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Getting paid is obviously a key part of doing business. But exactly how you get paid may be more of a point of confusion and concern than ever before. After all, if you’ve been in business for a long time then you may still be operating under the notion that payments are best made in the form of cash or check. However, both of these forms of payment are falling out of favor with many consumers who are using other ways to pay merchants and service providers in other areas of their daily life.

You might be wondering, is it time to explore new payment options for your landscaping business?

Do you ever wish you could predict the future? After all, planning for your company’s future when you have no idea what it holds is challenging. It can feel like quite a bit of pressure to make decisions that impact the future of your business (and its people) when you’re not sure what to base them on.

Do you feel as though you’re aimlessly chasing after growth through your company’s profit centers? Or, are you making smart and calculated decisions when it comes to which profit centers to put the focus on? Hopefully, it’s the latter. Growing a landscape business in a healthy manner is not something that can be achieved haphazardly. In fact, business experts say that growth without a plan can be a recipe for disaster.

If you’re stressing about running reports to evaluate your past year of business, you’re not alone. It’s not uncommon for owners to feel intimidated about pulling reports for their landscaping business. It might feel like an arduous task and on top of that, you probably don’t have a lot of free time to do it. For this reason, you may be putting it off.

Landscape peer groups can be an incredibly powerful tool. In many ways, they allow business owners to get a “glimpse into the future.” As part of a peer group, the opportunity to chat with business owners who have already been through some of the same experiences (or challenges) you might be facing, can allow you to make better decisions.  

Do you feel as though despite your best efforts, you’re failing to get more landscaping customers or the wrong new ones? You might even feel as though you’ve dumped too much money into ineffective advertising time after time. Though you might be getting some return, it may not be what you had in mind when you began investing in landscaping marketing materials or efforts.

If you’re having some of these feelings, you’re not alone. Many landscape companies have told us that they’ve struggled in trying to figure out marketing for their landscaping business. Whether you’re a B2B or a B2C company, your goal is the same—getting more of the right landscaping customers. That’s why you want a marketing approach that really works.

At Include Software, we love sharing knowledge that we’ve learned if it can help landscape companies in any way. After all, this is the industry that we truly value.

Do your employees enjoy coming to work every day at your landscaping company? Do they feel supported in the role they’re in? Do they have any ideas for how operations can run more efficiently?

You might think that you know the answers to these questions, or others like them, but are you just relaying what you think or are you actually confident it’s what your employees would say, too.

There’s a way to know for sure—and it comes in the form of employee surveys.

Employee surveys are important because they allow you to get candid answers from your team instead of relying on your gut feelings about what they’d said or just hearing from the most outspoken voices within your company.

What if you had a way that you could get inside of your customers’ heads and know exactly what they like—and dislike—about your landscaping business? It would give you the insight you require to make smart decisions and it would help you keep your customers’ best interests at heart.

The truth is, a tool like this already exists but it is grossly underutilized by many in the landscape industry—that being, customer surveys. Surveying your customers is an opportunity to gain meaningful insights from your landscaping customers that can drive actionable steps to improve your growth, retention, and profit.

You have the freedom to choose how you wish to structure your landscaping sales commission rates and salaries. Of course, you want to choose a model that will work best for your company (and its profitability) while also motivating your landscaping salespeople to perform their best.

There’s obviously a lot at stake to set this up right. After all, you want to inspire your salespeople to work hard and sell more work while also attracting new, highly-motivated salespeople to your company. But you don’t want to overpay—or make payment errors—that could hurt your bottom line or disenfranchise your salespeople if they found out they somehow were compensated incorrectly.

How many times have you heard someone use the expression change is hard? It gets thrown around all of the time in business—admittedly for good reason. Change really is hard, the main reason for which is because it requires work.

While change is always hard to some degree, the truth is, it’s hardest when it will result in long-term benefits rather than short-term ones. It’s more difficult for business owners to make changes when the reward will not be immediate because it means muddling through some tough times first. It’s also particularly hard when business is booming and the need for change seems almost unnecessary—at least for the time being. There is an inclination to want to put off changes rather than focus on them today.