Too many owners feel like their business is running them, and not the other way around. It’s an uncomfortable catch 22; You started a business for freedom, but end up feeling more trapped than ever. This is a big reason why landscaping business management software exists.
A lot of software targeted towards contracting and trade markets focuses on digitization. Those options promise paperless workflows and modernized experiences for employees and customers alike. Which is all great, but what if there was more to it than that?
In this article, we’ll discuss the true value of landscaping business management software by zooming in on its four main benefits: helping you know your numbers, streamlining operations, creating accessible and repeatable systems, and keeping your jobs on-course.
1. Knowing Your Numbers
“Know your numbers” is absolutely critical to your business success.
For example, say you pay your employees an average of $28/hour. By the time you factor in labor burden and payroll taxes, you’re at $35/hour. You then bump your hourly rate up to $60/hour, assuming that will be enough.
Except…your overhead expenses grow as your business does. When you finally crunch the numbers using SynkedUP’s free tool, you realize you have $30/hour in overhead costs alone! You can then figure out your breakeven rate is $63/hour. But you still have to make money! Once you add a 20% profit, you find your hourly rate of $78.50.
This is what knowing your numbers can do for you, which is something that a lot of landscaping business management software options miss. Most tools focus on workflow over financial awareness. But the right option for your business should have the power to take your company’s real-world job data and use it to determine things like your break-even rate, or your exact man-hour rate.
If You DO Know Your Numbers…
When you know your break-even rate, you can choose and price jobs knowing that the numbers back you up. When somebody tries to nickel-and-dime you, you don’t cave. You hold to your number. If the client wants to pay less, you can negotiate on the scope of the work instead of on the price.
But if You Don’t…
You might run into some trouble.
A landscaper who doesn’t know their numbers is one who’s basically flying blind. If you don’t know your break-even rate, how can you be sure that the jobs you’re taking are profitable? Owners who don’t know their numbers tend to cave in price negotiations, accepting counteroffers that end up barely breaking even. You might do a full walkthrough of how a job can be quoted, sold, and executed…and only realize after the fact that that job actually lost you money.
When things are going well and you’re selling jobs at high prices, you might think you have absolutely nothing to worry about. But eventually you will run out of rope, and something will go wrong. If you don’t know your numbers, you won’t know what to change to stop the bleeding. In fact, you might not even realize there’s a problem until your cash flow starts drying up, but by then it’ll be too late. It’s difficult to recover from that situation, and many businesses never do.
Here’s where landscaping business management software gives you a big step up. To give you a pre-job reality check…and fend off post-job regret.
2. Streamlining Operations: Where Most Software Starts (and Stops)
A lot of landscaping software products skip right over the “Know Your Numbers” part of the equation (Obviously, there are exceptions to this; SynkedUP is one of them). Instead, they focus on a much-touted benefit of landscaping business management software: the way it digitizes workflows, creating a more streamlined, efficient experience.
Consider all the time-wasting, mind-numbing side effects of slow, manual landscape management:
- Crews having to drive back to the shop because no one communicated which supplies were needed
- Hours spent every week manually entering data into spreadsheets
- Invoicing backlogs that delay cash flow and frustrate customers
- Constant phone tag between workers in the office and workers in the field, trying to hammer out basic job info like addresses or material amounts
Landscaping business management software eliminates all of the noise. It does so by creating and then working from a single, centralized source (like a mobile app!) where crews can find the answers they need without having to call the owner. There’s a lot of value in that, so much so that some landscaping software companies build successful businesses on the promise of streamlining alone.
For example, let’s say your business selects a landscaping business management software solution that costs $400 a month. Let’s also say that that software saves 40 hours of collective employee time a month, and your man-hour costs are an easy round number like $100 an hour. That’s a 10X return on investment, from time savings alone!
3. Getting Information Out of the Owner’s Head
Let’s talk about the invisible ceiling that stops growth.
A lot of landscape companies hit a wall somewhere between $500K and $2M revenue, and it’s not because the market dries up. Instead it’s usually caused by something we call the owner bottleneck. This is the point where so much of the business relies on one person (usually the owner) that it’s impossible to get anything done without their involvement.
When you hit this ceiling, you’ll start to notice that every problem lands right on your desk. That crew members can’t operate without your input. That things keep getting missed or forgotten. That day-to-day operations feel wobbly and reactive. And your phone won’t stop ringing.
The owner bottleneck usually occurs because critical business knowledge exists solely in the owner’s head. Things like pricing standards, customer preferences, and crew instructions stay completely in the domain of one person, with no system or documentation to back it up.
You Need a System
Repeatable systems and processes are the best guide out of this labyrinth. Systems and processes set a clear definition for your business’s perfect workflow. They also centralize everything, so you don’t have to serve as the sole kingpin of the operation anymore. That way, your team can answer questions and solve problems without having to go through you every single time. They get some much-needed autonomy, and you get some much-needed peace.
But Here’s The Thing…
It’s hard to build systems and processes from scratch. It takes hard work, effort, and lots of time that you don’t really have. Landscaping business management software provides the perfect shortcut; instead of trying to design perfect workflows from scratch, you can just pull out a proven framework and deploy it.
Keep in mind, though, that software can’t act like a magic wand that just solves everything for you. You’ll still need to show decisive and steady leadership to actually benefit from this upgrade. But if you never make the leap, you’ll be your own bottleneck forever, and the company will never reach a point where it can operate without you.
4. Track What’s Working, and What Isn’t
When you have a system that can show you your numbers, streamline operations, and pull information out of the owner’s head, there’s one puzzle piece left: visibility. Can you tell, job by job, where things are going well and where they’re not?
Another valuable feature of landscaping business management software is how it fuels job costing. When we talk about job costing, we’re referring to the practice of comparing a job’s estimated hours, material costs, labor expenses, and net profit against the actual numbers.
Owners often get a “gut feeling” that something is off, but can’t pinpoint the actual source of the problem. Job costing using real business data removes the guesswork, and points directly to what’s causing the issue – whether that’s a slow crew, a material cost spike, or one of any other number of factors.
Unlike your accountant’s profit and loss report, which tells you what happened months ago, job costing tells you what’s happening right now. With that real-time data, you can respond to a pattern before it becomes a full-blown crisis. You can adjust your man-hour rate if fuel costs go up (again). You can also identify which services are the most profitable, so you can drop the ones that consistently underperform.
With access to real-time job costing data, you’ll see a shift within your team, too. Instead of trying to gauge from you, the owner, whether they’re doing a good job, employees have actual metrics to evaluate their work against. They’ll start to care more about efficiency, waste, and profitability, because the system makes those things visible and easy to target.
More good news: this is a benefit that compounds over time! Teams that review job costing data continuously learn, adapt, and improve. As your team improves, so will your margins.
Easier, Smarter, Landscape Management Through SynkedUP
The value of landscaping business management software isn’t just one thing. It’s four interconnected layers of financial clarity, operational efficiency, systemized processes, and performance visibility, each building on the one before it. Your software solution should work toward the goal of creating a business that can operate, grow, and service customers at a high level, without the owner driving every single decision.
That’s the goal that led us to create SynkedUP, a landscaping software that helps contractors estimate, track, and win jobs with confidence. Ready to see what a smart, intuitive system can do for your business? Reach out to schedule a demo today!
