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Landscaper's "Short Course" to Success
by Phil Nilsson
Working this industry as a Business Consultant and Author, gets me to thinking about exactly what it takes to make a landscape business succeed. I've landed on three things that if ignored, overlooked or taken for granted, have a negative impact on business progress..
Business Happens in 3 Steps:
Get The Work ... Do The Work ... Manage Outcomes
Getting the Work ...
Begins with developing an entire "philosophy" as to how you'll get your phone to ring ... over and over, year after year. Advertising, marketing and promotion all fall into this category. You'll need to master each one of them or hire experts because like anything else, customer accounts have a limited life cycle. Add, replace, add, expand. Once you've done that, the next crucial step is to become an absolute without a doubt expert at job estimating and bidding.
Your success or failure starts with the job bid. It's the starting point to your costs, and your profits.
With each bid you should know what to expect, and how winning any particular bid will impact your business. We're not talking a hit or miss approach. Bidding input and outcomes are predictors of where your business is going. Careless bidding almost always leads to marginal results. Marginal results leads to below average growth and profits. If that's what you want you don't need to make changes. If you want more, you need to give more. Learning about advertising, bidding, cost, pricing, and work measurement all fall into "getting the work". Education and information is key to success at just about anything. Getting the opportunity to bid is part of it, bidding intelligently the other part.
Doing the Work ...
Comes a little more naturally, but understand that you yourself can't make a great deal of money by working for it. At least not in a busines that sells time. If you want to grow a busienss, you need to separate yourself from the work! Huh? Growth comes when the owner works at getting the work and management, not actually doing the work. Doing the work means that you value an hour's worth of your own time at no more than you pay your employees. Ten bucks an hour or so? In other words, if you never get off that mower, you'll never have the time to really grow your business which means to sell other peoples time. The more time you sell in a service type business, the greater the sales ... hopefully the higher the profits. But aside from that aspect, doing the work is not as simple as it sounds. We're not looking to just do the work ... we're looking to do it smart, at the least cost, with highest productivity. Effective management considers best crew size, equipment and what it produces and costs, employee recruitment, crew leader training, quality control ... and to complete the work within budgeted times. That's a mouthful. But that's part of the equation to getting results.
It takes a whole lot of trying. You'll find yourself "thinking your brains off".
But in a nice, slow, well thought out way. The fast road to growth? That as soon as you decide to delegate to others the "simple stuff", the faster you'll have time to not only learn how to manage but to use it to further your business. It makes all the difference and why some companies do let's say a few hundred thousand in sales while others do millions. I'm not advocating doing big sales numbers but without big sales numbers it's tough to make big money even if profits go lower as sales go higher and higher!
Over time, you promote yourself in your own business by becoming its manager ... not its worker.
Managing Outcomes ...
Is what managers do. They learn how to sell and contract, how to best do the work staying within cost guidelines (so there's a profit) then at the end, they measure results to see if they reached particular goals. Managers Oversee everything. It's the most important thing an owner can do because we know that when owners turn their backs on their business ... things start to go wrong, profits drop, and employees begin to get careless.
It's a Three Ring Circus ...
You're the ring master. Accept the position as that. See that you need to learn how to manage, and not just how to do the work yourself. From my experience with companies at every level, I'd say it's more important to learn to manage than to learn how to mow grass, drive a truck, plow snow, plant a tree. You yourself can't make the "big money" that way. You make money by managing that work using other peoples time, not your own.
Knowing what matters ...
That using your brains and not just your back will help you succeed. Your company like any other can make it to the top of whatever "heap" you're after but to make it big you have to learn how to think big. Managers think about things like branch operations, business expansion, acquisitions, diversifying into new services, finding more profitable ways and means, and looking ahead a few years to understand how the business will continue to grow and prosper. Managers look at the big picture, and so in that respect management doesn't "major in minors". Who cares about the cost of paper clips? We're after focusing on major concerns, and the main driving force to the future. That's what manageent does. It's not a license to lay back and rest on. Real business managers are unique because they are "positively charged". Taking calculated risks, not dwelling on negatives. Asking "what will make this work?" ... rather than overexamining each and every possible pitfall.
Real managers simply "go for it". They know it's more about where they are "going" rather than where they came from, and then having the desire to actually do it.
