Understand Your Lawn Care Business - Data Metrics

There's always a certain degree of guesswork in starting up and running a business. With all of the "little things," that make up a typical business day, it's difficult to quantify and measure each part. However, a well-organized business CRM can help you wrap your head around what parts of your lawn care business make you the most money, and which parts take up the most time.

Here's an example: Let's say you have 10 yards in a neighboring city that's "not too far away." While you get the addresses from your list of sales, they all say they're in that neighboring city, so you think they're all good. However, what the address doesn't tell you out of the box is that 2 of the addresses are on the opposite side of the city, making your drive time about double what you normally expected.

So, without planning ahead the first time, your crew is 20 minutes late to the job, the customer isn't happy, and then your crew is 40 minutes late to get home that day. Plus, the added driving distance means more gas money and your profit margins were already razor thin. 

The next time, you know how long it takes your crew to get out there, so you change the schedule around to give them that extra drive time to make sure the job beforehand doesn't make them late to the far away job, and then you give that job a little extra time to make sure your crew can leave and get on home. So, instead of that job taking the typical 45 minutes, it now takes 85 minutes. However, you didn't change your "lawn maintenance & care," price (that you advertised for $100 a visit) for this one customer, so now you're making half the money you should be making. 

This scenario is exactly what we're talking about when it comes to understanding your lawn care business with data metrics. With Turfhop in particular, we can make sure your landscaping crews know exactly how long it should take them to travel from one job to the next with route optimization features, and we make sure that administrators know profit & loss statements with gas readings and expenses from time spent on a job.

If you, as a lawn care business owner, were able to tell that one paritcular crew has a much higher expense that the rest of the crew (which you would know by the odometer readings inputted at the beginning/end of the day), then you could easily identify the outlier job as the reason for the extra cost.

Regardless of what lawn care or landscaping business solution you use, you need to understand where your business makes money and where it can be trimmed, no pun intended. Ever lawn care or landscaping business has certain types of jobs that make more money than others, as well as certain travel distances that just make a job not worth it any more. With Turfhop's route optimization and profit/loss statement features available on every account level, you can rest much easier knowing that your business is profitable and sustainable.