Improve Lawn Care Business Profit Margins

TRUTH: There ARE simple ways to improve lawn care business profit margins

As a business owner, while winning bids and making sales is the lifeblood of your company, you need a strategy to continually improve lawn care business profit margins.  Sales doesn’t make up the whole story. If you’re closing business based on low margins, now you’re losing money.

While cash flow is important, if your business is going to grow, you don’t just need revenue, you need profit margins.  Profit Margins = Direct Sales minus Direct Costs.

How do you improve lawn care business profit margins?

It starts by taking a peek at where costs can add up:
— Double booking or inefficient booking of appointments.
— Having too much or not enough of materials and supplies.
— Too much downtime on equipment and other resources.
— Inaccurate bids.

Does this sound familiar:

Missteps in Equipment and Resource Scheduling

You find that you are buying too much of one thing and not enough of another, or the larger of your two mowers is on a job that should be on a larger yard. What happens when you get a call for a last-minute full yard clean-up? You’re scrambling to meet the demands of your customers who need you asap.  These jobs are worth good money.  Not an easy scenario.

Scheduling overtime

Who would ever “schedule overtime” if they could help it?  If you’re using a personal Google Calendar or even a shared public calendar, you could be scheduling crews all over the place in a single day.  The means you’re paying your crews overtime while they travel all over town on your dollar.  Overtime is one of the biggest profit erasers, even on your most profitable jobs.

Creating “Blind” Estimates

As with any company, the longer you’re doing what you do every day, the easier it is to lose sight of the cost of doing business.  Job Costing is an AMAZING set of numbers that no business owner should be without.  From gas for the mowers to fertilizer, and equipment wear and tear, there are hidden costs in any every job.  Every estimate should take these things into consideration.

When one, or any combination of these factors come into play, you’re going to see a rise in costs and a loss in profit.  Ouch.

So What’s the Solution?
Tracking. Tracking. Tracking.

Tracking your resources (employee time, equipment, inventory) is key to keeping costs down. You may have an idea or a general ballpark of where your costs are at. You might even have a system. But at some point, it stops being practical to keep everything in your head, on paper, or even in a spreadsheet. And without accuracy, you’re left with just approximations, which rarely lead to robust revenues.

Improve lawn care profit margins with job costing made simple

That’s where Arborgold comes in: our resource management software does all the tracking for you. We specialize in the lawn, tree, and landscape business, which is what make the software so unique: it’s tailored exactly to the needs of your business

If you are a business owner, you owe it to the future of your business invest in resource management software now, while you have the luxury of time, instead of waiting for it to become a problem, at which point it might be too late. Check out their software today, and start seeing more profit tomorrow.