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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.

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.

The possibility of employees stealing company money is something that most landscape business owners don’t want to think about. It’s one of those things that make a lot of people say that could never happen to me.

But the fact is, it happens more than most people realize. It’s estimated that workplace crime costs U.S. businesses as much as $50 billion a year. And research shows that on any given day as many as one in four businesses are being embezzled.

While most embezzlement cases do occur in the financial services field, every industry is at risk. And that certainly includes landscape businesses.

Just consider this one real-life case for example.

In this day and age, where customers want their questions answered and their problems solved as quickly as they present them, it can be hard to keep up. Customer demand and expectations only continue to rise. You try to be as supportive as you possibly can, but it’s impossible to be physically present for all of your landscaping clients, 24/7.

While you can’t be personally attentive at any given moment of the day, your website is a powerful tool that is always available. Even after you’ve gone home for the evening or are no longer taking client (or prospect) calls, visitors to your website can still be online reading information about your company and getting answers to their questions, all on their own time.

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.

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.