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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.

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.