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.

“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?

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?

Companies that have achieved success during this economy have followed the same strategy – to find a more efficient way to get the job done. As a contractor, there are ways to grow both sales and profits without the typical headaches involved in hiring more people.

As a landscape or snow and ice contractor, we all make mistakes. The best, most profitable companies are those that learn from them. We all fail, so fail better than your competitors.

Using a lean technique called the 5 Why’s will help you solve not just your problems, but the reasons why they keep happening.

How many of us witness our email inboxes overflow with email after email? We barely have a chance to answer an email before the next one comes in. How many of us feel time-crunched? Or that we are being pulled in a million different directions at once? The problem with this is that – without a break from all the madness – these experiences contribute to an enormous amount of stress. And as we are told every day by health experts, stress has a major impact on our health and wellbeing. Here’s how to work towards achieving a better work/life balance.

Having a budget in place and using it is one of the biggest differentiators between non-successful and successful businesses. Why? Because when you have a plan, you know how much you can afford to spend on things like equipment and materials. But it’s more than just that. When you budget, you have the ability to set clear, measurable goals. And when you have measurable goals, you can actually communicate your plans to your employees and reward them for having a stake in helping you achieve them. Here’s why you should start budgeting for better business management and better productivity.

Happy Friday! It’s the beginning of a new month – and a great month at that! April promises (hopefully) warmer weather, longer, sunnier days and a more busy and productive season. What better way to get the month off to a great start than to review some of the best business advice featured on the blog? Here are some of the top posts of the month.

If you want to be more productive and more profitable than your competition, you need to put the right plan in place and you need to implement systems that clearly communicate how the company gets things done. Proper planning coupled with the right systems is the only way to ensure you can grow a successful business without needing to be involved in every bit of planning and execution. Systems are the only way the owner can take the information and expectations out of their heads and effectively pass it on to the employees. Read on to learn how implementing standardized operational systems can help you plan for success.