Whether you have one gaping hole or a thousand tiny punctures in a ship, it will eventually fill with water and sink. The only difference is how long it will take. The same can be said for inefficiencies in your landscape business.
“Most landscape companies don’t struggle because of one catastrophic problem,” says Fred Haskett, principal partner of TrueWinds Consulting. “It’s usually death by a thousand small inefficiencies. The most common weak points are scheduling, routing, communication between office and field, job costing accuracy, equipment downtime, labor productivity, and inconsistent quality control.”
Why Small Inefficiencies Matter
Marty Grunder, founder and CEO of Grunder Landscaping Co. and The Grow Group, argues that even minor operational practices, such as where you park the truck on a job site, can impact your overall efficiency.
“If you’re going to grow your business, you have to be adding value,” Grunder says. “There can’t be operational slop in your business where you think your customers are just going to pay for it. They’re not. If you’re not being efficient in everything that you’re doing, you’re opening up your accounts for someone who is efficient to come in and get them.”
One example of an operational practice you may see as inconsequential is how your team goes about morning dispatch and evening load-out.
“I’ve seen companies lose 30 to 45 minutes per crew every morning and again at night because trucks weren’t loaded properly, materials weren’t staged, or crews didn’t have clear instructions before leaving the yard,” Haskett says. “That sounds small until you multiply it across multiple crews, five days a week, over an entire season. Do the math!”
Haskett says companies can frequently recover hundreds of productive labor hours annually without adding a single new employee by implementing a basic checklist, specific task assignments, pre-staged materials, and a standardized AM/PM process.
You Can’t Fix What You Can’t See
Grunder says that often landscape company owners don’t realize how inefficient they are. This is especially common if they don’t have real-time data they analyze regularly.
“It’s like driving a car with no speedometer,” Grunder says. “‘Are you speeding?’ ‘I don’t know. Doesn’t really feel like we are.’ The lights go off behind you. ‘Do we have gas?’ ‘I don’t know. The gas gauge isn’t working.’ ‘Something doesn’t sound right in the engine. You think it’s okay?’ ‘I don’t know. There’s no dashboard.’ I always like to say good managers make good decisions with good information.”
Grunder says if you have an enterprise system like Aspire, you should be reviewing metrics such as your efficiency ratio, individual job costing and days of work without a lost-time accident on a daily basis.
“If we wait for a review once a month, there’s 29 days that we’ve killed that maybe we didn’t have to kill,” Grunder says. “If we looked at day one and something was amiss, we might be able to take some corrective action. If we’re monitoring jobs and we’re doing a $100,000 job, and it’s going to take 30 days to do it, and we know on the 20th day that we’re hurting, we might want to take some salaried managers and put them on to help bring it in under cost.”
Other core operational indicators to monitor closely include:
- Labor efficiency
- Gross margin by job and division
- Budgeted versus actual hours
- Revenue per crew day
- Callback frequency
- Equipment downtime
- Overtime percentage
- Employee turnover
- Sales close rates
- Accounts receivable aging
Which metrics that matter to your organization will vary, but the goal is not to overwhelm your team but reveal whether crews are performing as expected.
Haskett cautions you shouldn’t just track numbers but understand the trends, as a negative trend seen over several months is often more important than one bad week. He says monthly reviews should evaluate trends like profitability by division, sales performance and operational bottlenecks, while quarterly reviews should focus on big-picture issues such as staffing, leadership development and process improvement.
“The mistake many companies make is only reviewing operations when something goes wrong,” Haskett says. “Strong operators build review rhythms into the business before problems surface.”
Haskett adds one of the easiest ways to spot problem areas is to look where frustration, delays, overtime, callbacks and margin erosion consistently show up. He says that for emerging or growing companies, revenue growth can temporarily hide inefficiencies.
Beyond data, Grunder also recommends seeking outside perspectives, as at times you can convince yourself something is doing well, when, in fact, you’re far outside the industry norm. He recommends finding a contrarian voice who can disrupt your equilibrium and look at things from a different perspective. This can come from a peer group, a board of advisors or a mentor.
“We struggle at times in The Grow Group as coaches because we have a professional obligation to help them,” Grunder says. “They’re paying us money, and sometimes we have to kick their rear end. We have to tell them they’re wrong, that you’re not doing a good job. You’re not looking at this right.”
Addressing Issues and Stress-Testing Solutions
Once you’ve identified some problem areas in your organization, you need to determine which issue will have the biggest ripple effects in your organization so you can address it first.
Grunder suggests using a bracket system where you narrow down your priorities by putting them head-to-head.
“Put all your issues up on a dry-erase board and battle them out,” Grunder says. “The jobs are going over, and we’ve had too many accidents. Which one’s more important? Too many accidents. We can’t have people getting hurt. That’s a major problem. That is a sign of a ton of other internal problems. So that would win.”
After identifying one or two major operational constraints, create an action plan to address these issues. Grunder says you should constantly reassess your priorities and maintain a good dialogue with your team so they are in agreement.
Haskett adds that when you are creating a corrective plan, avoid implementing overly complicated solutions.
“Operational improvements usually work best when they are simple, repeatable, and easy for teams to execute consistently,” Haskett says.
Grunder suggests running your ideas by peers who may have done something similar in the past or asking ChatGPT to pressure-test your solution.
The best way to ensure that your proposed solution works is to beta-test it on a smaller scale at first, whether that be with one crew, one department or one branch. Then measure the impact using metrics such as error reduction, time savings, and gross profit improvement.
“Field reality matters more than conference-room theory,” Haskett says. “Some ideas sound great operationally but fail because they create unnecessary complexity for crews.”
This article was published in the Sept/Oct/Nov issue of the magazine. To read more stories from The Edge magazine, click here to subscribe to the digital edition.
