Are You Missing Opportunities To Make Your Business More Profitable?

Posted January 9, 2023

2023 could well be an ‘interesting’ year for the UK’s landscape industry. What are you doing to future-proof your business? How will you know if you are missing opportunities to make your business more profitable? – Or, at the very least, more efficient.

With soaring inflation rates and concerns over the cost of living, it’s possible that clients will take more time to decide on the scope of their garden makeovers. For us landscapers, that may mean uncomfortable interruptions in our cash flow. So it’s more important than ever to grasp any opportunities with both hands.

I’m not talking about cutting your prices, de-valuing your time or taking on work you’re not actually skilled in. I’m talking about looking at your basic business, discovering where you are ‘leaking’ money and looking for new opportunities to make best use of your business assets and your teams’ skills.

What is profit?

Profit is the difference between the amount of money coming into the business and the amount of money going out. Depending on your business set up, your profit might be what will feed your family, it might be what you’ll use to actively fund the growth and development of your business, or it might be what you put aside for emergency use. That’s up to you, but the fact is, if you’re not making a profit, you probably don’t have a viable business.

Want to make more profit?

We all want to make more profit don’t we? And the only way to do it is to make sure there’s more money coming into the business than going out of it.

How do you do that? By making sure that everything you do is as cost-effective as possible. Work out your hourly rate and try not to waste your time on things that won’t turn a profit. For example if your time is worth £35 an hour, why would you spend 20+ hours designing a garden, (ie £700) and not charge the customer for the time?. When instead you could outsource the service for half the price, pass the cost onto your client and spend those 20 hours doing something thats either profitable or fun.

Want to make more money? It costs a lot more to find a new customer than it does to up-sell to an existing client. Try to add value to each project by suggesting additional features that your client might like. Garden lighting for example, or built in storage or perhaps something like a dog shower to help keep muddy paws out of the house. Every little helps.

Here are a few more suggestions to help protect your business during a recession

Go through your accounts with a fine toothed comb – are you spending money unwisely? Have you got direct debits going out for subscriptions you don’t need? Do you spend a fortune on machinery repairs when it would be cheaper to hire in equipment instead?
Double check all quotes for insurance – are you getting the best rates?
Check your overheads – are you charging enough to cover all of your costs?
Consider outsourcing tasks that you’re not good at so that you can free up time and use your skills to make money instead
Make the most of opportunities to do some training with your team. That includes sales training as well as practical landscaping skills – you never know, they may be able to help you earn more from existing customers.
Take a good look in your machinery store – is there anything you could sell? Would it be cheaper to hire instead of buy bits of equipment that are only used occasionally? Or would be be cheaper to buy machinery if you hire something regularly. An excavator for example.
Your time is valuable. Are you wasting resources by visiting prospects who are unlikely to buy from you? or by making multiple visits to the same site when you could have done everything you needed to in one hit?
Think about some community projects – you may not get paid in the short term but you’ll be making your business more visible and creating some fabulous PR.
Refresh your website and use social media to tell more people about your business.
Hire a brilliant business consultant – they’ll earn you a lot more than they cost you.

Hiring a Business Consultant

I have to admit it, the profits from my landscaping and garden design businesses have been totally transformed since I started working with a business consultant.

Before I met Neville Stein, we were doing OK but I knew we could do better. Looking back I can see that we were missing several opportunities to make more money. But – sometimes when you’re in a situation you can’t see the wood for the trees.

Neville has helped me to step back and identify the strengths and weaknesses within the business. We’ve looked closely at things like

What type of work we’re best at and what is most profitable for us.
Who to target with our marketing- it’s far better to be focussed than to take a scattergun approach
How to ‘read’ the marketplace and provide the services that people want.
Identifying where resources are being wasted (by resources I mean time and money) and reining in the overspend
Knowing how far from base we can travel for a project and still be profitable
Managing business overheads
Deciding when to outsource skills and when to keep the work in-house
How to retain staff and motivate colleagues to help the business grow
Changing mindsets and being open to different opportunities to use the team’s resources and skills
Working on our sales tactics, helping us win more work
Planning for growth (and planning to protect the business during difficult times!)

By working with Neville I’ve learned how to focus my energy on the elements that I can control, how to delegate bookkeeping work but still keep control of the finances, and how to decide when to walk away from an idea if it’s not working.

Yes, there is a cost to his services, but actually, the money I’ve saved by trusting my team to look after the hands-on work while I pay closer attention to the business side of things has more than covered the consultancy costs. Of course each business will be different. For some, it may be better for the boss to work on the tools and hire somebody to help manage the bookwork. The joy of a consultant like Neville is that he doesn’t dictate how a business should be run, he helps you to figure out what works best for YOUR business and how to balance work life and family life.

Hiring a business consultant seemed scary at first, but trust me, I’m glad I did.

If you think Neville could help you, here’s a link to his website.