If you left your landscape management business for two weeks to go fishing, would the company still make money while you were gone?
For too many owners, the honest answer is no. If you’re one of those owners, or if you’ve been one before, you probably know all too well what that looks like. The invoices only go out when you send them. Payroll only runs because you run it. The estimate only gets priced right because you’re the one pricing it. The crew keeps moving because you’re there on the jobsite to direct them.
Pull yourself out for two weeks, and the whole operation slows to a stop in days.
Contractors stuck in this position really feel the pain in the evenings. That’s when your “free time” gets eaten by the stuff you were too busy to handle during the actual workday. Revenue and expenses sit uncategorized in Quickbooks until you can get to them after hours. Receipts pile up and never make it into your job costing reports. Sales calls and estimates get pushed to weekends. Dinner gets cold while you finish the office work no one else can do.
As James Clear puts it in Atomic Habits, “You do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.” Your landscape management business runs at the level of the system behind it. For too many owners, that system either does not exist yet or lives entirely inside their own head.
You feel the lack of a system the most after hours, when the office work piles up, when you have to price the estimate only you can price, and when the jobsite stalls if you try to step away from it.
Make the Office Run Without You
Ask a landscape management owner where their evenings go, and they’ll tell you that the answer is the office. A lot of administrative work is invisible until it’s overdue. Then you pay for it with your evenings.
Nobody else has the login, the context, or the directive to send an invoice, run payroll, or record a job’s costs, so that work just sits until the crew goes home and you have some “free” time.
You keep all of these administrative tasks on your own plate because that feels cheaper than paying someone else a few grand a month to do it for you.
But is it actually cheaper? Run the math yourself and decide. Count the evenings the office costs you each week and set a conservative value on your own hour. Two hours a night, five nights a week, at $75 an hour comes to $750 a week, or roughly $39K a year.
If you hand that work off for two grand a month, that runs you about $24K a year. Which would you rather pay? The money is only part of the cost; those hours also cost you your weekends, and push your invoices out late enough to strain your cashflow.
Two moves take the work out of your evenings. The first is putting the process for day-to-day office operations in a landscape management software system so it won’t have to live in your memory.
Onboarding into a system makes you look hard at how you handle invoicing, payroll prep, and job costing now, and it locks in the process you want going forward. Because the software holds the rules, the work happens the same way every time, even when you’re not the one doing it.
The second move is hiring an (in-person or virtual) assistant to run the office day-to-day for your landscape management business and keep everything moving while you’re in the field. A good one will build and document the workflow for you as they go.
Get the Estimate Out of Your Head
In the early years of a landscape management business, you, the owner, basically are the business.
You’re the only one who can walk a property, work out what the job involves, and put a correct price on it. Every judgment that produces an accurate estimate, which crew to send, how many hours the job takes, what the site conditions add to the cost, and so on comes from those years of you doing the work yourself.
Then all that experience just lives in your memory, where nobody else has access to it. So just like the office work, every estimate waits on you.
Pricing is the part of the business that keeps every job reliant on you. You can hand off the digging and planting long before you can hand off the pricing, because the pricing is the part you never wrote down. Until you do write it down, or teach it to someone else, no one else can quote a job like you can. If you leave, estimating stops until you get back.
Getting the estimate out of your head starts with writing down the method you already use. Or, better yet, building that process into your landscaping software. Start with your production rates. A production rate is how much work a crew finishes in an hour: square feet of sod laid, shrubs planted, and edging cut.
You set those rates once, along with your pricing templates, and enter them into the same system running your office. After that, quoting a job comes down to entering its measurements. Landscape management software applies your rates and returns the hours, the materials, and the price.
The judgement you spent years building now exists inside the system. Whoever uses the system to run the estimate gets the same price you would.
I know a contractor in New York who built his estimating into a system this way. Now, his 13-year-old son prices high-dollar jobs for the business. Estimating might feel like a job only the landscape management owner can do, but once you get the process out of your head, you can delegate it without fear.
Build a Crew That Runs the Job Without You
You can hand off the office work and the estimating and still spend every day at the jobsite. The crew in the field will still wait for your decision before acting, because right now those calls are yours alone.
Keeping your landscape management business small does not change this. A two-person crew still needs one trained crew leader who can run the site without you. Until someone can, you can’t comfortably take two weeks off, and a company you can’t leave for two weeks is really a job. You’re the owner, but the work is running you, not the other way around.
If you take the time to train that crew leader, the shape of your entire week will change. With work running on-site without you, you can focus on keeping new work coming in. You don’t have to split every day between finishing a job and selling the next one. Invoices go out on time, steadying your cash flow. And a crew leader you trained often does the work better than you expect.
Your crew leader works from the same system that runs your office and your estimates. The estimate you built lists the hours and production targets you priced it against.
He checks the crew’s progress against those numbers without calling you, and he logs those hours and material use back into the job as the crew works. So your job costing stays current, and lets you, wherever you are, know whether the job’s costs match the price you set.
As long as you stay on the jobsite, the crew leader brings every decision to you instead of making it himself. I saw this on my own crew.
When I was building SynkedUP, I had to get myself off the crew at Tussey Landscaping. My cousin Ben had worked for me for three years. He’s capable and talented, but he’d never made a decision on his own while I was on site.
Once I stepped off the crew, Ben started making those decisions himself. Today, he manages projects on the jobsite better than I ever did.
Growth doesn’t happen by accident. If you want a crew leader who can direct the work without you, you have to make the choice to train him. Start by handing him decisions while you’re still there to check the results. Do it now, while stepping back is a choice you can make on your own terms.
A good friend of mine just started to build his team when a family member was diagnosed with cancer, and he had to be away from the business far more than he planned.
The business did not fall apart, because his team kept it running. It’s running now better than before, because he had put the right people in the right place. Build the field side of your landscape management operation the same way.
Whether You Pass the Fishing Test is Up to You
If you left your landscape management business for two weeks, would it still make money in your absence?
If the answer’s no, it’s because you’re the only person who knows how the work gets done. But putting the right system in place can change all of that.
If you take the time to implement a smart landscape management software system, you’re no longer the bottleneck in your own company, or the sole source of truth. Office work runs on your software, so it no longer waits for your evenings. Estimating templates and production rates let others price jobs without you in the room. Your crew leader directs the work on-site, and uses the software to track jobs, and compare actual hours against what you estimated.
All that experience and knowledge you spent years building sits in a system your whole team can run. Your business stays profitable and functional, even when you’re gone fishing.
I spent years as the bottleneck in my role at Tussey Landscaping before I built SynkedUP, an all-in-one landscape management software that takes all of your business’s data (and your know-how) and stores it in a centralized database. SynkedUP also has a mobile app with offline capabilities, so everyone stays in the loop, no matter where they are.
Book a call today to learn more about how SynkedUP works, and how it can benefit your business.
