The balancing act that commercial landscaping companies face...
In Part 1 of this post, we looked at a list of some of the variables that commercial landscape service companies consider when pricing your property’s landscape maintenance service. Measuring, counting, and evaluating the overall health of your landscaping can take a considerable amount of time, but is absolutely essential to accurately determining the amount of time it will take our crews to service your property.
Once we load all of the measurements into our estimating system, we have a pretty good idea about how many hours it will take to perform all of the necessary mowing, trimming, edging, and blowing to make your property look its best at each visit.
That number, the total hours we estimate that we’ll spend servicing your property’s landscaping, is the single most important factor that will drive the cost of your property’s commercial landscape service contract.
Why is that?
Because any commercial landscaping company’s single greatest asset is also our single largest expense – the professional landscape labor force that delivers our services.
More than anything else, our service personnel – not equipment, not trucks and trailers, not administration, not even fuel – come close to the investment that we make in our landscape service professionals.
Because we know that labor is so critical to the success of our business, getting an estimate of the hours they will need to service your property to the level you expect is an absolute necessity.
And here is the balancing act that commercial landscaping companies face.
Can we perform the services at the level that the client’s property deserves, and do so within the number of hours that we’ve estimated, while allowing our company to grow and be financially healthy?
Are there companies that intentionally misrepresent the number of hours they’ll spend on a property, just to win the job?
Yes.
Are there companies that will spend more time on a property than they estimated, sacrificing their profit margin because they believe they owe it to the client?
Yes.
For a client, I would suggest that neither of these scenarios are a good one.
The low bidder that cuts corners to reduce the hours they spend on your property will never deliver the result that you had hoped for when you hired them. Complaints begin piling up, you start to feel like you need to micro-manage your landscaper to make sure they’re meeting your expectations, and pretty soon neither you or the landscaper are happy with the partnership.
The dedicated company that underestimated what it really takes to service your property is certainly respectable and well intentioned, but eventually becomes a candle burnt at both ends. Healthy commercial landscaping companies are always growing and reinvesting in ourselves. Depending on the size of your property and the size of the company, an underestimated project can seriously injure a growing company and impede their ability to continue serving your property.
The best partnerships exist when the landscaped spaces of your property and the company that delivers your landscape service are healthy.
A company that takes the extra time to perform a detailed evaluation of your property and prices your landscape maintenance service contract fairly is free to deliver the best result from your landscaping. They don’t have to watch the clock every visit or look for shortcuts. If they've accurately estimated the time they’ll need to exceed your expectations, then all that’s left to do is deliver - to add real value to your property with every service visit.
Does your current landscaping company really know how many hours they spend servicing your property every year? Is that aligned with what they initially proposed when they began service?
Pricing your property’s commercial landscaping service isn't a guessing game. The total at the bottom of the pricing sheet is important, but understanding how your contractor came up with their number is even more important to the long term success of your property’s landscape.
