Tracking Time is Critical in a Landscape Company

Tracking time

I just got back from speaking at an event at Zimmerman’s Mulch Products in Eastern PA. While there I had some great conversations with landscapers getting geared up for the season – and much of the conversation was about tracking time.

We were discussing the things they were working on adding or improving in their process this year.

In almost every conversation, we kept landing back in the same vein: tracking time is critical in a landscaping company.

You can go through all the budgeting and estimating motions, in such a way that it is “perfect on paper”.

But if you bid on a job at 100 hours, and it takes you 150 hours, it doesn’t matter how “perfect on paper” your math in the estimate was.

You still lost money.

I know (from experience) that tracking time can feel like a burden of filling out paperwork when you’d just rather be getting the real work done.

But…

Who cares if you’re getting the real work done if you’re losing money on it?

If you’re working for free, you’d probably rather go fishing. 🎣

How to be sure

And the only way you can be certain that you are making money is to track that time.

And you can’t just view tracking time as a “best effort” thing that you do “if you remember”.

If you’re only tracking time 80% of the time, do you know what’ll happen?

You’re going to review those estimated vs actual hours on the job after it’s done, but then when you don’t like what you see, you’ll tell yourself “Ah yeah, I don’t know if I can trust this though… I know we forgot to track this and that religiously.”

You just did 80% of the work, and got 0% of the reward for doing that work.

The only way that tracked time does any good or provides any real value to you is if you track 100%, that is ONE HUNDRED PERCENT! of the time.

Religiously.

No exceptions.

Ever.

At Tussey Landscaping (where I worked for 15 years) if you didn’t track your time in SynkedUP, you didn’t get paid.

Simple as that.

It is company policy.

You want to be paid as an employee, you track time in our system.

Why?

Because as a company, we must know if we were over or under on hours.

Without knowing that, we could not know if we were making money or not.

Meaning our ability to grow, give raises, get better tools, etc was at risk.

But if we knew when we went over or under on hours, that allowed us to react right away to estimating mistakes, production issues, etc, so we could hit our goals.

Hitting our goals allowed us to grow, give raises, bonuses, etc.

See how employees, owners, and managers were all aligned in the importance and necessity of tracking time.

We were all on the same page!

No top-down whip-cracking cracking needed to get employees to track time.

What about unbillable time?

Another key thing we had to know about our company was how many hours our company spent on unbillable time.

Things like washing trucks, maintaining equipment on rainy days, etc.

That time was time the company of course needed and wanted to pay its employees for, but the company could not bill any customers for that time.

So…

That means those unbillable hour expenses are overhead expenses.

Which the company needed to plan for and recover.

The million-dollar question though is “How much unbillable time do you have in your company?”

Simple to find out.

Create a job called Shop Time in your time tracking system, and any time employees are working on anything not related to a billable job, clock into that job.

At the end of the year, we knew exactly how many unbillable hours we had.

Success is in doing the simple things well.

Consistently.

It’s not hard to track time.

However it can be difficult to track time consistently.

It takes discipline.

The alternative is not knowing.

Or guessing.

The successful business owners

Last I checked, any successful business owner was not cool with not knowing or guessing.

That kind of habit isn’t what made them successful.

What you tolerate you promote.

Start promoting tracking time. All the time. Without exception.

If you want to get started, you can do so manually as part of my How to Price My Job course where I have a manual time tracking log sheet in it.

Or you can jump on Zoom with one of us and we’ll show you how SynkedUP does it not only quickly, and efficiently, but also shows you your estimated vs actual progress in real time on every job.

Powerful stuff.

Hit me up in the comments or reply to this email and tell me what’s worked for you in your pursuit of tracking time consistently. I know it’s a battle. Employees sometimes struggle to understand the why or the big picture. Leaders sometimes struggle to communicate the why or big picture.

I’m not trying to be dismissive of the discipline it takes. It does take a lot.

But not knowing is not an alternative…

Let me know what’s worked or not worked for you. I’m always listening for ideas.

Cheers!

Weston