather than good business sense, then it’s an issue that requires further exploration. You may even feel as though you are unaware of just how big your equipment costs are and whether or not they’re hurting your profitability.

The possibility of employees stealing company money is something that most landscape business owners don’t want to think about. It’s one of those things that make a lot of people say that could never happen to me.

But the fact is, it happens more than most people realize. It’s estimated that workplace crime costs U.S. businesses as much as $50 billion a year. And research shows that on any given day as many as one in four businesses are being embezzled.

While most embezzlement cases do occur in the financial services field, every industry is at risk. And that certainly includes landscape businesses.

Just consider this one real-life case for example.