For years, the only thing that made sense about the building that housed Chris Brown’s lawn care company was the inexpensive monthly mortgage payment. Hesitant to invest in a larger, more costly space, Brown and his crews worked around the building’s shortcomings — and made life harder for themselves. After a year of analyzing all the things they were wasting time and money on because of their inefficient setup, Brown finally decided to purchase a bigger building in a better location. Despite more than quadrupling his monthly mortgage, Brown says his company is more profitable than ever and only continues to grow.
“We were doing so many things inefficiently because we were being penny wise, pound foolish,” says Brown, owner/CEO of Teed & Brown, a $7 million firm in Norwalk, Conn. “By calculating the efficiencies we could get out of our investment in a new building, we realized that spending more would put us in better shape.”
A new year is often seen as a clean slate and a chance to change what isn’t working. As 2020 begins, lawn care operators like Brown are focusing on efficiency to overcome challenges and meet goals.
Make the investment
To further increase efficiency in 2020, Brown plans to purchase or rent several more locations in areas highly concentrated with customers. Currently, some of Brown’s crews spend up to an hour driving to their first jobs, which he says is wasted time that could be recouped with a better positioned fleet. Teed & Brown provides lawn care services to a 90 percent residential clientele.
“This will provide us the opportunity to get more work done,” Brown says. “If we have a truck getting 11 jobs done each day instead of 10 because they are not spending as much time driving, we can grow that much more.”
Like Brown, Loriena Harrington, president of Beautiful Blooms Landscape & Design in Menomonee Falls, Wis., realized that investing in factors that increase efficiency is often worth the risk. After a personal injury kept her from the business in 2018, Harrington was determined to bounce back in 2019. She hired a developer to redesign the website and tripled the company’s advertising budget.
The new clients these efforts attracted resulted in tighter, more efficient routes, and 2019 was the company’s best year to date. Beautiful Blooms is an $859,000 company that provides 90 percent maintenance and lawn care services and 10 percent enhancements to residential clients.
“I was very apprehensive to spend that much money on marketing, especially after an incredibly challenging 2018,” Harrington says. “But our main focus in 2019 was filling our routes to capacity and gaining efficiency through that. I didn’t want to have regrets two years in a row.”
Tech savvy
By design, technology is intended to increase efficiency. Andrew Ewig, marketing manager for InfoHub, a division of Briggs and Stratton based in Milwaukee, says more lawn care operators are embracing the benefits of GPS technology to improve operations in the office and in the field.
“GPS technology is versatile, and really can be utilized in various ways depending on a lawn care operator’s needs, pain points or even business maturity,” Ewig says. “Of course there is the primary benefit of understanding crew locations, but there are countless other valuable ways to use GPS to drive efficiency into an operation.”
For example, equipment tracking provides data about how a machine performs, monitors how long crews spend at each job site and keeps track of preventive maintenance schedules. A real-time look at where crews are keeps everyone accountable and encourages safe and efficient driving practices.
“The ways to use that valuable information are endless, and companies that embrace that line of thinking are going to have a head start on their competition,” Ewig says. “Our industry is really starting to shift to that mindset.”
Go iLawn, an online property measurement tool, is a technology that has improved Harrington’s sales process. Instead of having to visit each property and take physical measurements before generating a quote for lawn care services, Go iLawn uses high-resolution property photos and point-and-click measuring tools to generate quotes remotely in minutes.
“When a phone call comes in, we can go online, measure the property, and provide a quote within a few minutes,” she says. “Our turnaround rate on the sales end has improved drastically.”
Harrington also plans to invest in a customer relationship management (CRM) program this year to help the company better communicate with clients through systems like automatic text message service alerts.
“Right now, we are inconsistent with our text message alerts, if we make them at all,” she says. “My advice to other company owners getting started is to systemize anything that can be done on a repeat basis.”
Time for training
“2020 will be the year of efficiencies,” says Mark Leahy, president of Blades of Green in Edgewater, Md., adding that the company’s employees will play an important part in making that happen. Leahy says the company will focus on cross training more technicians to provide multiple services at every visit to increase revenue. This approach required a redesign of the company’s truck setups to allow crews to carry the products and equipment needed to perform these additional services. Blades of Green is an $11 million company that provides lawn and tree care services to mostly residential clients.
“This allows us to respond to new sales and perform any needed service calls quicker than before,” Leahy says. “Because of this, our routing becomes more efficient and allows for more work to be done each day while lowering fuel, labor, and truck expenses.”
For 2020, Harrington is also focused on training to increase efficiency. She implemented “Training Tuesday,” a weekly 1.5-hour on-site training session for all staff members.
“For our lawn care services specifically, we went back to the basics,” Harrington says. “We have focused on retraining our technicians in order to stop call-backs and eliminate the possibility for error as much as we can. With more training comes more efficiency because everyone will be better at their jobs.”
