Starting a landscaping business felt straightforward when it was just you and the work. Then year one hit. The crew, the cash flow, the bids that don’t pencil out, the customers who pay 60 days late. Sound familiar?
Running a business is a different skill set entirely, and the gap between the two has caught a lot of talented contractors off guard. The ones who build something lasting aren’t necessarily the best in the field. They’re the ones who figured out the right things early enough to matter.
Get Your Pricing Right
We talk to contractors every day at SynkedUP. Ask any of them what they’d change about year one and almost all of them say the same thing: pricing. It’s not even close. Most rookies set prices by looking at what competitors charge. Or what “feels competitive.” That’s the wrong move. Your prices need to be based on what it costs your business to do the work, not theirs.
Even if they don’t realize it in the moment, businesses that don’t price their jobs correctly are setting themselves up for failure. Charging inaccurate or unrealistic prices for your company’s work creates broken profit margins, and that can be a deep hole to dig yourself out of. A company with a pricing problem can’t make up for losses by taking on more jobs without just making the problem worse.
Charging inaccurate or unrealistic prices for your company’s work creates broken profit margins, and that can be a deep hole to dig yourself out of.
Let’s say your break-even on a man-hour is $75. You bid a job at 200 hours, but it actually takes 240. That’s 40 hours over. 40 × $75 = $3,000 you just lost. On one job. Now multiply that by every job this season. Without pricing calculations and adjustments, you’ll just keep bleeding profit, and by the time the cash flow gets really painful you’ll already be months removed from where the problem started.
When starting a landscaping business, your first step should be establishing sustainable, realistic pricing for on-offer services. You’ll achieve this by passing over gut feelings, best guesses, and competitors’ prices in favor of cold, hard math. Calculate the actual labor, material, and equipment costs generated by your team on specific jobs, then use these costs to build a budget. Now your prices are built on real numbers from real jobs. Not guesses.
Don’t Be The Only Person Who Can Run the Job
Many owner-operators, especially those just starting a landscaping business, feel like they have to take on all responsibility for every aspect of every job. Running things yourself might work out in the short term, but a sustainable, profitable business cannot run on the back of one person. If your business only functions because you are personally handling every single decision, that’s not a business, that’s just a job you can never leave.
The best way to build a business that can still operate without your direct involvement in every single thing is by establishing systems for business operations, and establishing them early. When we talk about systems, we’re referring to an official, defined process that employees can follow to produce the correct result, without having to constantly ask you what to do next.
The best way to build a business that can still operate without your direct involvement in every single thing is by establishing systems for business operations, and establishing them early.
Without a system in place, you become the point around which the entire company revolves, turning yourself into a living bottleneck. If you falter, the business won’t function. You’ll stay that bottleneck until you burn yourself out…or until you build a better system.
Begin by defining the ideal outcome for every task your crew performs. Then step back and let them take it from there. Setting expectations for completed work instead of micromanaging every step to reach that outcome fosters leadership and decision-making skills in your team. It also lessens their dependency on you.
Hire for Character, Train for Skill
Most early hiring mistakes come from desperation. When you’re starting a landscaping business, you may feel that beggars can’t be choosers. You need bodies for your crew, so you take on whoever shows up…and odds are you’ll pay for that choice in callbacks, client complaints, and employee turnover.
When you’re not in the field or directly interacting with clients, your staff become the de facto representatives for the company, and for you. The way a crew member interacts with a homeowner, handles problems, and leaves a job site is your reputation playing out in real time, whether you’re there or not.
With this in mind, you’ll need to put a little more thought into hiring than “I’ll take whoever shows up.” Certain skills can be taught and developed in employees, so focus on finding workers whose attitudes and work ethics would make a good fit for the company. Good employees do not want to be babysat, or to have to rely on the owner for every single decision on every single project. They want autonomy, they want to feel capable, and they want to do work that they can take pride in when the job is done.
Certain skills can be taught and developed in employees, so focus on finding workers whose attitudes and work ethics would make a good fit for the company.
