What You Should Be Measuring (And What to Stop Worrying About)

As the landscape industry becomes more data-driven, business leaders are starting to rethink the metrics they use to measure success. The truth is, many companies are still relying on legacy KPIs that don’t tell the full story or worse, lead them to focus on the wrong things.

It’s time to elevate your measurement strategy.

Why Old Metrics No Longer Work

Metrics like total revenue, job count, or hours worked can be helpful at a glance, but they rarely tell you how well your company is actually performing. They're outputs, not insights.

Executives who want to lead scalable, profitable, and resilient landscape businesses need to shift their focus to the metrics that drive decisions, not just reports.

Modern Metrics That Matter

Here are the key performance indicators forward-thinking landscape companies are using:

1. Labor Utilization Rate

How much of your available labor time is actually billable and productive?
This metric directly connects to profitability, and exposes gaps in scheduling, delays, and labor inefficiencies.

2. Estimate vs. Actual (EVA) Accuracy

Are your field teams hitting the estimated hours, labor, and materials per job?
Tracking EVA lets you pinpoint slippage, improve estimating, and hold teams accountable in real time.

3. Sales Velocity

How long does it take to turn a lead into a signed proposal, and how fast does that turn into revenue?
Speed matters. Understanding velocity helps optimize your pipeline and forecast revenue with confidence.

4. Team Productivity by Role

Rather than just tracking hours or payroll cost, measure productivity by crew, account manager, or estimator.
This helps uncover your strongest performers and identify where additional support or training is needed.

5. Backlog Health

Are you booking the right work at the right margins?
A healthy backlog is balanced across service types, production teams, and seasonal needs. It's not just quantity, it’s strategic quality.

What to Stop Obsessing Over

Here are some metrics you may want to deprioritize or rethink:

• Raw revenue without margin context
• Employee count as a growth indicator
• Jobs completed per week without tying back to profitability
• Cost cutting without evaluating value lost

If a metric doesn’t lead to a specific decision or insight, it’s noise.

How Include GO Surfaces the Right Data

With traditional tools like spreadsheets and disconnected systems, getting these modern metrics takes time and manual effort, if you can get them at all.

Include GO changes that.

The platform gives landscape businesses real-time access to:

• Labor utilization per team and crew
• Estimate vs. actual data by job, phase, and resource
• Sales pipeline reporting and velocity tracking
• Field performance metrics, delivered right from GO Mobile
• Productivity dashboards built for every role, from account managers to ops leadership

No more data hunts. No more guesswork.

Measure What Drives Growth

Your business is evolving. Your KPIs should too.

By shifting your focus to modern, actionable metrics, you empower your team to make smarter decisions, improve profitability, and drive sustainable growth.

Include GO helps make this measurable, and manageable.

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