Your landscaping business runs on the ability of your entire crew to provide hands-on skilled labor and be engaged in their in-person work. Your landscaping and lawncare skills, customer relationships, and efficiency on the job are some of the most central and important parts of your business. This can make focusing on your other business operations a dreaded task – like ones that involve finances or technology.
While these areas of your business probably aren’t your favorite, they’re necessary because they can:
- Save you time and money
- Help you serve your customers better
- Keep you competitive in a saturated market
If you’re wanting the benefits of technology for your business but you’re unsure of how to best implement new apps and systems, here are our recommendations:
On-the-go customer relationship management
Customers put a lot of trust in their landscapers to keep their lawns looking beautiful. But for your crew on the job, it’s easy to lose certain details in the mix (like customer requests or payment information) if there isn’t a good documentation system in place.
A now common practice in landscaping is to give each crew an iPad to use on the job, where they can access a customer relationship management software to keep notes, review customer requests, log visits, and take payments.
This is a simple and easy way to take your customer service to the next level, and everyone will be pleased with the higher level of organization and attention to detail.
Online billing
Allowing credit card payments through an online billing system is a hot topic for business owners because of the fee incurred from using a card.
Here’s our take:
It’s true that you have to pay a fee for using a credit card. It may be 3% of your customer’s total payment, and that can add up. But do you know what else adds up? The cost of time and resources when you have to track down your customers who still haven’t paid their bills. If you know you’re going to take credit card payments, you can work that extra fee into your budget from the start. But you never know when your clients are going to go weeks without paying, which will catch up to you when you have to pay your team with money you don’t yet have.
And aside from that, allowing your customers to pay with a card on file will be a welcome change for them – it’s one less thing to think about!
Payroll systems
While you probably already use a payroll system online, now may be a good time to review it and determine if it’s really serving you as best it can. The main thing to look out for is if it integrates QuickBooks or whichever accounting software you use. If it doesn’t integrate with QuickBooks, you’re only creating more work for yourself. The point of technology is to make your life easier – so let’s make sure it does!
Project management platform
In the same way you need a project management system for your customers, an internal project management platform can also be extremely useful. Platforms like Asana or ClickUp are easy to use and can bring so much organization and clarity to your everyday business operations and for your admin team.
No matter what type of technology or apps you decide to implement for your company, keep in mind that these systems are designed to make our lives and businesses run more smoothly – not make them more complicated! Use these ideas in so far as they are helpful for your landscaping company, and don’t worry about the rest.
If you need more ideas for how to optimize your business operations, we’d love to talk about how the Profit First system can help make your finances more organized and your business more profitable.
