As we enter a fresh decade, now’s the perfect time to sit down, analyze your landscape business, and map out your budget and goals for the coming year and beyond. Your finalized landscape business plan should constantly be top of mind as you book jobs and organize your workforce—not analyzed at the very end to see how well the company did. The plan you so carefully establish should be re-examined often throughout the year to be sure you can react and make adjustments accordingly, and remain on a path to increase your landscape business profitability.
Here are a few suggestions to keep in mind as you plot out your objectives.
Brainstorm inefficiencies
Wasted time robs your landscape business profitability margins of billable opportunity. Include your foremen in a discussion about where they see time being wasted. Create a spreadsheet and estimate how many man hours a week you lose to pockets of misspent time. Flag the ones that are easy to fix. With your team, come up with ways to address those avoidable areas. On the other hand, know when to recognize untapped capacity so you can schedule an employee’s time accordingly.
Communicate any new processes to your staff. This will help to get everyone on the same page to become more efficient.
Think about raising your rates
The average landscape business owner makes a profit between two and 10 percent. You want to ensure you’re still being competitive with your pricing, while addressing factors that affect your bottom line, like inflation and expenses. However, if you want to keep your rates as is, you can still aim to increase your landscape business profit by maximizing what can be achieved in a day through eliminating wasted time and generating more revenue per man hour (as suggested above).
Cut costs and shed services that don’t earn
Analyze your costs to see if there are places you can trim. If you see an area of your business declining, try to boost it by focusing on another area that is more in demand.
Assess your tools and equipment
In your landscape business plan, consider replacing equipment that needs consistent repairs. Faster, efficient equipment can reduce your field labor ratio. Look into types of equipment that aren’t as reliant on regular servicing, as well. And don’t be tempted to invest in more than you need.
Identify materials that can be upsold
Scan through your past jobs to determine common materials that don’t require as much labor to install and build them into your sales pitches. Items like lighting kits, decorative structures, and garden art typically have a good markup price.
Increase employee retention
Labor affects profitability more than any other cost in your company. Give your employees opportunities to succeed. Establish goals and incentives that are tailored to each area of your workforce—sales, construction/install, etc.
Casting an analytical eye on your business will help you to create a strategy that will see you streamline processes, eliminate inefficiencies, and increase the profitability of your landscape business.
Learn how you can achieve these elements of your strategy with an LMN educational workshop. https://golmn.com/workshops/
