The Devil’s In the Details: The Value of Job Sequencing

Imagine you’re trying to bake a cake, but you decide to pour the batter in the pan, and then you try to grease the pan. It’s an unmitigated disaster, obviously, and you’d never do something like this because it’s out of the proper order of operations.

Yet many landscape crews are out completing jobs in a similarly inefficient way because they fail to job sequence. While chances are doing these tasks in a less-than-ideal order typically won’t result in calamity, it does guarantee your team is wasting time.

“Poor performance means that your gross margins are not where they could be,” says Fred Haskett, founder of TrueWinds Consulting. “If you have maximum efficiency, you can add work to a crew’s day or a crew’s week without maximizing capacity. That means I can sell more work without adding CapEx and additional staffing with that.”

Haskett says that a crew’s quality improves with job sequencing as well, as they can get more done in an effective manner, improving customer satisfaction and retention. He notes it can also help with employee retention as the better people understand their jobs and what they’re responsible for, the more they’ll feel a sense of accomplishment.

“After you’ve done job sequencing across the board, I’ve seen it happen in branch or in company operations, where we’re saying, ‘Wow, our churn has gone down. Why is that?’” Haskett says. “Because we now have found a better way to welcome them on to the team and show them what they’re supposed to be doing, and not having them do this guessing game thing about what am I supposed to be doing?”  

Examples of Ineffective Job Execution

One of the most common examples of poorly executing a landscape maintenance job is string trimming ahead of the mowers.

“We almost double the amount of string trimming that we do by doing that,” Haskett says. “The proper sequencing is when things are mowed, trimmed, edged, and then the power blowing takes place on the sidewalks. I’ve seen the same sidewalk blown three times because we came through, mowed, and people aren’t paying attention, and they’re not sequencing properly.”

Haskett says job sequencing is basically choreographing a routine for your team. Employees who string trim should police the property first and pick up trash, fallen branches or pull weeds. Once a section has been mowed, then they can go string trim that area.

For employees mowing, depending on the job site, once they’ve finished mowing, they can pick up an edger or a blower and follow behind and clear off sidewalks after they have been trimmed and edged.

“Everybody has a list of tasks that they’re trained for in a certain order, and then each job site will have some nuances with it, but that becomes the crew leader’s job to recognize any change-ups or things like that,” Haskett says.

Haskett says another common mistake is on larger sites where the crew leader will often want to handle the mowing, but in reality, they need to be directing the job and making sure the team is following the process sequentially, like the conductor of an orchestra.

“Crew leaders should be doing much higher-level work directing things, and they can run around with a backpack sprayer while they’re directing the team and things of that nature,” Haskett says. “They should be checking the irrigation system. They should be inspecting the high-vis areas to make sure they’re weed-free, making sure that the string trimmer is not ahead of the mower.”

The crew leader can also ensure team members are taking a fuel can with them on a larger site instead of walking all the way back to the trailer to fill up.

On the design-build side, there should be a detailed bid package that includes everything, like the materials and manhours related to different aspects of the project.

“If it’s a week and a half job, you can really get in your own way pretty quickly,” Haskett says.

Even simple logistics, like where you stage materials, can impact your crew’s productivity. For instance, if you are dropping 20 yards of mulch 40 yards away from where it’s needed, this can tack on time quickly.

Another scenario is if you are planting 20,000 ground covers on eight-inch centers, Haskett advises prepping the beds, putting the fertilizer down, then the mulch and then planting through the mulch.

“If you’ve ever tried to mulch 20,000 plants on eight-inch centers, it takes twice as long,” Haskett says. “If you plant through the mulch, you’ll have a little bit of dirt come up around, but you can brush that back in.”

Small inefficiencies like these suck time and can be eliminated by proper job sequencing.

Starting Job Sequencing

Haskett acknowledges that the process of job sequencing is daunting.

“The problem is they don’t have a uniform picture of how they should execute a job,” Haskett says. “It is very time-consuming to do job sequencing, but the payoff is enormous.”

Haskett says companies can see at minimum 10 to 15% and up to 18 to 20% improvement by successfully implementing job sequencing.

“If you’ve got 18% improvement in efficiency across the board on five crews or 10 crews or 15 crews, what’s that worth in dollar bills?” Haskett says.

To start, simply observe your teams from a distance to see how they perform when they think no one is watching. He says this can give you a good understanding of what you’re working with and if there are any glaring inefficiencies that should be changed.

Haskett advises working with your best crew to debug your procedures and learn the ins and outs of how they’re currently executing jobs. Then, you can suggest improvements and work with them until they adopt the new process.

Afterward, you can move on to coaching the next crew on the proper job sequence. You can share the successes you’ve had with your best crew with other crews as you train them.

“It’s the determination and the follow-through to do it and stay with it until we’re done,” Haskett says. “And that’s where everybody falls off the wagon, because there’s a complexity to it, and there’s a time frame to it that most especially the small and mid-sized companies really just can’t get out of their own way to do it.”  

Keys to Success

You need to have your preferred order for processes documented. Haskett says these documents should include the tools needed for the job and the method they should be completed in English and Spanish.

These processes must also be trained to your entire team, so people don’t make things up as they go along on every job. Haskett says without clear protocols and processes, if you have five crew leaders, you’re going to have at least three different methodologies to do a job.

Once you have trained your crews on a proper job sequence, Haskett says you also need to at least quarterly conduct quality checks and refresh your team on the sequence.

“When crews start to slip a little bit here and there with that you should be monitoring that on a weekly basis,” Haskett says. “What’s our variance on budgeted hours? Are we 95% efficient? Are we 105% efficient?”

He says the budgeted hours and variance by crew, day and week can give you clear insight on who might not be following the proper job sequence.

Haskett notes there will be some seasonality impacting your efficiency as you can’t expect 100% efficiency in the spring with rain and other weather delays. He recommends implementing job sequencing after the spring rush so you aren’t layering on additional stress during an already challenging time.

He says you’ll know it has been implemented effectively if you see an uptick in quality, safety, gross margin and improved budgeted hours versus actual hours.

“If you do the math, it’s clearly worth it,” Haskett says. “But we don’t always do the math. We just look at ‘I don’t have time to do that this week,’ and we don’t look at the big picture of where we’re headed to be able to figure out how we can do this to get where we want to go.”