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While acquiring additional customers and adding new property maintenance contracts are sure-fire way to boost your landscaping business profit, these high-impact, high-energy activities aren't the only ways to elevate your bottom line. Rather than directing all your attention to attracting new business, it’s important to also reflect on ways you can improve your existing profit margins. Along those lines, increasing productivity and eliminating inefficiencies can have a powerful impact on your operation. Besides helping you anticipate changes and overcome challenges, maximizing your existing resources and gaining control of your everyday processes will enable you to duplicate—or even surpass—the results you’d get from simply increasing your customer base.
Although every business owner wishes to grow their business by increasing sales, it’s important to understand that acquiring new customers isn’t the only way to impact your bottom line. In fact, eliminating inefficiencies to improve productivity within your organization can have an even more dramatic effect on your landscaping company’s profit margins. As an added benefit, making these optimizing operations goes a long way in enhancing the work-life balance within your company, an improvement for both you and your team.
However, without the right tools, collecting and analyzing enough information to initiate real change is a time-consuming challenge. That's why more and more landscaping companies are turning to business management software to gain insight into the factors affecting their operations.
Business management software can help improve your profit margins in a number of ways. Here are eight:
- Providing full visibility into your business
- Facilitating better decision making
- Increasing transparency and accountability
- Simplifying job costing
- Maximizing purchasing power
- Ensuring accurate labor
- Streamlining invoicing
- Reinforcing customer satisfaction
How specifically does business management software help in these areas? Let's take a closer look.
Providing full visibility into your business
As a business owner, it’s challenging to obtain a 360-degree view of all the elements influencing your bottom line. Aside from outside factors, such as equipment and material costs, internal challenges like improper scheduling and unprofitable services can add up to significant losses. Recognizing and understanding how these obstacles, individually and collectively, affect your company is crucial to knowing which ventures are worth pursuing and where adjustments are needed.
Yet, obtaining this information can be difficult—especially when the data is not readily available. Rather than scouring through spreadsheets and juggling files, business management software enables you to customize and run reports in an instant while also compiling, organizing, accessing, managing, and storing all of your company information in one centralized platform.
Facilitating better decision making
Having real-time access to operational data means you can run your business based on facts rather than guesswork. With the right business management system, you'll know within a few clicks which contracts, divisions, jobs, services, and crews are adding or detracting from your bottom line. Armed with this information, you can make the needed changes to processes, people, or relationships that are draining profits from your company.
Even better, with a business management platform, you can gain visibility into your recurring contracts and sales pipeline to enable you to proactively adjust staffing, equipment, schedules, and supplies.
Increasing transparency and accountability
Supporting and empowering your team members to stay proactive and engaged is one of the simplest and most effective ways to maximize your bottom line. Integrated business management platforms enable staff members to gain real-time access to the data and tools they need to estimate and schedule jobs, keep projects on track, and continually manage materials, equipment, customers, and crews.
But beyond helping employees accomplish their daily tasks efficiently with less frustration and higher accuracy, these systems also provide organization-wide transparency into estimated and actual goals. This increased visibility often promotes friendly competition that can motivate your teams and, in turn, boost performance.
Simplifying job costing
Without a standardized system, estimating costs at the job or opportunity level can be confusing and lead to expensive oversights and mistakes. Even worse, continuously failing to apply enough time, equipment, and labor to a job can create a pattern of inefficiency that will contribute to similar losses on future projects.
As an alternative to cumbersome spreadsheets and basic accounting tools, many businesses are turning to intuitive software solutions to help standardize costing structures, track trends, and manage their expenses. Besides providing a simplified, reliable, and repeatable way to record and analyze both direct and indirect costs, these platforms often also allow you to create and adjust margins based on preset or customized criteria.
Maximizing purchasing power
Adding to the benefits of predicting and forecasting job costs, gaining visibility to current and anticipated material needs can help you further reduce job-related expenses. Rather than ordering supplies by the project and potentially wasting money, you can take a proactive approach to purchasing by increasing your order volumes to negotiate better pricing.
How? Simple. By using integrated software to predict company wide needs and compile a sizable materials order, you can not only ensure your crews have the right supplies on hand to complete their projects but also guarantee you’re maximizing your returns by taking advantage of bulk discounts and vendor initiatives.
Ensuring accurate labor
For many landscaping companies, managing and tracking labor costs while ensuring accurate time projections can be challenging. Besides unforeseen changes to staff availability and project complexity, juggling multiple crews and job sites can quickly become overwhelming during peak seasons.
While spreadsheets and basic time-tracking tools offer inexpensive ways to manage and record labor costs, at the operations level, they’re impractical for field use. Even worse, if they’re not updated regularly, it’s easy to misappropriate or miscalculate numbers. Fortunately, the leading business management solutions offer mobile functionality to help ensure labor accuracy and allow daily time card approval.
Streamlining invoicing
Equally important, accurate and consistent invoicing practices help ensure your company receives prompt payments and maintains a healthy cash flow. However, without proper data collection and reporting practices, it’s extremely difficult to reconcile job tickets, estimates, and invoices. Even worse, multiple hands and multiple sets of eyes can add to the confusion and create unnecessary bottlenecks to generating and sending statements or collecting payment.
Again, this is where business management platforms can help. Integrated software can not only ensure that invoices are created and sent like clockwork every time but also improve efficiency by enabling seamless information transfer between account records.
Reinforcing customer satisfaction
Safeguarding profitable relationships and boosting customer satisfaction is vital to your landscaping business. As partners in your success, your customers are counting on you to deliver prompt, dependable service at every interaction.
To this end, having a business management software platform that allows you to engage your customers, create opportunities, manage contracts, initiate renewals, handle discrepancies, and provide ironclad service will help you retain customers, increase profits, and foster future growth.
At Aspire, we understand that when you’re running a landscape company, it’s important to have the right tools for the job. That’s why we’ve developed an all-in-one, cloud-based solution with the functionality you need to keep your entire business running smoothly—and profitably. If you’re ready to take your company to the next level, contact us today!
Need help finding the right business management software? Download this helpful buyer’s guide to learn everything you need to know before selecting a solution, from initial research to final decision.
If you enjoyed this blog post, you might also want to read, 7 Key Considerations for Selecting Landscape Business Management Software.
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