Most lawn and landscape contractors know exactly what they pay their employees per hour.
But very few know what they are paying employees to waste time.
And fellas, those are two entirely different numbers.
Let’s look at a simple three-man landscape crew working an eight-hour day.
Suppose each employee wastes only 2½ minutes per hour.
Doesn’t sound like much, does it?
But 2½ minutes per hour becomes 20 minutes per man per day. With three employees, you’ve lost one full man-hour every single day.
If that crew works 200 days per year, you’ve wasted 200 man-hours.
Now let’s assume wages, payroll taxes, workers’ compensation, benefits and other labor burden bring your true labor cost to $30 per hour.
200 hours × $30 = $6,000.
Congratulations! You just wrote a $6,000 check for absolutely nothing.
But hold on.
It gets worse.
Wasted Time Has TWO Costs
Most business owners see the $6,000 in wasted payroll and stop there.
That’s only half the story.
What could your company have done with those 200 hours if they had been productive?
If your company bills productive labor at $70 per man-hour, those same 200 hours represent:
200 hours × $70 = $14,000 in additional revenue.
So if we eliminate $6,000 in wasted payroll and convert those hours into $14,000 worth of productive, billable work, we’ve potentially created a $20,000 improvement in the P&L.
From one crew.
From only 20 minutes per man per day!
Now multiply that by three crews. Five crews. Ten crews.
Are you paying attention yet?
Where Are YOUR 20 Minutes Hiding?
Here’s where this gets interesting.
During our Wealthy Landscaper training, we identified some of the most common productivity killers hiding inside lawn and landscape companies:
- The morning circus — Employees standing around while trucks get loaded and everybody figures out what they’re doing.
- Afternoon shutdown — The last 20 or 30 minutes becomes social hour instead of productive time.
- Missing tools — “Hey, Johnny! Where are the lopping shears?“
- Missing supplies — Somebody forgot mulch, fertilizer, fittings, string, blades or another critical item.
- Poor routing — Trucks burning fuel and wasted employee payroll driving unnecessarily across town.
- Bathroom breaks — Necessary, of course, but poorly managed stops aren’t.
- Loading and unloading — Handling the same equipment and materials over and over.
- Hitching and backing — Trailers create additional steps every time they’re connected, disconnected or maneuvered.
- Equipment breakdowns — Poor maintenance turns productive employees into expensive spectators.
- Surfing the web — That little computer in everybody’s pocket can become a mighty expensive distraction. Did you think of Tik Tok, Instagram, FaceBook, X and Linked-In? I sure did!
- Phone calls — Personal cell phone conversations don’t stop the payroll clock.
- Bad information — Wrong addresses, incomplete work orders and poor instructions create confusion.
- Rework — Perhaps the ugliest productivity killer of all: paying somebody twice to do something that should have been done correctly the first time.
None of these problems looks enormous by itself.
That’s what makes them so dangerous.
Two minutes here. Five minutes there. Ten minutes waiting on somebody. Fifteen minutes looking for something.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
And pretty soon your profits have leaked right out of the bucket.
Become a Productivity-Seeking Machine
You don’t improve productivity one time and declare victory.
The pursuit of productivity improvement is endless—and highly rewarding.
Every morning, I want you looking at your company and asking:
How can we do this faster, safer, easier and better?
Better equipment.
Better trucks.
Better tool organization.
Better routing.
Better information.
Better training.
Better planning.
Better systems.
Your competitors may have access to the same employees, mowers, trucks and technology that you do.
The company that wins is the company that figures out how to accomplish more productive work with the same 24-hour day.
Become obsessed with finding those wasted minutes.
Because minutes become hours.
Hours become dollars.
And dollars become profit.
Tony Bass, founder
866-923-0027
P.S. Think your crews are productive? Let’s find out. Take the Wealthy Landscaper Productivity Challenge and compare your company’s financial productivity to some of the most productive lawn and landscape companies in the USA.
Your banker, CPA nor the IRS will ask you for this important number. But if you and I work together to improve your profit margins, we will figure it out.
Take a headstart and do the simple calculations as described in the video and detailed handout.
