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.

This doesn’t just happen by chance. There is a lot of legwork that goes into improving your success. Bruce Birdsong, founder, and CEO of Precision Landscape Management, a full-service commercial landscape management firm employing over 300 employees, knows this very well. He’s been in business for nearly four decades and has learned from his mistakes—and his many successes—about what it takes to produce more profitable commercial mowing contracts.

Bruce recently shared 5 of his best tips that he says can make all the difference between a profitable contract and one that falls short of helping your bottom line.

1. Getting Your Mowing Crew Size Right

This sounds relatively simple but Bruce says you’d be surprised how often the wrong crew sizes are matched up to jobs. This is a huge detriment to making sure your commercial mowing contracts are profitable.

That’s because Bruce says the more crew members you have in a truck, the more your “windshield time” goes up. That’s something that you want to avoid. Windshield time is one of those hidden profit killers. For one hour of travel time, with a six-man crew, you’re paying for six hours of time that has just been spent in the truck, making zero profit.

“Of course, your most profitable crew size is your one-man-crew but that can’t be right for every job,” Bruce says. “The key is to get as small a crew as you can for the job while still being able to get the work done the right way.”

Building crew size comes from experience, Bruce admits. But it also comes from staying on top of your jobs and ensuring that you don’t have more crew members than you need going out to a site. If you have crew members that are sitting around with nothing to do, that is taking a cut out of your profitability. But the only way you can know this is to stay on top of your jobs.

2. Using the Right Machine for the Job

Equipment plays a huge role in how productive, and in turn, profitable that you can be on any given job site. On each of his commercial mowing contracts, Bruce says his goal is to use the machine that will get the job done the fastest while also meeting his clients’ expectations. Typically he aims to use the biggest mower that will properly do the job.

But you must know your limitations, he adds.

“A property manager might ask you to use a push mower for certain areas of the property specifically because they like the cross-cut look that it can give,” Bruce explains. “Visual perception is important, more to some property managers than others, and it’s often a case-by-case decision which mower is right for the job.”

3. Knowing your Labor Costs

You can have the right machine for the job and the perfect sized crew but if you don’t know your labor costs, then you are still going to fall behind, Bruce says. In fact, he surmises this may be the number one mistake commercial landscape companies make—they don’t know their actual labor costs. As a result, they are underbidding jobs.

This happens a lot in competitive markets where there is a lot of pressure to be the lowest bidder. But Bruce says you have to evaluate the value of each of your commercial mowing contracts and determine whether it’s really worth going after the jobs that make it challenging to turn a nice dollar. It may not be (and we’ll get to that in tip number 5).

4. Understanding Efficiency in Real Time

Another thing that Bruce says helps him to have profitable commercial mowing contracts is the fact that he understands his production rates in real time. Bruce says that he knows exactly how productive his crews are on any given job, up to the minute. That means if he calculated that it was going to take an hour to do a certain job, and it’s actually taking two, he can now make changes to get that job back on track toward profitability going forward.

Bruce says that without the ability to stay on top of production rates in real time he would not be able to ensure jobs were staying on track regarding what he bid. He cites iCrewTek, a smartphone app companion to the landscaping business software Asset, as being the reason he’s able to do this.

5. Saying No When You Need To

This is a tough one for a lot of companies. Saying “No” might even go against the way you’ve grown your business—by taking on as many leads as you could. But as you begin to explore these other four areas more carefully, and you really start to know your numbers, you’ll likely learn that some jobs just aren’t profitable, Bruce says. You might be doing everything right and these jobs simply are not going to ever be profitable enough to boost your bottom line. Sometimes to grow, you have to say “No.” That opens you up to focus on commercial mowing contracts that are profitable rather than wasting time on ones that are not.

Of course, you can’t make a decision like this without truly knowing your numbers. Once you have a good grip on real-time data, you’ll find that some jobs straddle the line. They’re profitable, but not by much. These jobs might also be worth ditching. It’s a decision often made on a case-by-case basis by analyzing the data.

Don’t Forget: Your People Impact Your Profitability, Too

While it’s these 5 tips that have helped Bruce to secure profitable commercial mowing contracts, he says there’s an extra piece to the puzzle that is sometimes overlooked, and that’s your people. While you can put together the perfect-sized crews, match up the right equipment for the job, and get all your numbers in line, if your people don’t care about being productive for you, then it can still hurt your bottom line.

But how can you get people to care about being productive? Bruce says that you likely have more control over it then you realize.

“It sounds so simple but people forget the Golden Rule all the time,” he says. “Treat people the way you want to be treated. It’s really that simple. If you want your people to work hard for you, then you have to treat them right. Too often business owners fall into the trap of treating their people like a commodity and that’s a huge mistake.”

If you take care of your people, then they will take care of you, Bruce says, adding that it’s not just about money or paying them more. Yes, you should pay your people well. But there’s more to it than that, he says.

“Money is one thing but people also want to be recognized for what they’re doing,” he says. “It’s a hand on the shoulder or a pat on the back that counts most sometimes. They want to know that you’re paying attention and that you care that they’re working hard for you. That will encourage your people to keep working hard and at the end of the day, that might impact your profitability more than anything else.”

If you’d like to talk more about Asset has helped successful companies like Precision Landscape Management become even more profitable, give us a call at 800-475-0311 or contact us for a free demo.  

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Image Sources:  Precision Landscape Management