The average landscape contractor only bills 60% of their actual capacity for sales. Although this is bad news for most landscape contractors, it’s good news for those who have the desire and the will to get more efficient. There’s enormous potential right there within your business. In this video, we’ll discuss how to measure your capacity, your efficiency, and a few of the best ways we found to reduce waste, improve sales, and improve profits.

Did you know there’s a free video series built for budgeting and pricing snow and ice work? It’s up on YouTube for LMN members. There’s a video dedicated to each section of the snow and ice budget – how to better forecast your sales, labor, equipment, etc. and each one deals specifically with how to [...]

“The projects are always taking longer than I expected when I submitted pricing” – seems like every contractor has this sentence at the tip of their tongue when they start to discuss estimating….. but is it possible that it all started with the estimate as opposed to the “delays” starting during the project?

There are several ways to setup your business so that you don’t compete on price, but lets look at the one of the most important ways: differentiation. If you can differentiate yourself from your competitors, you don’t have to compete with them on price. See this article for a great video explaining differentiation.

Regularly check your actuals vs. your goals and enjoy a big edge over your competition.

Every company faces the conflict between sales and operations. Sales wants to sell with the lowest price possible so their tempted to trim hours on the estimates. Operations wants to complete jobs on time – they want as many hours in the estimate as they can. So how do you solve this conflict?

Is your area growing or contracting? What’s it going to look like in 10 years? Using new US census data sharing tools, ProximityOne has compiled population shift projects for US counties through to 2020. A better understanding of what your area might look like in 10 years will help you better manage the shifting trends in your landscape business.

Mistakes are all-to-frequent in every company. It’s really easy to look back and blame someone, get frustrated, or shake your head, but it’s almost as easy to tune your ears to hear mistakes coming. The best mistakes are the ones you can stop before they happen.

Profit margins, profit markups… what’s the difference? Truth is, there is a difference and more than 8/10 contractors add profit to their estimates in a way that leaves them short-changed every time. Read more to fix this simple mistake.

I often ask contractors why they decided to start a landscape business during our management workshops. Often, they shrug or laugh followed by saying something along the lines of “I wish I knew what I was thinking”. There is simply no way in this business to avoid work.