Keeping landscaping team members motivated to continue working hard is essential given the state of the industry and how challenging it is to find new hires. Retention is the name of the game. But how exactly can you encourage workers to stay? And, on top of that, how can you continue to engage them so that they’re both hardworking and happy?
When it comes to your landscape business, efficiency is everything. You’re likely always looking for different ways that you can be more productive and efficient while reducing hold-ups and hassles that slow your business down. You may have refined everything from your routes to the way that you handle invoicing, constantly looking to be better.
Technology has made our lives faster and more efficient in so many areas. From banking to airline check-ins or even making purchases, technology allows us to perform tasks at a faster rate than ever before.
Of course, when it comes to your landscaping business, there are many great benefits to technology but in terms of speed, an important one is your response time. With the use of various tools you can respond to customers faster than ever.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
