Are 2-Man Mowing Crews Most Efficient?
Mike Andes breaks down crew sizes for lawn care. One-person crews waste less time driving between jobs. Three-person crews make sense for big landscaping projects. Two-person crews split the difference: better morale and accountability without the overhead.
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Hey everyone, it's Mike over@landscapebusinesscourse.com and I wanted to share a couple of my thoughts on the different people that have been asking me questions about should you have a one man crew, a two man crew or a three man crew? And there really is no right answer to this, but I wanted to kind of bring up the way I think about it and the areas that you should be thinking about in your business as to if you had one person on the crew, just two people in one crew or three people in one crew. So first of all, just from a logistics standpoint of equipment, you're going to have to have more equipment, the less amount of people you have in a truck. So if you're going to have one man cruise and you have three guys working for you, you're going to need three full sets of equipment. So you're going to need a truck, a trailer, all the equipment that goes into that truck or trailer. And then if you have a three man crew, you only really need that one truck, the one trailer, whatever they're hauling along, there's less capital investment. That being said, if you're gonna have a three man crew, typically you're gonna need a truck other than just a standard cab or regular cab, however you wanna say it. So in a regular cab truck you can seat three people, but it's pretty tight, there's not much space to store stuff. So you're gonna usually wanna get an extended cab or a crew cab if you have more than two people in a truck. And so I'm gonna tell you kind of the pros, cons and the different ways of looking at this and then also give my recommendation as, as to why I do with my business at Augusta Lawn Care and what I would suggest you do if you're in similar circumstances. So first of all, one man cruise is the most efficient form of different scenarios of how many people should be on a crew. Especially for mowing, because for mowing a large chunk of your time is spent driving. And so if a truck is driving, you aren't making money and it costing you a lot to drive that truck around. Now the thing is, think of it like this, if one guy's driving along, he gets to a job. So let's say he drives 10 minutes and then the job takes 30 minutes or half an hour of man hours, so 10 minutes and then he had a 30 minute job, so 40 minutes that he worked. Okay, now let's consider that to a two man crew who still has to drive the same 10 minutes. And when they get to the job, it takes them 15 minutes. Let's presume even that it's a perfect 50, 50 split, which it won't be, it'll be more like 18. It'll actually be more like 20 minutes that it'll take them to do that job. So Instead of the 30 minutes for one guy, it's going to take 20 minutes now for two guys. So they drove for 10, they worked for 20, so now they took 30 minutes. Whereas the guy that the one man crew, he drove for 10 and did it in 30 minutes. So really you're only saving 10 minutes in that scenario. So a lot of times when people think, oh, I can put a two man crew out there and get twice as many jobs done, that's just not the case. Because drive time isn't any more efficient when there's two people on the crew. And when you get to a job, it's never 50, 50, which means if your job takes 30 minutes with one guy, it's not going to take 15 with two. The reason for that is just if one guy's trimming and one guy's mowing, the guy that's trimming might get done sooner, or the guy mowing might get done sooner, depending on the size of the lawn, or if there's more grass and more edges versus just a square lot where there's not much edging and lots of mowing to do. And so you're never gonna have that 50, 50 split of the more people you add, the less time the job takes to a perfect. Obviously it cuts time off, but when you add that third guy, it's not gonna be 10 minutes. A 30 minute job for one man isn't gonna go to 10 minutes because now you have three people.
Like 15 or even 16 minutes that that job would still take with three people. So it's really a lot of diminishing returns as far as the more people you're on the crew, the less efficient you are, the less time you're going to break down on the job. Because if you have three people and one guy's blowing, one guy's edging, one guy's mowing, and there's a lot of mowing, but not much edging and not a lot of blowing off. All of a sudden you have two guys kind of just hanging out, wasting time, you're still going to pay them. Whereas that one man crew, they get to a job, they are working 100% efficiency, they get back in the job, I mean back in the truck and they drive to the next job. So one man crews are the most efficient. And I'll come back to the cons of a one man crew. Why I don't suggest it all the time. A two man crew is really a balance between a three man crew and a one man crew, obviously. However, what's nice about the two man crew is now you give someone to be with your employee, which means it's good for morale. Really. This is the main reason why I'm a big proponent of the two man crew is it's morale. At the end of the day, it's a long day, it's hard, it's hot, and there's 30, 40 minutes left and there's two more jobs to go. And one guy's kind of getting really discouraged. The other guy can be like, come on man, just like, let's put our head down, get these done. We just have a couple more to go. Let's just pound these out. Whereas if you're by yourself, it can be a little bit demoralizing. If you're a business owner, you've been out in the field by yourself, you know what I'm talking about. It can be a little demoralizing when you working out in the field by yourself come to the end of the day, you don't have much motivation. So having that two man crew is really nice to have that second guy a three man crew. There are even more morale benefits to having three men on a crew. Obviously, even with two men, you're going to have accountability. So people aren't going to stop for breaks and be on their cell phone for 20, 30 minutes without clocking out if they have someone else to keep them accountable. Same thing with three men. It's just obviously you keep the accountability factor with when you have more than one person. So when you have that three man crew, I really suggest these go to landscaping jobs. Because the more drive time you have