If you’re like most landscaping business owners, you didn’t start your company with a 20-page plan. You started with a truck, some equipment, and the drive to put in the long hours to make it work. As you take on more and more jobs, though, winging it becomes expensive and less doable. A landscaping business plan helps you move from reactive decisions to intentional growth. In this article, SynkedUP explores how a well-built plan can clarify your direction, allow you to set measurable goals, and highlight what makes your company different from your competitors.
Why a Landscaping Business Plan Matters
Think of your landscaping business plan as a road map, uniting your goals, hopes, and scattered ideas for your company into a structured plan that provides a clear path forward. Some landscapers might balk at the idea of sitting down and creating a detailed business plan, preferring instead to get out in the field and get their hands dirty. After all, that’s the job, right? But staying busy isn’t the same as moving forward, and a business plan helps make sure your effort is actually building toward something.
One of the biggest benefits of a landscaping business plan is that it creates an outlet for you to lay out your vision for what you want your business to be and do, and then figure out a way to make that vision a reality. Coming up with a plan forces you to think critically about your market, the services you offer, and how you’ll stand out from competitors.
A landscaping business plan lets you set the direction of your business instead of letting circumstances set it for you. Without that structure, you might find that growth feels chaotic and disjointed, or that you’re taking on jobs that don’t actually align with your vision or your long term goals. What you want is a business that’s growing on purpose, not just growing because it has to.
What to Include in Your Landscaping Business Plan
So what should go into your landscaping business plan? Let’s break down the key ingredients.
- Executive Summary: Start with a brief (1-2 pages), simple, informative summary of what your business is, what it does, and what it aims to accomplish. Include the mission statement of your business, the main services it will offer, the target market you’re hoping to reach, and what sets you apart from other, similar businesses. Because this section will loosely summarize your full business plan, you should prepare it last, after you’ve finished the following sections.
- Company Description: Introduce the practical elements of your business. Who are you, and what do you do? Give the name, history, location, and background of your business. Then break down the business’s structure, including whether it’s a partnership, a corporation, sole proprietorship, or a Limited Liability Company (LLC). Provide names and specific roles of founders and executives as well as details about the management team and management style.
- Market Analysis: This is where you do your homework about what kind of clients are in your area, what services they want, and what competitors are also competing with you for these jobs. The thing to get clear on here is basically: Who do you want to serve, and what makes you different than competitors? It could be that you do a basic service such as lawn care, but your customer experience is 5 star, and you really go above and beyond for your customer, making a certain clientele opt to go with you rather than your competitor.
- Mission, Vision, and Values: Most of your landscaping business plan will focus on the ‘how’ of your company, but in this section, you should also provide the ‘why.’ What are the beliefs and goals at the core of your business? Start with the mission, defining what you hope to accomplish in the day-to-day. Your vision outlines where you want your business to be in 10 years, including long-term hopes and goals. Finally, identify the core values underpinning those goals. Those values should shape how the business acts and set expectations for employee behavior and conduct. A great way to think about your values is how Patrick Lencioni puts it: A core value is something you’re willing to get punished for.
- To give an example, at SynkedUP, our mission is to make contractors profitable by giving them insight into their numbers and empowering data-driven decisions. Our vision is to end entrepreneurial poverty for blue-collar contractors and their employees. We hold ourselves and our conduct to our values of Innovation, Faith & Service, Growth, Optimization, and Leadership.
- Services and Pricing Strategy: Describe the main products and services your business provides, and how you’ll charge for them. Include information on any service packages your company will offer, minimum and maximum job sizing, and how you determine and calculate pricing.
- Marketing and Sales Plan: This is where you explain how you’ll get and close leads. Describe your main lead sources (referrals, social media, your company website, etc.). Include a brief description of how your sales process from the initial contact, to quoting, to following up.
- Operations and Team Structure: In this section, you’ll outline how the work gets done, and who will be doing it. Define key job roles, such as foreman, crew leads, estimators, and office staff. Describe how those different roles interact with each other. Include details on the day-to-day workflow of your business; what steps carry your jobs from intake to completion, and who is involved in those steps?
- Finances: Here, you’ll get into the financial nitty-gritty and lay out the numbers that shape your company. For an established business, include financial statements, balance sheets, and any other relevant documents. For new businesses, provide targets and estimates for the first few years you’re in business. This section should start with a revenue target, and then working backwards from there. How many jobs will you need to close at what average price point to reach this goal? If you close 30% of your leads, how many leads will you need to get to make doing this many jobs a reality?
