Mike Andes from Augusta Lawn Care shares how to schedule jobs weeks in advance by calculating your team's available hours. With three employees working 8 hours a day, you have 120 hours weekly, but he recommends using 110 to account for call-outs. Subtract standing commitments, then book projects by their hour requirements to give customers exact start dates.
Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes here from Augusta Lawn Care. We have over 50 locations around North America that do lawn care. But today I'm talking about my number one tip when it comes to scheduling jobs on projects. So if you have any sort of project, whether it be pulling weeds for four hours or trimming some bushes or doing a big leaf cleanup or property cleanup, or installing a massive paver patio and a retaining wall, it's gonna take three weeks, regardless of the project size. Today is extremely important because we're going to be talking about how you should put those on the schedule to make sure you can serve your customer the best and you stay organized. Because when people call command center at Augusta Lawn Care, we give them a specific time that we're going to actually start on their project. The reason we can do that is because of the way that we schedule our projects. So it's very important that you use any sort of method to keep track of your jobs and when they're on the calendar. So what I mean by that is whether you're using a whiteboard, whether you're using Google Calendar, whether you're using your CRM, whether you're using a software like we use called Team up, regardless of what you use, you know, Google Calendar is another great free software. All of these things. The reason you want to use this is be able to give your client an exact day when you're going to come and do their project, when they call or email and accept service. So if they call and say, yeah, I got your email, I love it. When can we get on the schedule? Instead of just saying, oh, well, we'll get to in a few weeks, which is just basically the traditional response from every landscaping company. Instead of giving, oh, yeah, it will be in a couple weeks or three weeks, and then you're kind of like shuffling papers on your desk of like, who's next in order? And there's just no rhyme or reason to it. Whereas if you have a calendar and you have exact times of when jobs are going to be on the calendar, you can give them an exact time. Oh, it looks like we are booked out to the 13th. We can put you starting on the 14th. We'll be there. Now, how do you do that? Is what are the budget hours on that project? So what you should be able to do is look at your entire week and ask yourself, how many budget hours is my capacity? And how many budget hours do I have on the calendar? Let's make simple numbers. Let's say three employees. We have three employees. And we're just gonna assume that they can get eight budget hours of projects done every single day. That's 24 hours per day. And let's say we work five days a week. So that's gonna be 120 budgeted hours that should be completed every single week. Now, I've done lawn care and landscaping enough to know that if I have three employees, there's going to be at least one or two of them. Call out, get sick, have a family. Something's going to happen. So I might say, you know what? Instead of putting 120 budget hours on the schedule, I'm going to put 110 budget hours on the schedule just to be safe, make sure we have some cushion if someone calls out, if someone gets sick or if they have an emergency. So 110 budget hours is my capacity. And I'm going to put on, if I divide that by 5, 22 hours per day. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to literally look at my entire calendar for the entire month, say, okay, well, I've got to have eight budget hours every single day for one mowing crew. So I got one person going out and mowing every single day. Well, if I take 22 budget hours, take out eight budget hours for one person mowing all day long to get the mowing done, I now have a grand total of 414 budget hours every single day for capacity for projects. So if a client calls and they say, I want to accept my paver patio, and that Paver patio is 28 budget hours, that means it's going to take 14 budget hours in my capacity per day. It's going to take two days to get that project done. And most likely I'm going to have one person mowing and two people on that paver patio for both of those days. So again, if now I can. If someone calls the next day and say, oh, well, I got this, I got this 140 budget hour job accepted. Massive cleanup, massive mulch installation. No worries. We know exactly what we're gonna do. We're booking out 14 budget hours every single day. Therefore, 10 days worth of work is two weeks. So for two weeks, I'm now booked out for that capacity. I got one person mowing out, doing lawns for eight hours a day, and the other 14 hours out of my 22 hours capacity is gonna be spent on projects. So projects is almost always the biggest thing that people struggle with. Cause mowing's easy, you know, if you get one or two lawns a day or lawns a week accepted. You just throw them on the schedule, you put them in your days and maybe over the course of a few months, you have to change the schedule up because you're getting more mows on a specific day. When it comes to projects, I see a lot of people simply printing out the estimate, putting it on their desk, and they're like, oh yeah, we'll get to in a few weeks and just kind of like shuffle them up and oh, well, that job, we don't have the materials yet, so we're just going to move that down. Oh, I totally forgot. We got to order the excavator and put that on rental. Oh, we totally forgot about that. We'll have to shuffle that one down. It should absolutely have a rhyme and reason to it, whether it be on a whiteboard, on a Google calendar. Using Team up or your CRM to visually be able to quickly look and see what day you're booked out till. And how you do that is use budget hours to know your capacity and that capacity to determine how many people you have on your staff. And then you can predictably and accurately know months out in the future. We can book ourselves out months into the future and know exactly what days we are going to be able to put people on the schedule. It's a, a great thing for customers to be able to call, accept an estimate and know exactly the day you're coming. Even if you're six, seven, eight weeks booked out. You can do this again. If you lose an employee, capacity is gonna be hurt. You're gonna have to replace them. So build into the fact that your capacity is not always gonna be 100% and if you do lose somebody, you're gonna have to replace them quickly. Otherwise you will fall behind. I'm Mike andes. Check out landscapebusinesscourse.com, lawncarewebdesign.com and lawncaremedia.com to grow your lawn care business. We'll see you tomorrow.
