Why a 60-second guide? Because it is a busy time for most landscapers, we understand that time is limited and want to help you get the most out of this season.
So let’s look at your goal for the season — a faster turn-around, better productivity, and increased bandwidth to manage more customers. You need to organize various aspects of your business to achieve those targets, from landscape design to customer communications to crew management. And a landscape business management software will help you streamline these critical aspects of your business.
0:60 Toss the Hand-Drawn, Crew Routing Calendar
To achieve success with a landscape project, you need to be a good crew manager. Once your crew has access to a mobile app that ties into your landscape business management software, you can track their time and location with geo-stamping; the crew leader simply clocks in when they arrive on the job site, and clocks out when they’re done. Any changes made to the crew’s route can be managed remotely with a dynamic route builder. Imagine saving all that time and energy consumed in tracking resources, crew members, materials, equipment and subcontractors. Optimizing the route of your crew and equipment can save three significant costs: administrative, fuel, and equipment downtime costs.
0:48 Streamlining Change Orders
Customers may often request changes that may seem small to them but are managerial chaos for you. For example, shifting a patio, adding a different tree or reducing the pathway area can significantly increase the time and material costs determined on the original work order. Discouraging such change requests can impact your customer’s satisfaction or, at times, lower your chances of upselling. A business management software with change order functionality can be your saving grace here, allowing you to easily input and process any changes without redoing the original work order. The flexibility of billing each change order separately ensures that you are compensated for your additional time and materials.
0:36 Integrating Design and Business Makes for a Winning Combination
One competitive advantage of having an end-to-end landscape business management software is the ability to fully integrate design and management aspects. This means that as you’re creating your design, the software is tracking every plant, paver, and item used and linking it to your costbook items to automatically generate your quote. Any landscape design revisions can be easily incorporated and quickly updates your quote, leading to faster turnaround times, and ultimately higher customer satisfaction.
0:24 To Organize Your Business, Organize Your Costs
The basis of every quote is your job costs; if updated prices are at your fingertips, half your work is done. On the other hand, if you have to shuffle through spreadsheets to find your itemized costs, it doubles the effort. We suggest using smarter ways to save your costs by creating kits, which are predefined groups of all of the labor, material, and equipment costs that you regularly use for your projects. So the next time you are preparing a quote, you can simply add the appropriate kit for the project. This process ensures you’re not missing out on any costs, helps you keep your profit margins consistent, and saves you the time of manually entering prices each time.
0:12 Keep Things Simple
Managing the everyday aspects of a landscape business is challenging, but it becomes even more so if your processes aren’t going through one pipeline. If you’re using 5-6 different programs to support your business, you’re losing productivity. To keep things simple, choose one specialized software to take care of your industry-specific needs such as storing your customer contact information, preparing your quotes, scheduling your crews, and analyzing your sales figures.
Get in touch with one of our account managers to find out how DynaScape can help you with organizing your landscape business today.
“In fact, because I have DynaScape Design, Color and Manage360, I can now design, color and estimate a $100k job in a single day … I could not have done it that easily before. It does all the tedious work for me, which allows me to turn proposals around quicker, increasing sales, which is important, but also frees up more of my time to provide my clients the customer service they expect and deserve.”