Every company needs stronger managers or more managers to grow.
But hiring them increases your overhead often before the additional revenue arrives.
How do you know when to invest in more people—and how much business an expanded team should support?
These questions can leave owners stuck, wavering between spending too much on overhead and investing too little in talent.
Here is a solution.
Financial Masterclass go here. To learn about our Leaders Edge Peer Group go here. Mitch Katz, Director of Operations and Executive Coach at Jeffrey Scott Consulting, joins Jeffrey Scott on The Ultimate Landscape CEO to discuss how landscape business owners can use AI...
Our upcoming Financial Masterclass (Jan 7/8) has been totally revamped and improved based on input from past attendees.
We got feedback that when owners wanted to bring their people, it could be better organized for that. And owners wanted more advanced learning.
We have provided that – and more. We have also developed a Financial AI tool to help you with analysis of the anonymous data.
Note: All Data Will Be Confidential and Anonymous.
Five Big Improvements for this year’s Financial Masterclass.
A large fleet and impressive facility can make a landscape owner look financially successful. Same as a prospect’s multimillion-dollar property can make their budget seem unlimited.
But how much do you really know about another person’s finances or priorities?
Former private banker Elizabeth George spent 20 years working with wealthy clients.
In a recent blog post, she describes the surprising gap between people’s apparent wealth and their actual financial lives.
Every year after the Summer Growth Summit, we take a vacation to decompress. This year, we flew directly to Guatemala, but with a greater purpose this time.
A longtime mentor of mine, Steve Lewine, passed away suddenly last year. This week, his life was commemorated in Guatemala with the inauguration of a school and early-childhood learning center he helped build in a rural community there.
We were among 35 people who traveled from the United States to honor Steve and meet the students and teachers whose lives he touched.
If I asked five people in your company who owns pricing, would I get the same answer?
Probably not.
Pricing tends to evolve in different directions as a company grows:
Different salespeople start setting their own negotiation.
Perhaps an estimator builds the proposal to their own standard.
Account managers may make their own exceptions.
And operations has to deal with all the consequences.
Once his wife, Sonya (MBA), joined four years ago as General Manager, they made several big moves together:
Raised pricing and expanded Google-based marketing, Expanded crews and hired production managers, Implemented Aspire, Built a state-of-the-art facility, Developed a leadership team that is helping the owners regain balance
Kevin jokes that he is now able to work part-time: 35 to 40 hours a week.
The team has worked quite hard to get where they are. Kevin is now able to play golf weekly, so things are on the upswing.
Last week I held a 1.5-day roadmap session with their team and then took a wonderful vacation on Vancouver Island with my wife and partner, Corine.
During the roadmap session, we reviewed department and company-wide strategy and refined their Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). We set a much stronger course for the future.
Here are five lessons every owner and leader can learn from.
What should an owner pay themselves? You may have heard the rule of thumb: pay yourself 5% of revenue. But that falls apart quickly. It does not work for small businesses or very large ones. There is a better way.
There has been a lot of discussion about how to build a valuable business.
You know the usual advice: build strong systems, teams, earnings, and recurring revenue.
Many owners miss a fundamental value-driver hiding in plain sight: brand equity.
It may start with a new logo, website, truck wrap, or color scheme. But it goes deeper.
I know from my family’s business—where I always kept a focus on building brand equity. When it finally sold, our loyal client base, reputation, and market position were a large part of the value.
That is why your brand equity matters. It affects the economics of the business in ways many owners underestimate.
This is a common financial problem I see with landscape firms of all sizes.
You’re making important decisions about staffing, equipment purchases, and pricing, and you hope your accountant can guide you through the financial implications.
But the advice you get often comes back to cost cutting and tax minimization. It’s frustrating.
