Blog

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.

A key to securing ongoing and steady revenue for your landscaping company is developing an easy transition from design/build jobs into maintenance contracts. If you’re not converting the vast majority of your design/build contracts into landscape maintenance agreements, then you’re missing an incredibly valuable opportunity to boost your profitability and line up ongoing sales.

Do you find it much easier to choose entry-level employees than you do good crew leaders? If you do, then you’re not alone. Most landscape companies say that finding crew members who would make good crew leaders or foremen is a major challenge.

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: