A good friend of mine recently switched vendors, and saved 10% on the product he buys. A 10% cut in material cost can make a massive difference on a 12-month Profit & Loss report!
That conversation got me thinking about how we choose vendors for landscape jobs.
What factor decides that? Price? Checking to see which supply yard is closest?
Obviously, location matters. Your vendor should be close enough to supply your shop reliably. Beyond that, I recommend weighing three things when choosing a vendor for landscape jobs:
- Pricing
- Reliability and convenience
- The leads the vendor sends you
Let’s walk through each one, and I’ll also offer some tips on how to treat your best vendors so they keep working hard for you.
#1) Price: Compare Vendors on Every Material
Some vendors can get you better pricing than others, so you want to buy smart.
For example, if you need stone base materials, it often makes sense to buy straight from the quarry. When you’re working landscape jobs that require a large amount of base, the quarry can lower cost on the material compared to buying from the local landscape supply yard.
Before you place the order, though, check the quarry’s price (plus delivery) against the supply yard’s price, to make absolutely sure.
Ask About Early-Buy Programs and Pay-Now Discounts
Vendors who compete hard for your business may offer early-buy programs, which discount materials you order before the season starts. Some also offer deals like a discount when you pay at the time of purchase, instead of just putting the order on your account.
Every time you change vendors or get a new one, ask them what programs and deals they offer. If you don’t ask, you’ll never know!
Review a Full Year of Material Purchases
Take time at the end of every season to review your buying habits. Add up the volume of every material you bought for landscape jobs over the year.
Now take a look at the materials with the highest yearly totals. Finding a vendor who offers a bulk or early-buy discount on the materials you use the most will save you more money than the same discount on materials you only need to buy a few times a year.
Reviewing your materials totals for this season also gives you a rough idea of how much to order for next season. Finish your review early enough, and you’ll be ready when early-buy programs start and offers begin to arrive.
Price Isn’t the Whole Story
I’d be lying if I said that price doesn’t play a huge role in choosing vendors for landscape jobs. If price were the only consideration, then you could just find the vendors with the lowest prices and move on.
There’s a little (or a lot) more to it than that.
#2) Reliability and Convenience: Get the Right Material When You Need It
There’s an old saying: “You get what you pay for.”
Using a cheaper vendor only saves you money if you can rely on them to get you the right products on time. Late deliveries, or deliveries of the wrong materials, can cause slowdowns and delays on landscape jobs.
Delays cost you in paid labor hours, and lost labor hours come directly out of your profit. At the end of the season, you may even realize that you lost more money than you saved, because you chose an unreliable vendor with the “best prices.”
Wrong or Late Deliveries Hit You Right in the Schedule
I can think of many, many instances from my time as a foreman with Tussey Landscaping when issues with delivery threw off our schedule for landscape jobs. We’d be a few days into a job, with the excavation done and the base prepped, and then the materials we needed didn’t arrive.
Or we did get a delivery…but of the wrong product altogether.
Or the right materials did arrive, but in a completely wrong color.
So we’d call the vendor, and we’d learn that the color we actually needed was out of stock, with the next shipment a week away.
That left the crew standing around on the jobsite with nothing to install, but payroll didn’t stop running. We still needed to finish that job within the scheduled time, so we could start our next project on time.
Delays crash into your schedule like a line of falling dominoes. One bad order could push back all the landscape jobs you had lined up after your current one.
Ask Your Vendor to Fix What Slows Your Crews Down
During my time at Tussey, we’d mainly get our hardscape and water feature products from Terrascape Supply. They were great, and constantly bent over backwards for us. If an order went wrong, Terrascape fixed it as quickly as they could.
Early on, our crews were constantly driving to Terrascape to pick up another layer of pavers, or to grab a few more bags of joint sand. Those trips netted a lot of time on the road, and cut into the hours our crews spent on the jobsite.
At first, we figured that we had no way to avoid those trips, and simply had to eat the cost.
Then, we tried something. We made an unusual request: we asked Terrascape whether they’d deliver orders, even small ones, directly to our shop. It worked like this:
- If a crew needed something for the next day, they’d call Terrascape before 3 P.M.
- Terrascape would deliver the order that same afternoon.
- When the crew returned to the shop, the crew leader loaded the delivery onto the truck.
- The next day, the crew would head out, equipped with everything they needed for the job.
Our shop was only two miles from Terrascape, which kept delivery costs low. Production went up, and wasted drive time went down. Our skilled crews stayed on the jobsite all day.
As foreman, I went from visiting the supply yard multiple times a week to counting my visits for the entire season on one hand.
You pay your crew to do their work at the jobsite. For every hour they spend driving to the supply yard or waiting on shipments, you pay them without making any progress on the job.
To see what those trips actually cost you in dollars, multiply your labor rate by the hours your crews spend driving to pick up materials.
And if you don’t know your labor rate, check out SynkedUP’s free labor rate calculator here! It’ll use your business costs and ideal profit margin to generate a realistic labor rate in minutes.
By the way, Terrascape didn’t actually make much money on all those little deliveries. They helped us out anyway because the arrangement saved us time and they wanted to keep earning our business. Which they did.
Consider trying our tactic yourself with your most trusted vendors. Make a list of tasks that pull your company’s crew off the jobsite, or delay your landscape jobs (like supply runs). Then ask your vendor whether they can handle one of those tasks for you.
#3. Leads: What Work Does Your Vendor Send You?
Before you jump ship from your current vendor to one with lower prices, you need to consider one more thing.
How many solid leads have come out of that vendor relationship?
Some supply yards will have homeowners coming in looking for a contractor to take on their project. If your vendor sends a lot of those homeowners your way, the landscape jobs that come out of those referrals might bring in more revenue than you would save on materials by switching vendors.
Lead count alone won’t show you which vendor helps your business more. Maybe a vendor sends lots of leads to your shop, but they rarely close. That vendor holds less value than one who sends a few leads your way that all close on large landscape jobs.
As always, the best way to know for sure is to know your numbers, and do some good old-fashioned math.
List the dollar value of landscape jobs you closed from vendors’ referrals over the season, then compare that total against what you’d save in material costs by going with the cheaper vendor. What does that tell you?
(Bonus) Appreciation: Thank the Vendors Who Serve You Well!
Not every vendor will have great customer service, but some will go above and beyond for you. They’ll make last-minute deliveries for you, or break apart a full pallet of pavers so you can buy a few layers, or open early so your crew can load up and get to the site sooner.
If you’re lucky enough to work with vendors like that, let them know that you value them.
Thank Vendors After Your Last Job of the Season
At the end of every season, set some time aside to thank the vendors you relied on for that year’s landscape jobs.
Tell them directly that you appreciate the work they’ve done for you. Name the specific things that helped your crews most, so they’ll know which efforts really mattered: “You saved our bacon by getting those materials to us on such short notice!” or “You don’t even know how much your willingness to open twenty minutes early for us helped us out.”
Then, if you’re able, give them a small end-of-year gift. It doesn’t have to be huge, just heartfelt.
Treat Your Vendors Fairly All Year Long
Don’t abuse your vendors, and don’t take them for granted, either.
The way you treat your vendors affects the way they treat you. Vendors who know you value their service actually have a reason to do you favors, like rush deliveries for your landscape jobs.
SynkedUP Helps You See the Full Picture
When choosing a vendor for your company’s landscape jobs, I always recommend considering three things:
- What you pay
- The vendor’s reliability
- How many leads they send you.
If you’re choosing between two vendors who both deliver well, and neither send you many leads, then go with the one with the better price.
As with all decisions you make as a landscape owner, like pricing and estimating, you can’t choose vendors on gut instinct alone.
Or you could…IF you’re okay with seeing less money in your bank account than you expected at the end of the season.
But I truly believe that if you want to succeed in this line of work, you have to know your numbers. Your numbers, unique to your business, not anybody else’s.
That’s why we built SynkedUP, an all-in-one landscape business software that centralizes your company’s job data into one accessible, automated system. The system uses that data to calculate production rates, build estimates and proposals, and set prices that make the most sense for the landscape jobs you take on and the business you’re running.
Use the Items Usage report in the SynkedUP Data Center to view your total material usage, so you’ll know how much to order when a vendor offers a bulk or early-buy discount. If you want to track where leads come from, SynkedUP can do that, too, letting you see which lead sources generate the most revenue.
Want to learn more about the specific ways SynkedUP can help your business? Book a call with us today, and we’ll be more than happy to show you!
