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Even after rapid growth, it’s not uncommon for landscape businesses to hit a plateau. After watching revenue steadily increase for several years, it can suddenly get “stuck” at a certain point. While this number can differ from business-to-business, it does seem that the $1 million mark is a particularly stubborn plateau where many business owners appear to level out. They did all the hard work to get to that mark and then suddenly they don’t know how to take it to the next level.

If you’ve leveled out and growth appears to be stagnant, you’re likely in need of a refreshed landscape sales strategy. Oftentimes what happens is that the strategies which worked at a lower level revenue may need revamping to accommodate the company’s needs at a higher level.

If you’ve begun any research into the different landscape business management software programs out there, then you probably already know just how differently they can be priced. Not only does the overall cost vary, but also the pricing structure. Regardless of what landscape business management software you go with, you can expect that it’s going to be a big investment, making it all the more important that you choose wisely.

Writing landscape business proposals may be one of your least favorite parts of the job. For one, it can be a rather menial task. Proposal writing can be a big time drain when what you’d rather be having face time with a prospect, closing a deal. It can be especially cumbersome if you don’t have a landscaping proposal template or standardized language as it will mean repetitive data entry each time you go to create one.

But what we often hear from landscape sales professionals is that they’re not exactly sure what to include in a landscape sales proposal in the first place. While you’re probably really great at beating the bushes and selling jobs, the proposal writing aspect may still feel like an enigma.

Chances are you’ve never taken a course in drafting landscape business proposals—and you probably feel a bit on your own in terms of the process. You want to write a great proposal but maybe you don’t even know where to start in order to do so.

Salespeople, no matter how good they are, forget stuff. Whether it’s leaving something off the proposal or not budgeting enough man hours for the job, these mistakes can cause hassles and be costly to your landscaping company.

In their defense, it’s a hectic job with a ton of things to keep track of day in and day out. Salespeople often have a lot on their plate and keeping track of all the minor details of a project can be challenging. Without a good system in place, estimates are sometimes left to guessing or chance.

According to the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, the landscape industry is comprised of 35% Hispanic workers. Many of the companies employing a Spanish-speaking workforce say that they still struggle with language barriers. They often utilize several bilingual employees to serve as translators for those employees that don’t speak any English at all.

While language can be a barrier in some aspects of business, particularly when it comes to interacting with clients or English-only speaking employees, there’s no reason to believe it has to be a barrier for everything. Despite that, we have found that landscape businesses with a lot of Spanish speaking employees are often hesitant to adopt green industry software. One of the biggest objections to adding landscape operations software is due to the fact that landscape business owners believe their Spanish-speaking workers will struggle with understanding the software and therefore it will go unused. 

How could your business change for the better if you had a crystal ball handy? What would you do differently if you could get a good read on exactly where your company’s year stands at any given moment? While the idea of peering into a crystal ball to tell your company’s future seems silly, let’s be honest. Do you forecast your year based on good intentions and a fraction of the data you need to do so? Are you staring at your company’s financials and incomplete reports just hoping it will magically happen? 

You’ve already reached a point where you know landscaping business software is necessary. You’re dealing with too many different systems that require multiple data entry and you’re just not operating as efficiently as you could be. There are simply too many sources of wasted time when it comes to running your landscape business. Having more than one system with none of them communicating with one another has made life challenging. You know things could be going much better but right now it’s all starting to feel like one big mess.

At this point you know you want an all-in-one system but you’re overwhelmed by the options out there. Beginning the process of researching companies feels like an enormous task and you don’t even know where to start.

Keeping track of data is incredibly important when it comes to snow operations. But it can also be a completely overwhelming task. How often do you not end up getting your bills out to the client until two or three weeks after a major snow event? That may not seem like a long time but it’s long enough to put a wrench in your cash flow.

In sales you always do your best with the information that you have available. When it comes to selling a landscaping job and giving the customer an approximate timeline for when the job will be completed, you can only work with what you’ve been given by the rest of your team. You put your trust in them that they’ll get the work done in the time table they’ve provided.

However, in the instances where the ball is dropped and the timeline gets pushed back, the customer’s frustrations wind up falling back on you. When a job doesn’t get completed on time, you’re left to deal with an angry customer who feels as though they’ve been lied to. They don’t realize you’ve done your best. Now you have to do what you can to keep them happy so they don’t abandon your company and cause you to lose your hard-earned commission.

If you’re like a lot of landscape business owners you might decide how much to charge for labor simply by using gut instinct. You might have asked around and have a sense of what most companies in the area pay their laborers and you aim to pay your people somewhere in that same vicinity.

Then, after factoring in what you think your overhead recovery will be, you determine a price. Or maybe you take an even less systematic approach and simply take what you pay your laborers and double it.

But when it comes to something as important as your profitability, neither of these approaches are ideal. At the end of the day, you’re shooting in the dark. If you can’t immediately answer the more important question “Will this job be profitable?”, then there is a cause for concern.