Every landscaping company has its own tricks of the trade that help them work more efficiently. Two landscapers, from opposite ends of the country, share their advice for getting the job done better and faster.
SIDE-STEPPING SENIORITY. Ryan Panarese, landscape and snow manager at Constantine Property Management in Loudonville, N.Y., says maintenance makes up the majority of the company’s revenue.
“I do about 90% maintenance,” he says. “We’re a pretty small operation. Right now, I’m running one crew with four mowers.”
And with his approach to structuring his maintenance crew, Panarese says the company’s efficiency is improving while not sacrificing quality.
“Efficiency has been a challenge for sure,” he says. “I see a lot operations where the owner/operator is always the guy on the mower and then you’ve got your newest guys on the string trimmer… and all my guys look at me funny… but I do the exact opposite.
“My most inexperience and newest guy is trained on the mower because it’s very task oriented,” Panarese adds. “They have nothing else to worry about other than what’s right in front of them. Then my more seasoned guys…they are doing the string trimming, the weeding and that stuff that requires more experience.”
Panarese says this work philosophy has been helpful in a number of ways.
“The guy who’s running the crew can’t see where everybody is from the mower,” he says. “And if they stop mowing, then guess what – the mowing isn’t getting done and that’s holding up the operation.”
Getting his crew on board with it can be challenging at times though, Panarese says.
“It’s a balance that I’m always faced with,” he says. “In some of the cultures that I’ve employed, it’s sign of status. Whoever is on that big mower is the king…it’s certainly a shift from what a lot of these guys are used to.”
Panarese says he justifies his decision by relaying feedback from their clients.
“I try to explain it that our customers aren’t complaining about the mowing,” he says. “What they are complaining about is that we missed string trimming, or we scalped here, or these weeds didn’t get pulled. It’s like they say – the devil’s in the details.”
STORE AND SAVE. But Julio Lopez, president of Cadre Landscape in Los Angeles, has a different tactic to saving time and money.
“We do large entertainment properties like Sony Studios and other venues,” Lopez says of his clientele. “We have about five maintenance crews and four extra groups.”
Lopez says he has about eight mowers despite maintenance only making up about 15% of the company’s revenue.
“We have so many because we have one for each of the bigger properties that have 40 or 50 acres,” he says. “And we leave it there. Then the mower tends to last longer. We invest more money, but it’s used for just that property. It makes it easier for us.”
In addition to saving time hauling equipment from site to site, Lopez says the move has added benefits for the properties they manage.
“We don’t contaminate other properties with different types of grasses,” he says.
Lopez adds that the crews on each site tend to take more ownership over the equipment this way.
CONTENDING WITH CHALLENGES. And even though Lopez and Panarese are working on opposite coasts, they encounter the same challenges all landscapers do including labor and weather.
Lopez says that California’s drought has hindered him from being able to grow the maintenance division, while Panarese says that the unpredictable weather in New York keeps them from having a set maintenance season.
“I explain it to people as whenever Mother Nature tells us to ‘go’ and whenever she tells us to ‘stop,’” Panarese says.
Both companies also felt the effects of COVID-19 but in different ways.
Lopez says his clients were doing the bare minimum since everyone was quarantining at home. Maintenance turned out to be the one consistent service everyone still needed during throughout the pandemic.
“We provide all kinds of services and tree work, but all we do are large, commercial properties. We don’t do residentials or HOAs,” he says. “That’s actually our niche and it works really well because they needed to keep up with the landscape. So other than the flowers and other little things they stopped doing, the maintenance has been consistent.”
Panarese said that COVID caused some slow downs for his crew after a mower malfunctioned and they were left waiting for parts.
“So far, I had one machine that was down for a while because it needed a new mowing deck,” he says. “And because of COVID, everything was backed up. It took eight weeks just to get the mowing deck in and it was coming from New York.”