How a Landscaping Business Plan Drives Results
Creating a landscaping business plan should be an exercise in careful thought and research, giving you the opportunity to really think through every aspect of your business. It provides direction and structure for your company, so you don’t feel like you’re starting from scratch with each new season. This sense of direction and structure applies to the rest of your team, too! With a solid plan in place, you’ll find it easier to onboard new hires and keep veteran team members aligned with long-term goals.
Your landscaping business plan also makes your financial and operational goals easier to measure. Calculating and documenting financial projections lets you track your performance against actual numbers instead of gut feelings, so you can get a better sense of whether you’re hitting profit targets or just burning through labor hours.
Plus, having a strong landscaping business plan in place will help improve your decision-making, especially when you find yourself juggling priorities or potential jobs. Instead of saying ‘yes’ to everything in an effort to stay busy, you’ll be able to have a template for evaluating the situation and saying, ‘this doesn’t fit our strategy.’
Where to Begin When Writing Your Plan
Creating a landscaping business plan might sound like a lot of work, so here are some quick tips to help you get started.
- Start With Why: Begin creating your landscaping business plan by identifying your ‘why.’ Why do you do what you do? Why is it so important? This will help motivate you through those slow months, and remind you of what success means to you.
- Use Real Numbers: When you’re estimating revenue or creating financial projections and goals for the future, pull actual data from past jobs, or use a reliable landscape estimating software.
- Keep it Simple and Practical: Your landscaping business plan doesn’t need to be perfect. You’re creating a useful tool, not a college thesis. You’re not trying to impress anybody, so write your plan in a way that actually makes sense to you.
- Revisit Your Plan: As your market, team, and your goals evolve, your business plan should, too. Plan to review your plan and (if necessary) refine it at least once a year, to make sure your goals and your reality stay in alignment.
Common Pitfalls That Undermine a Landscaping Business Plan
We’ll also leave you with some suggestions on what to avoid in your landscaping business plan:
- Not Budgeting Based On Real Numbers: When you don’t build a real budget, it’s easy to lose track of what jobs actually cost you. Labor, equipment, and overhead add up whether you plan for them or not. Without that barometer, pricing decisions are based on gut feel instead of reality, putting cash flow and profitability at risk. If you aren’t sure where to start, try out our budgeting tool!
- Leaving Out Market Research: Your landscaping business plan should reflect reality! How can you do that if you don’t know what the reality is? Don’t skip out on doing market research, or just assume that your business will find an audience because ‘everybody needs landscaping.’ If you don’t know your competition, or how saturated the market is, you won’t be able to position yourself effectively in that market, which will limit revenue and stunt opportunities for growth.
- Fluffy Mission Statements: Sure, your vision and values should relay your hopes and goals for your business. But they should also be actionable. Craft a mission statement that will guide your pricing, hiring, and your approach to customer service.
- A One-and-Done Approach: You shouldn’t create a business plan to say you’ve done it, and then never look at it again. If you’ve put the proper time, thought, and analysis into your business plan, it should serve as a resource for shaping and growing your business. Make a habit of reviewing it quarterly to ensure the plan still reflects reality or needs updating as your business evolves.
SynkedUP Helps Put Your Plan Into Action
A landscaping business plan can help give your business guidance and direction. And SynkedUP, a business landscaping software created by contractors, for contractors, can help make that plan a reality.
SynkedUP takes your landscaping business plan off the paper and puts it into our centralized, automated system designed to help contractors win jobs, create estimates and proposals, and track profitability with confidence. Our system calculates accurate production rates, instantly, turning estimating into a fast and painless process. We also offer job tracking and progress reports in real time, so you’ll always know where you stand, helping your jobs stay on-budget and on-task.
That efficiency and ease extends to our budgeting tool, which uses real job data to help you find your breakeven and hourly rates. That way, you can always rest assured that the proposals you send out the door are priced correctly for your real expenses. And if those expenses ever change, you’ll just need to update your SynkedUP budget, and the next proposal you send will be automatically adjusted to reflect that change.
You’re the one with the vision, and SynkedUP has the tools to help you make that vision a reality. To learn more, Schedule a demo with us today!
