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Billing is a fundamental process of your landscaping business. That’s because billing is your “bridge to cash flow,” making it an essential process that allows you to sustain your operations.

Despite the importance of billing, it’s a process that can go awry for many different reasons—and that’s a big deal. Billing blunders can cost your business profit and should be addressed seriously. The last thing that you want to do is leave money on the table due to a billing mistake that could have been prevented.

Even so, you might feel as though you’re struggling to find a good system that prevents you (or your staff) from making these errors in the first place. It might feel like a hopeless cycle. You know billing mistakes are being made but you can’t seem to put a stop to them.

But have hope because there are solutions out there.

At Include Software, we’ve worked with hundreds of landscape companies and often end up discussing their business needs. Occasionally, we hear a lot of companies are looking at updating or improving their websites.

This is a smart business move. After all, your website is one of your most important marketing tools. Even if a client finds you somewhere else (like a Facebook ad or even via word-of-mouth), they’re still going to head to your website to check you out.

While you may be great at designing a landscape or a property maintenance program, chances are, you might not know much about website design. You may know it’s important to put together something that will stand out, but you may not be sure how to get started.

If you’re worried about retaining landscaping employees, you aren’t alone. No matter what trade show, conference, or other green industry events you attend, listen to the chatter and you’ll likely hear about the same struggles come up again and again.

Landscape business owners nationwide are all struggling with the same employee retention concerns, saying that it’s not only difficult to find workers, but it’s also incredibly difficult to keep them.

While you need more job recruits to fill your open positions and to keep your business growing, employee turnover can be a thorn in your side.

Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be that way.

Let’s be honest, the financial aspect of your business can be a big challenge. While the landscaping part of your operation may be cut-and-dry to you, the inner-workings of the business, may not be. After all, financials are complicated and require a certain level of business acumen that typically only comes with a business degree or background.

Even so, you are tasked with not only running a successful landscaping operation but also ensuring that your company continues to make more profit. It’s a lot of pressure.

While you feel as though you should be able to manage your business in a more profitable way, you may not be sure how. With so much data that needs to be tracked, you may not be certain of the best way to determine where your company is gaining—and where it’s losing.

Chances are, you started your business because you’re passionate about landscaping. Not because you are passionate about accounting. While you know that staying on top of the financials, and making better decisions is key to your profitability, it may be a struggle to do so.

After all, very few landscape company owners have a strong business background. You know a lot about your trade and about producing and maintaining spectacular landscapes but you may not know a whole lot about maintaining financial reports.

Because of that, you may be worried that you’re not turning enough profit for your business. You want to be able to track numbers more easily and make better decisions based on priorities—and on data. But you may not even know where to start.

If you’re like a lot of landscape companies, then chances are a good chunk of your revenue is being hijacked by landscaping overhead. Certainly, a lot of that is to be expected. There are always going to be overhead costs associated with doing business that you can’t avoid. Paying the mortgage on your facility building, investing in office supplies, and paying for insurance are all necessary overhead expenses that you can’t do much about.

But that’s not true of all of your overhead. Not only can some landscaping overhead costs be better managed, but it’s also possible to recover some of those costs. The key is to pay closer attention to your budget and to employ tools that will set you up for success. In a cutthroat business like landscaping, every dollar counts toward your bottom line.

Here are some expert tips for recovering landscaping overhead costs when it comes to pricing.

You already know that your landscape sales team is at the heart of your profitability. How they perform can either positively or negatively impact your business. But what can you do to make improvements? How can you ensure that your team is constantly getting better and not repeating bad habits or following ineffective methodologies?

The fact that you’re concerned about these issues is already a step in the right direction. A lot of landscaping companies get stuck in sales rut when they don’t take the time to analyze how their team is doing and what kind of additional support they may need to succeed. After all, you have some accountability in the grand scheme of things—and that is to support your people and give them the tools and skills they need to be the best at growing your company.

We’ve rounded up 7 great landscape sales tips that you can take advantage of in order to improve your landscape sales team. Incorporating these concepts could make a huge difference in your overall success.

New client acquisition is expensive. Chances are, you’ve heard the stats. It’s been said that it costs five times as much to attract a new customer as it does to keep an existing one. That’s why you do everything you can to treat your clients right and to keep them happy.

While it’s undoubtedly important to invest in your existing clients, if you aren’t doing anything to generate additional service opportunities from them, then you’re missing out. Your existing client base is likely ripe with possibilities for upselling your landscaping services and increasing your sales.

Of course, the last thing you want to do is be pushy and risk losing a client over selling too hard. The key is to implement creative approaches to upselling that will generate you more business while also impressing your clients on your commitment to serving them.

There are a number of factors that go into creating the best commercial mowing contracts and all of them must be in line in order to have success. In fact, even if you have just one item askew, it can eat away at your profitability.

As a commercial mower, your goal is for all of your jobs to be profitable. With the cost of doing business not getting any cheaper, you need to be able to make more money and build up more profitable commercial mowing contracts in the pipeline.

Recruiting in the landscape industry is often cited as being one of the biggest challenges landscape business owners face. How many times have you heard an industry peer say (or maybe you’ve even said it yourself), “I just can’t find good people!”

There’s no question that it’s become increasingly challenging to find capable people who are willing to put in the hard work. But they are out there. There are plenty of landscaping companies that are proving to be successful, even in challenging markets, and it’s largely due to the fact that they’ve found a landscape industry recruiting strategy that works for them. Some of these companies are even thinking outside of the box and recruiting in unique ways.