Prepare your employees before their first day on the job begins by setting clear expectations early. Define what good work looks like, then follow up by providing your crew with the tools and training required to meet those standards. One employee who thinks like an owner is worth two who need babysitting. Every time. I’ve watched it play out at Tussey Landscaping for 15 years.
Track Money From Day One
Hitting a wall doesn’t mean you’re bad at making money. It means you don’t know where it’s going. Big difference. Avoid this problem by keeping a close eye on finances from the very beginning.
When starting a landscaping business, it’s vital that you keep your business account separate from your personal finances. This is the only way to know whether your business is actually profitable or just spinning its wheels.
When starting a landscaping business, it’s vital that you keep your business account separate from your personal finances.
Another crucial but oft-overlooked tool for landscape contracting is job costing, or the practice of comparing estimated job costs against actual job costs. Job costing is a habit that helps sharpen everything else about the job. Being able to tell whether a job came in over or under the estimate creates a feedback loop that helps you build smarter pricing, more accountable crews, and better, more accurate bids as you keep taking on clients.
Spend one hour a week comparing what a job actually cost vs. what you quoted. Do that for a year, and you’ll learn more than any course, coach, or conference will teach you. Contractors who know their numbers are rarely the ones getting surprised by low profits once the season ends.
Be Deliberate About the Jobs You Choose
Contractors early into starting a landscaping business will say yes to just about everything. Especially in those early days, you might be tempted to take every job that comes your way, because every project represents money you can’t afford to leave lying on the table. What many don’t realize about starting a landscaping business is that in that first year, the jobs you accept—and the ones you don’t—set a course that quietly defines the business you end up building.
Saying yes to every potential job that comes your way just isn’t a sustainable way to run a business. For example, let’s say that your company is contacted by three different potential clients, for three different potential jobs: residential maintenance work, a commercial install, and a high-end design-build. You may notice that these job types all differ wildly in terms of required equipment, crew skill sets, scheduling, and margin. Mix those without a plan and you get work that’s hard to staff, hard to schedule, hard to price. Hard to win.
Saying yes to every potential job that comes your way just isn’t a sustainable way to run a business.
If you want your business to find success (and make a profit), you’ll need to get comfortable with turning down certain jobs. Remember that saying ‘no’ to work that doesn’t fit your business model helps protect the company’s capacity for jobs that actually move the business in the direction you want it to take. Contractors who see sustainable growth tend to pick a lane early, build efficiency, then gradually and deliberately expand, rather than chasing down every single opportunity that comes their way. Pick a lane in year one. Why? Because every other decision (hiring, estimating, marketing) flows from that one.
Run Your Business Better With SynkedUP
The lessons we’ve discussed here about starting a landscaping business aren’t particularly complicated in hindsight, but most of them can cost real money, real time, and real frustration before they become obvious. Contractors who build something worth having are the ones who made the same core shifts early: they got pricing right, they built systems so they aren’t the only person who can run jobs, they tracked costs, and they were honest about the work that best fit their business.
Some people have to learn all of this the hard way, but that doesn’t mean you have to, too! At SynkedUP, a landscaping management software created by contractors, for contractors, we’re about working smarter, not harder. That’s why we created an intuitive, automated way for landscapers to estimate, win, and track jobs with confidence.
Whether you’re an industry vet or just starting a landscaping business, SynkedUP has what you need to succeed. We start by taking all of your company’s job data and storing it within a centralized, accessible system. That system can then be used to calculate and store production rates, create synchronized schedules that update automatically when changes occur, and send fast, professional proposals.
Thanks to our handy, automated estimating templates and the real-time job tracking and costing offered by our mobile app, SynkedUP has been known to save estimating time for our vendors by up to 90%! What once took hours or even days now takes minutes, so you can get estimates and proposals in front of clients before you even leave the driveway, without sacrificing accuracy or professionalism.
You have the dreams and plans for your business, and we have the tools to make them a reality. To learn more about what SynkedUP can do for you, contact us for a demo today!
