Minding Your Business: April 2001, Winter Is Over - Now What?

Many landscape contractors feel ready to face the challenges the spring rush offers because they spent time working on improving their companies during the winter.

Creating plans is easy, but sticking to them is a different story. Here are some critical areas contractors must focus on throughout the year to improve their businesses.

A BUDGETED BASE. Budgeting is a key ingredient when it comes to running a landscape company. For most contractors, the winter months are the only time of the year they can find the time to budget.

When creating a budget, the company sets its financial goals for the year. Contractors must manage the goals they hope to meet, and doing this during the heat of the season can be difficult. Most managers find it easier to manage their budgets by reviewing profit and loss statements at the end of each month and comparing them to their budgets, but this is not budget management. During the busy season, most managers don’t have time to take a proactive approach to managing their budgets. Instead they wait until the end of each month to see how they did. The difficulty being maintaining the budget throughout the busy year.

Managers who forecast and project direct costs, revenue, sales and overhead expenses on an ongoing basis will be able to make better financial decisions and improve the consistency of their company’s financial performance.

SYSTEMS ARE GO. Typically, strategic planning identifies systems within an organization that need to be modified and improved. A business is made up of many systems that are implemented daily.

Winter provides contractors the chance to evaluate and modify their companies’ systems based on last season’s experiences. Too often, contractors spend winter hours creating new systems, but then these systems do not materialize once spring rolls around. Whenever a company adds or modifies a system, it must always remember that implementation takes time. In addition, when adding or changing a system a business owner needs to create some form of a process to evaluate the new or improved system and its effectiveness.

Too often, contractors spend hours each winter working on improving their systems and creating new systems that their employees will be required to follow, but then those systems never materialize in their businesses. Spring rolls around, business picks up, and the next thing they know is they are back to doing things the way they used to. As managers, contractors are too busy to spend time retraining or enforcing new systems, so they decide to just let them go and allow employees to return to the way they performed tasks in the past. After all, the old way is the way that got them to where they are today. This is certainly the easy way out. But next winter, these landscape company owners will be spending more time working on the same systems all over again.

Therefore, landscape contractors should not give up on new systems. Instead, they should evaluate systems on an ongoing basis and make adjustments when and where they are necessary.