In a competitive industry like landscaping, efficiency is often the difference between a costly and profitable business. The only way to reliably maximize revenues and minimize costs is to optimize your job timelines as well as your online scheduling system. Streamlining one’s operations is easier said than done. It requires dedicated resource allocation, planning, and crew management. Normally, achieving this type of efficiency takes years of market research, experience, and experimentation. But with the right approach, and the help of LMN, shortening job timelines should no longer be a challenge.
LMN has broken down four key areas of scheduling that landscape business owners should target in order to successfully shorten their job timelines and streamline your business. Each breakdown will review how you can upgrade your scheduling and how you can do so using the LMN Time.
Maximize Your Scheduling Efficiency with Job Groups and Live Map
With landscaping, so much of the inefficiency comes down to traveling. How well a landscape business owner can minimize the downtime between jobs will directly impact the profitability of its operations. By creating job groups based on job locations, landscape managers can optimize driving routes to create the most efficient work order possible. Normally, this would be quite a daunting task. But with LMN’s time tracking app, job groups can be created, accessed, and organized all through one’s smartphone.
Job groups are particularly valuable for less predictable work, such as snow and ice removal, where client job sites may vary in size and location. With LMN’s GPS tracking and routing feature, landscape managers can review all jobs within a route as well as the time since a job site’s last visit.
Speaking of time, one of the easiest ways to improve the efficiency of one’s job scheduling system is to reduce the amount of time challenges associated with unscheduled routes.
Optimize All Job Types – Even Unscheduled Routes
As mentioned earlier, unscheduled routes – or unpredictable jobs – can be a huge source of income depending on the company portfolio and the current season. Dropping a brand new job into your crew’s already optimized daily schedule can result in greater obstacles and inefficiencies if done improperly.
But similar to job groups, the unscheduled routes feature on LMN Time allows landscape business owners to create optimized routes quickly. These added tasks can seamlessly be integrated into the list of day-by-day tasks a crew needs to complete. Unscheduled routes allow managers to automate the online scheduling system while also incorporating the help of multiple crews, should more jobs become available.
Streamline Your Job Timelines with Non-Recurring Work Calendars
Non-recurring projects are a common aspect of many landscape companies. Homeowners and small businesses, for example, will typically only require infrequent assistance. By setting up a non-recurring work calendar, landscaping supervisors will be able to schedule and assign jobs based on a variety of customizable factors, including estimated hours, crew size, productive versus unproductive time, etc. A crew manager can even use a non-recurring work calendar to factor in time for mistakes and cancellations or work due to weather conditions.
Upgrading Your Recurring Work Schedules
Recurring work means reliable income. Since recurring work schedules have consistent hours, locations, and job routes, landscape business owners can maximize the efficiency of their crews much more easily. A landscape supervisor, for example, could create a schedule template for different, recurring jobs, such as bi-weekly lawn mowing. Standardization, while unflashy, can significantly reduce operational inefficiencies over time as managers and crew members become more familiar with the process. An airtight schedule can help to amplify these positive internalities.
Profitability often comes down to efficiency. How effectively can your landscape company utilize its assets and resources? The best way to do that is through scheduling system optimizations. Reducing job timelines, however, is no easy task. But with the help of LMN’s suite of landscape business management applications, scheduling and coordination can be done from your laptop or your smartphone.
Want hands-on experience with LMN’s work calendar and job group features? Download LMN Free today.
