Johnny-T-
New Contributor
This is not a success story yet .....
I’m currently running a small landscaping operation with a focus towards high end residential builds. I have been doing this for ten years now and I have had some pretty major ups and downs.
Starting from scratch I built the company up to 12 employees for a short time with revenue approaching $1M. I was so busy just going for it that I lost track of what was actually happening and it created a $40k hole in my pocket. That was about five years ago and I have crawled out of that hole.
The very first thing I did was focus one one thing, hardscaping. We were too broad going after every project that came our way. If someone had some garbage to remove we would do it, needed a field of long grass buzzed down, no problem, patio build, yep, retaining wall, sure, fence, why not.
We started to focus on patios, driveways and retaining walls. We got good at it, and we started to position ourselves in that market.
Next thing to tackle was cost tracking. With the help of my two brilliant partners we created an Excel sheet to track all the costs related to every job (rather than tracking them with pen and paper or in my head). Boom, now we could see how bad we were actually doing weeks or months after the project completed. Ha!
The next was organization and speed of inputs into the cost tracking sheet (CTS). We outsourced the tedious tasks of recording receipts and time into the different jobs in the CTS sheet to India. Now we were able to see what happened the week prior (assuming I input all the info into Dropbox to be picked up).
We were now able to see our margins relatively quickly and make adjustments to our operation to ensure we weren’t going to lose any more money. Great! Still we had to solve the problem of actually turning a decent profit.
That year we turned $80k profit but things were not right because the following year we lost $15k. The next problem to solve was with our efficiency, specifically how I planned the projects and passed that information on to the team members. Instead of saying “here’s a wall, it needs to be built in this location and you have 3 weeks” what we started doing was laying out each task and how long it should take. Now I give the guys a write up that states how long the excavation should take (setting a goal in man hours), how long the base preparation should take, how long to set base course, how long to stack a section. Now the guys have goals.
Next thing was to set our clients expectations. The same way I would set the goals for each section for the guys I now will lay out (in slightly less detail) how long each portion of the project is expected to take and what our exact finish day will be. I will always tell the client it will take longer than what I have estimated and I set the goals for my guys tighter. Now we are finishing projects on time and on budget and can usually exceed our clients expectations.
This brings me to today, currently I am working on hiring the right people which is proving to be very difficult. With focus on expanding now and replicating our success I am currently assessing the next steps forward. I have started to implement a basic training regime for new people without experience and actively trying to recruit new people with experience by paying high wages. So far we have had one new hire. We put him through basic training and he is doing very well 3 days in.
I need to assess and adjust much faster than I have been or this is going to take a long time.
I’m currently running a small landscaping operation with a focus towards high end residential builds. I have been doing this for ten years now and I have had some pretty major ups and downs.
Starting from scratch I built the company up to 12 employees for a short time with revenue approaching $1M. I was so busy just going for it that I lost track of what was actually happening and it created a $40k hole in my pocket. That was about five years ago and I have crawled out of that hole.
The very first thing I did was focus one one thing, hardscaping. We were too broad going after every project that came our way. If someone had some garbage to remove we would do it, needed a field of long grass buzzed down, no problem, patio build, yep, retaining wall, sure, fence, why not.
We started to focus on patios, driveways and retaining walls. We got good at it, and we started to position ourselves in that market.
Next thing to tackle was cost tracking. With the help of my two brilliant partners we created an Excel sheet to track all the costs related to every job (rather than tracking them with pen and paper or in my head). Boom, now we could see how bad we were actually doing weeks or months after the project completed. Ha!
The next was organization and speed of inputs into the cost tracking sheet (CTS). We outsourced the tedious tasks of recording receipts and time into the different jobs in the CTS sheet to India. Now we were able to see what happened the week prior (assuming I input all the info into Dropbox to be picked up).
We were now able to see our margins relatively quickly and make adjustments to our operation to ensure we weren’t going to lose any more money. Great! Still we had to solve the problem of actually turning a decent profit.
That year we turned $80k profit but things were not right because the following year we lost $15k. The next problem to solve was with our efficiency, specifically how I planned the projects and passed that information on to the team members. Instead of saying “here’s a wall, it needs to be built in this location and you have 3 weeks” what we started doing was laying out each task and how long it should take. Now I give the guys a write up that states how long the excavation should take (setting a goal in man hours), how long the base preparation should take, how long to set base course, how long to stack a section. Now the guys have goals.
Next thing was to set our clients expectations. The same way I would set the goals for each section for the guys I now will lay out (in slightly less detail) how long each portion of the project is expected to take and what our exact finish day will be. I will always tell the client it will take longer than what I have estimated and I set the goals for my guys tighter. Now we are finishing projects on time and on budget and can usually exceed our clients expectations.
This brings me to today, currently I am working on hiring the right people which is proving to be very difficult. With focus on expanding now and replicating our success I am currently assessing the next steps forward. I have started to implement a basic training regime for new people without experience and actively trying to recruit new people with experience by paying high wages. So far we have had one new hire. We put him through basic training and he is doing very well 3 days in.
I need to assess and adjust much faster than I have been or this is going to take a long time.
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