We sat down with Doug Robbins, a 30+ year landscape contractor running a multi-million dollar lawn service and landscape company. We asked him what his August Action Plan looked like each year to keep his company running sharp and making money. Here’s what we learned from Doug:
By late July and early August, the spring rush is behind you, summer is in full swing, and there are approximately five months left to finish the year strong.
For Doug, this was an important time to stop, evaluate the business, and focus on three priorities.
1. Know Your Numbers
Doug’s first priority was financial performance.
He would take a deeper dive into the company’s actual numbers and compare them directly to the annual budget.
A Profit & Loss Statement tells you what happened. Your budget tells you what was supposed to happen. Looking at them side-by-side can uncover problems that aren’t obvious when reviewing revenue or the P&L alone.
Doug specifically reviewed:
- Labor dollars as a percentage of revenue for Maintenance and Installation
- Credit card charges versus budget
- Actual overhead salaries versus budget
- Overtime versus budget
- Fuel costs versus budget
- Accounts receivable beyond 30 days
- Subcontractor expenses versus budget
The objective wasn’t simply to determine whether the company was profitable. Doug wanted to identify where performance was drifting away from the plan while there was still enough year left to correct it.
This was also a time when Doug found it valuable to have an outside advisor – (Doug worked with Tony Bass for 20 years) to review the numbers with him. A second set of experienced eyes can often spot something the owner has overlooked.
2. Take Care of Your People and Equipment
August is hot. Your crews have already worked through months of demanding conditions, and there is still plenty of work ahead.
Doug made employee appreciation a priority.
That didn’t always mean complicated incentive programs. Sometimes it meant having the Kona Ice truck or an ice cream truck visit the shop.
Other times, managers would grill food on a Thursday or Friday afternoon—and cook enough so employees could take some home to their families.
Doug also changed it up a bit to provide breakfast and play a few plant ID games before crews headed out a few times. He also used the pause in action to take team photos and post them around the facility. He added that the easiest thing he did was to make sure plenty of cold bottled water and Gatorade were waiting when crews returned.
And most importantly, Doug reminded his managers to frequently say, “Thank you.”
August could also be an appropriate time to consider pay raises, including portions of raises that may have been withheld during the spring ramp-up.
Then came the equipment.
Doug asked his mechanic to inspect the fleet and talk with crew members. Nothing damages morale as quickly as equipment problems.
Do we need handheld equipment? Are mowers getting long in the tooth and breaking down?
Are there trucks we should plan to sunset before year-end?
Do crews have everything they need to finish strong?
If the company was having a strong financial year, August was also a good time to consider planned equipment or truck purchases and discuss potential Section 179 tax treatment with the company’s tax professional. Doug said, “Don’t wait until December to start trying to reduce your tax bill. Meet with your CPA in August!”
Doug would also consider whether the management team needed an offsite planning day to evaluate how the company was performing.
3. Reset the Plan and Finish Strong
What Doug learned from reviewing the financials became the foundation for the third priority: adjusting the plan.
He updated sales and revenue goals for Maintenance, Installation and Irrigation. He reviewed the sales pipeline and marketing calendar and asked:
Where will our fall sales come from?
What can we offer customers that will generate more proposals and signed work?
He also looked closely at labor efficiency.
One of Doug’s best examples involved crews leaving the shop just five minutes later than budgeted.
Five minutes doesn’t sound like much.
But Doug had 17 field employees.
5 minutes × 17 employees = 85 minutes per day.
Multiply that by five days:
85 minutes × 5 days = 425 minutes per week.
That’s 7 hours and 5 minutes of labor every week—potentially showing up as unnecessary overtime.
And that’s from losing just five minutes each morning.
Instead of accepting the overtime as unavoidable, Doug’s team investigated the reason crews were leaving late and looked for changes to systems and processes that could eliminate the delay. (Tony added – this little step is what turns average companies into exceptionally profitable landscape companies.)
Finally, August meant preparing for fall.
For Doug, that included reviewing the lawn aeration schedule, coaching crews on the Standard Operating Procedure, preparing aerators, arranging additional short-term labor, and making sure seed and fertilizer were ready for deployment.
Your August Checklist
August isn’t simply another month on the calendar.
It’s an opportunity to ask three important questions:
- Are our numbers where they should be?
- Do our people have the tools and equipment they need?
- What must we change today to finish the year strong?
Answer those questions now, and you still have five months to do something about the answers.
We appreciate Doug Robbins sharing his time and expertise with the Super Lawn Toolkit community. You can watch and listen to the live interview with Doug Robbins and Tony Bass by clicking here.
Keep us posted on your progress at your landscape company. Send comments and questions to Tony@TonyBassConsulting.com .
To Your Success!
Tony Bass, founder
PS – Download Doug’s August Checklist PDF by clicking here. We know this is a helpful tool to make landscapers more successful, more confident and create more profit year after year!