with a larger crew, it's really gonna kill your bottom line. Because if you have a three man crew driving in a big truck with a trailer and they drive 20 minutes, that's one hour's worth of drive. One man hours worth of drive time. And that's, it's just very expensive. You're paying those guys 20 bucks an hour with taxes and everything. And then plus you have the cost of a truck, you're looking at like 80 plus dollars an hour of the cost of drive time, which is enormous. And if a truck goes down or you get a flat tire or something breaks on the route, you got a massive amount of revenue, or not revenue, but cost being sucked up by a three man crew with all the equipment, insurance, overhead that comes with that. But positive thing is there's a lot of accountability. Very good for morale. If one guy's having a bad day, even two guys, there can be a third guy that really picks them up, gets the job done. Also a three man cruise, you can get a lot done. So that's why I recommend them for landscaping jobs. Jobs that are going to take 10, 15, 20 man hours where they can do one or two of these in a day, whether it be cleanups, like leaf cleanups and trimming jobs that are going to take 12 man hours or so, which is four hours for a crew of three, and then get there, do the work, drive the next job, do another job, or be at one job for a whole day or multiple days. In that scenario, it really is the most efficient because if you had one guy, he would have to drive. Let's say, for instance, there's a job, it's going to take 24 hours of man hours on job site. If you're going to do a one man crew to that job, the person's got to drive there three days. If they do eight hour days, they gotta drive there three times. So they gotta drive the job, drive back the next day, they drive there, drive back the next day, they drive there, drive back. Whereas if you have a three man crew, you can send one time, send all the guys in one truck, which you don't have to pay as much for capital expenses as far as truck and trailers, you have less people, you have to deal with less overhead as far as that's concerned. And you can do it in one day. So usually the customer likes that a lot more. And you can drive there one time instead of six trips, there, back there, back there, back over the course of three days. With a one man crew, you can drive there once, get all the work done, 24 hours, man hours, divide by three, eight hours, one day, the guys come back. So to wrap it up, I really recommend that people have two man crews for mowing.
Sometimes you'll have an employee that prefers being a one man show because they really do like to have a consistent way of doing their job. We keep our guys accountable as far as if things are mistakenly messed up on a job, things are broken or forgotten. And so if someone, some personality types, they want to make sure that they do all the work themselves, there's no one else that can bring them down as far as on their team or on their crew. So if someone's personality allows it, having one man crew is more efficient. But I would definitely, unless they ask for it or unless you've talked to them and they would really like to be by themselves and they think they can be more efficient and get more work done and have a higher quality. Unless that's the case, I would stick with two man crews. You don't have a three man crew, which are gonna get really expensive for overhead if things go wrong. And if you don't have a really tight route or if you have a lot of small jobs, like small mowing jobs, that can be a hard thing to do as a three man crew. The two man crew is good. You get the morale, you get the accountability factor still in there. It's not as efficient. So if you were asking me purely what is the most efficient, I would say for a mowing route it's a one man crew. For a landscaping job, it's a three man crew. The two man crew is not the most efficient, but it is when you take all factors into consideration. Because efficiency you also gotta look at just from an accounting standpoint of how many trucks you gotta buy. If you have one man cruise, you're doubling the amount of equipment you're gonna need in trucks and trailers and overhead insurance. So I really look at that two man crew as really a perfect medium. And so we try to stay with two man crews all the time. One man crews are for jobs that are, for some reason they're way far away. And we don't want to have too many people in a truck doing drive time. So that's when we would use one man cruise. We'd use one man cruise if it's the summer and we have plenty of trucks available. So since we have trucks, I might as well use them. I want to maximize our asset utilization. And so I want to make sure all our trucks are used every day. So if we have extra trucks, I'll have one man crew because they're going to be more efficient. However, we always try to make sure that someone doesn't go more than one or two days by themselves on a one man mowing route. And then like I said, three man crews is really what we like for landscaping jobs. And we'll even go five, six guys on a big, big landscaping job. And it's going to take us a week or two weeks to be on that job. So I hope that clears up a little bit. There is no right or wrong answer. You just need to know when you're scheduling your work, what type of jobs work best, with what number of guys on a crew and just realize that you do want to use your trucks. And so if you have five trucks and you're only sending out if you have five trucks and six guys, I would much rather see you put a couple guys out on solo than just to have two trucks out, three parked at the shop and three guys on each of these trucks. If you have six employees, I would prefer that you spread that out, use your assets. If you're gonna buy a truck and pay for the insurance and all the overhead that goes with that, the maintenance, you might as well go send it out, make it more efficient. I can have a solo mowing route guy, he can generate 60 to $80 an hour during the day. Whereas when you go to two man cruise for mowing, it drops down to more like 40 to 60. So it just depends obviously on weather and all that. That's why there's range. But it's definitely a cut in efficiency and even productivity when you go to the two man crew. If you have the right people for, for one man crews, it's tough to find people that work very well, especially on mowing routes with one man crews. So all the pros, the cons, hopefully they help you a little bit. Thanks again. This is Mike Annie's Landscape businesscourse.com.
