Landscape Maintenance Business - Considering Restructuring Production Crews
When I first started in the landscaping business in 2015 I started running 2 person production crews that would do basic bed maintenance and mulching which is the core of business. I then for some reason or another we started running 3 person production teams likely in 2017 and have every since. Taking a long look at our payroll numbers annually and just efficiency I think it would be best to move back to a 2 person crews as we go out with a dump truck equipped with a dump trailer and walk behind skid steer so our equipment makes us more efficient to go back to a 2 person crew. How many team members are on your landscape maintenance crews? How many team members are on your landscape installation crews?
Snowplowing routing
We are having trouble with the way that we currently have to schedule our teams for dispatching when it come time to our snow plowing events. With Jobber currently not having a way for the management team to efficiently dispatch a large number of clients to each team member at a short notice interval. We currently have to set a job as a repeating job but leave it unscheduled. This leads to the problem of not having the option of selecting a team member/ members. Being in a area of heavy snow and storms that require at time 2-3 dispatches we currently have not found a way to notify our drivers through jobber quickly. We are currently looking at other programs to accomplish this task like Folosoft. But am wondering if anyone has had a successful way of doing this. Our thoughts for Jobber would be to have a dispatch via the team member and or a group. Example customers on Truck #1 route is saved as Route #1 and can be scheduled to the date of service needed in the order that is pre-set. Then all you need to do is assign the team member to the route and good to go. Example #2 would be Tagging all customer under the route you want and then mass schedule them using the tagged word. Ultimately we would like to dispatch as quick as possible and have the route for the drivers to take be preset. Then all they would need to do is capture a finished photo and hit complete. This would also help us track completion rate as our team members go.Do you utilize battery-powered tools?
Handheld battery-powered tools have come a long way from their first iterations, especially over the past few years. I've started making the switch away from gas-powered equipment throughout the last few seasons for my business and have found the switch to be positive for my workflow and bottom line. This is a trend I believe will continue as batteries become more powerful and long-lasting. Are you utilizing any battery-powered equipment and, if so, do you have any favorites you'd like to share??How do you utilize reports in your business?
I am curious to hear which reports you consider most valuable in your business and what actions are taken based on those reports if anyone is willing to share. Are there reports that you use regularly in Jobber or reports that you wish were part of Jobber? If so how do you utilize the information that the reports provide? Are changes made based on the reports? Is the data used to create the reports monitored internally for consistency? Thanks for sharing all input is helpful!
LANDSCAPERS: Let's unite on best practices...
Calling all landscape home service companies! We are a full-service landscaping company doing everything from irrigation, fertilizer and lawn maintenance programs to large projects. We've used Jobber for about 6 years and 'figure it out' as we go but tend to have to do a lot of manual work and workarounds. Wondering how others in the biz are best using Jobber and what kind of administrative help you employ to help manage it. For us... we have 3-4 people dedicated in the office at all times. We have 2 people dedicated to scheduling services and customer service for existing clients. We have another dedicated to billing daily, and another for administrative support to strictly field new requests and ensure people are being responded to. We use Trello to help manage all the tasks and customer status. It's a lot to manage. There's a lot of room for error. Setting up jobs is very manual. Scheduling can be pretty manual despite knowing there are ways to mass schedule in Jobber. Tags get super messy and are only so reliable. There isn't a great way to enforce good notes from techs in the field. Job Forms are only really for customer leave behinds and don't help with billing so the open notes field is really the only way to gather info from the field for invoicing... Interested in whatever others have to share that are really working for them!Landscape/Snow&Ice Biz Insurance
So are using Michigan Miller insurance as we have for several years now to cover our liability, auto and workers comp insurance here in western ny. We are a 1.5 million in sales company and previously had another insurance that offered apples to apples coverage for over 65% more in cost. I feel that this a cost that is out of control in our business we have around 440k in payroll and 1.5 million in sale but between all three coverage areas in our business insurance is 50-60k. I just think its outragous but we are do snow plowing. Who is everyone else using in a similar service situtation more importantly snow plow insurance and what are you paying.
