Mike Andes explains how tight routing and scheduling protect lawn care profits. Define a limited service area, use routing tools like Lawn Pro to keep jobs geographically compact, and batch mowing and landscaping days separately so crews can move between jobs without wasting time on the road.
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Hey, everyone, this is Mike Andes, and you're listening to episode number six of the Landscape businesscourse.com podcast. Make sure you check out the online. We got a webinar coming up this Thursday, and I'm going to answer all your questions live and in person on how to start, grow and save your landscaping business. Check it out. Landscapebusinesscourse.com now, today we're asking the question about scheduling and routing, and do you need systems in place for that? So the big thing about scheduling and routing is this. It comes down to one thing, and that's efficiency. So the one thing that's gonna separate you from everybody else, even successful, quote, unquote, successful landscaping businesses, the thing that's gonna set you apart is your efficiency. So you might not make as much gross as the guy down the street that's been in business for 20 years, but you can make as much net. How do you do that? You increase your profit margin. Duh. But how do you do that? You've gotta create an efficient, tight routes on your lawn mowing. Okay? So obviously we know we talk about the profit being in the landscaping stuff, but when it comes to mowing, if you want to make money in the lawn care and mowing industry and that part of the business, you've got to focus on efficiency. And routing is probably the biggest thing you can do about that. Okay? So routing, you're gonna have a system. So we use Lawn Pro I've talked about before to do our routing, where we put in all our addresses on all the jobs that we're doing in a day, and it creates the tightest route. Now, before we even talk about the actual physical routing part using a system, when you're getting jobs, you've got to keep in mind that the only way you're going to make money with lawn care and mowing is tight routes. Because every single time your employees or you get inside of a truck and start driving, not only are you not making any money, you're also burning money because you got to pay gas, you got to pay wear and tear on the vehicles, and you got a boatload of equipment that's not making you any money that you paid a whole bunch of money for. So any paying insurance and overhead and all that. So really what you got to focus on is the only time you're really making money is when you're actually mowing lawns or when you're doing work. And so in order to maximize that time, you gotta create tight routes where you're not gonna be doing 20 minute drives in between every single job. And so before you even start routing and figuring out what your schedule's gonna look like, you gotta figure out what's the service area that you're gonna serve, what county, what towns, what cities are you going to serve? Like you should literally have a map of the areas that you are and are not going to serve. And the reason you want to do this is because it's very tempting when you first start out to accept all the jobs that you get, all the estimates, all the work that's offered your way and that's good for the top line revenue. But if you want to create efficient routes and watch your bottom line revenue, you've got to create tight routes and know exactly what cities you are going to work in and what the boundaries are so that you get a tight route where within a city you can have 20, 30 jobs all within a few minutes drive of each other. Instead of driving one side of the city and then going 20 minutes and then driving all, it's going to waste money and not going to be scalable. When you start hiring employees who with taxes and L and I and all the other stuff are going to cost you 20, $25 an hour. Once they're just sitting in a truck, by the way, the truck is burning fuel and needs insurance and all that stuff too. So routing is important. And scheduling is also very important. So your scheduling, how we do it is like we have certain days we do mowing and we have certain days we do landscaping jobs. So that way we can fit in landscape big like landscaping jobs anytime. So three days a week we will do landscaping jobs. Three days a week we will do mowing jobs. And then essentially what we can do is we give everyone plus or negative one day for their mowing schedule so they know that if they're scheduled for Wednesday, it could also happen on Tuesday and Thursday if the weather's really bad or something crazy happens with our scheduling. So that way if we have a massive landscaping job, we can just push those mows off for one day and essentially get three days to do a big job with all the crew members. So that's how we do our scheduling. Routing is super important if you want to get your efficiency level up and make sure that your bottom line is being protected. This is Mike annis from the LandscapeBusinessCourse.com podcast. Check it out at LandscapeBusinessCourse.com we'll see you there.
