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.
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.
If you could only achieve profit or revenue growth next year, which would you choose to focus on?
It’s just a theoretical question, but one to consider as you lock down your plans (for growth and profit) for the coming year.
How much do you plan to grow in 2026?
It’s important to track the profitability of your services, whether it’s a one-time project or recurring maintenance like mowing.
But looking at services in isolation does not tell the full story. A lower-margin service might be offset by more profitable work over the year.
That’s why you should evaluate each customer’s total revenue and gross profitacross all 12 months—treating every account like its own profit and loss statement.
Many landscape companies miss this by focusing too narrowly on individual jobs instead of understanding a property/customer’s total contribution over all four seasons.
This broader view is critical: Though it can become challenging in a soft market, where homeowners and property managers are cautious about approving extra spending.
If upgrades and enhancements are a tougher sell, don’t give up.
The selling race is on. Now is the time to make hay.
This newsletter: “100 Days to Sell, Part 1” focuses on essential sales management techniques.
Here are 10 actionable strategies to help your team close more deals in today’s economic climate.
Use this as a check list, which ones are you doing well, and where can you improve?
As we plan for our fifth annual Financial Masterclass, I have put together a list of the costliest financial mistakes that we have seen landscape companies make. Here are three of them I recently discussed with a coaching client.
These may seem like no-brainers to some of you, and to others they may seem difficult or complex. If you are just starting to wrap your head around your numbers, now is a good time to master these.
Investors in fast growth software firms track the following key performance metric, and so should you. They keep tabs on the combined metric of “growth + ebitda”, to determine the health of their investment. We have modified this metric for our industry. We call it the Profit Growth Index “PGI”. We take:a company’s net-to-owner profit % (earnings before depreciation and owners pay), and we add to that their year-over-year growth. At our last all-client community event, we highlighted our top 5 scoring PGI companies from 2023, and we discussed how they got there. These top five companies achieved a Profit Growth Index between 64% and 100%.
There are a few important times each year to reflect on how things are going.
Right now is a big one. The kids are back to school, summer vacations are over, and it’s time to recommit.
Before you start your final push this fall…
• Pour yourself some coffee
• Grab your computer or “remarkable” tablet, and
• Ponder the following important questions.
Ten strategic questions to ponder right now:
It’s the dog days of summer, and lead flow for many companies is lagging. For some of you they are lagging in quantity, or quality, or both. Or perhaps this is just business back to normal: leads are simply not as easy to come by as they once were. No matter the reason, what’s a company leader to do?
Happy 4th of July! This holiday commemorates our original colonies coming together (in congress) to declare independence. Together is the key word. Our power as a nation comes from our grit, industriousness, innovation, spirit and ultimately our working together to overcome our differences. Hope you have plans to enjoy this holiday together with those you love. Webinar: Next week, July 10th at 12 noon EST, I will be holding a free webinar (sponsored by Team Engine) on the topic of improving your commission, bonus, profit sharing and incentive plans.
