The success of one’s landscape business depends on the quality and unity of their landscape operations team. If a workforce is not aligned in terms of goals, practices, and communication, it can be extremely difficult for a landscape business owner to maximize the productivity and, ultimately, the profitability of their business.
For aspiring landscape entrepreneurs looking to optimize their staff and their business, here are a few tips from the LMN team on how to effectively guide your landscape operations team in the same direction.
Slash Waste, Boost Profits
The key to running a profitable lawn and landscape business is minimizing the amount of avoidable, unproductive costs. Many landscape business owners can shoot themselves in the foot by permitting inefficiencies that negatively affect the bottom line. One such inefficiency is the time your landscape operations team spends waiting between different action items.
Time spent waiting may seem like a small form of unproductive “waste,” but the costs of disorganization like this can build up over time. Waiting for information, decisions, specifications, feedback, subcontractors, and equipment can add up and eat away at your profit margins. A great way to cut down on this time is by better coordinating your landscape operations team. An easy way to do that is by leveraging landscape management software like LMN Time.
LMN Time uses a paperless, cloud-based payroll system that provides up-to-date tracking data on job progress, transportation times, and other activities like material shipments. It can streamline processes to remove wasted energies while also aligning the workforce under one company umbrella.
Financial Goals For Your Landscape Operations Team
Budgeting is a really effective tool for simplifying the goals of your landscape operations team. By allocating overhead costs based on sales goals, a landscape business owner can create realistic budgets that produce realistic objectives. If a senior designer is assigned a certain amount of overhead to complete a specified sales benchmark, they can optimize their activities to meet this goal, and subsequently maintain profits.
For an in-depth breakdown of how you can create realistic, team-aligning budgets, check out LMN’s breakdown of profitable landscape goals for sales and design staff.
#NextGenLandscaper Engaging The Next Generation
Organizing your landscape operations team’s direction starts with the hiring process. Being upfront and honest during the interviews about expectations and workload is an excellent way to align your workforce while also motivating them to achieve their goals.
Similarly, the next generation also responds very well to honesty. This up-and-coming generation likes to work hard and play hard, so if you expect long hours, hard work, and weekend hours – tell them. How else is a team going to meet expectations if they aren’t aware of them? Additionally, this reinforces the importance of orienting your workforce effectively from the beginning.
Fix People Problems with a Great Orientation Process
For most organizations, orientation is often overlooked. Not investing in your orientation process, however, is a huge missed opportunity for those looking to create a unified operations team. Orientation, after all, is how you introduce your workforce to the company culture, its expectations, its values, and its objectives. All of these are things which can maximize employee efforts and minimize unproductive waste.
By not investing in your post-hire and orientation system, you could risk decreasing productivity, decreasing efficiency, and increasing employee turnover rates. Employee habits stick; therefore, facilitating productive, unified behavior is a must when it comes to successfully managing a lawn and landscape business.
An organized workforce is an effective workforce. The best way to organize your landscape operations team is to orient them effectively and establish clear financial goals to minimize their inefficiencies and maximize their productivity.
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For landscape business owners looking to improve their profitability and unify their workforce, check out LMN’s suite of landscape business management software. And try LMN Free today.
