The truck is already in the driveway

A quiet afternoon a long time ago, in the company I owned before this one. I had printed the year's invoices sorted by customer, nine pages stapled at the corner, because a credit had gone missing. I found it on page four. Then I sat there with a yellow highlighter and kept going anyway.

Four customers were fifty-eight percent of the year. The largest of them, a man I bought lunch for every quarter and would have named as my best account, carried the thinnest margin on the page. I had known both facts for years, separately. Seeing them in one column on one quiet afternoon was a different experience. I have found some version of that page in most companies I have walked into since.

A clean company with one way to make money

A landscaping company south of Tulsa, twenty-nine people, five maintenance crews and one install crew. Good outfit. Trucks lettered, trailers laid out, and the owner could give me his fuel spend to the dollar. Revenue had sat between $2.5M and $2.7M for four years, and profit had drifted the wrong way in three of them.

Mowing and maintenance contracts were sixty-four percent of the money. Installs were twenty-two. Irrigation and small repair was nine percent, and the most profitable thing the company did. Nobody had chosen any of that. It had settled, the way water settles. One commercial property manager held twenty-eight percent of the revenue on contracts that renewed by email once a year, and the owner did not enjoy thinking about that, so he mostly did not.

An ordinary month looked fine. Crews rolled at six-fifteen, properties got serviced, invoices went out on the first, nothing caught fire. That is what makes this one hard to catch. The business does not fail, it stops climbing, and the same crews work as hard each year for a slightly worse result.

A few signs, if you want to check your own:

Your crews stand on paying customers' property forty times a week and have never mentioned work the customer would have bought.

You could not say which service line earns the most per man-hour, and you have never pointed your best people at the winner.

One service, or one customer, covers more of your revenue than you would say out loud at a barbecue.

Every dollar that arrives comes through the same door, usually your phone.

Whoever prices your work quotes what was asked for and nothing else, and considers that professional.

That is just how this business runs

He had a sentence ready for it, and I have heard the same sentence in nine states. Mowing is a commodity. There is always a man with a trailer who will do it cheaper, you make it up on volume, and the good years are the wet ones. Every piece of that is true enough to work as an excuse.

So the fixes followed the diagnosis. He hired a salesman to bring in more contracts, financed a sixth crew to run them, and when the property manager pushed on price at renewal he held the account by giving back four points. Each decision was sensible on its own. Together they poured more of the company into its least profitable work.

Volume in your lowest-margin line does not lift a company, it enlarges one. More trucks, more payroll, more of the owner's Saturday, and roughly the same money at the end of it. Meanwhile the fifty-one cent work grew by whatever happened to wander in.

The correction most owners reach for is a new service line. Hardscape, lighting, outdoor kitchens. It feels like progress because it costs money. But a new line has to be sold from scratch, to people who have no idea you offer it, through the one channel you already have, by the one estimator who is already behind. Add-on work sits at the other end of that. The customer is yours, the truck is already in the driveway, and the only missing part is a man saying one sentence out loud.

Underneath both sits the narrowest number in that company, the count of ways work could arrive. The owner's phone rang, or the property manager renewed. No builder relationships. No path from a finished install to the three neighbours who watched it go in. No way to buy anything without the owner personally in the conversation. One channel is a single point of failure that happens to be paying your bills.

Ten jobs a week that nobody mentions

Take the smallest version of this, the one nobody would complain about. A crew leader spends four days a week on customer property. Across that week he sees two things the company sells and the customer would probably buy: a row of hollies gone brown at the base, a head throwing water across the sidewalk, a bed gone thin enough to need mulch. He says nothing. Nobody told him it was his job and he has no idea what to charge.

Five crews, two apiece.

Nothing gets doubled in that table. No time was destroyed and nobody redid a job, so the loss counts once. Two a week per crew is low and I chose it on purpose. Run the same arithmetic at three and it clears forty-four thousand.

None of that needs a new truck, a new route or another person in the office, so it lands close to whole at the bottom. The company was netting around six points, call it $156,000 on $2.6M. Five quiet crew leaders were worth about a fifth of the year's profit.

The ceiling in that business sat on the selling side. Delivery had room. The install crew had open days most weeks and could have absorbed every one of those small jobs without a hire. What could not absorb them was a sales operation consisting of one estimator and a phone. When the narrowest part of a company is the asking, buying more capacity is an expensive way to stand still.

Five prices and one crew leader

Sit down for twenty minutes with whoever prices your work. List the small jobs you already sell that a man standing on a property can see. Visible, not diagnosed. Quotable without a site visit.

Pick five. At that landscaping company they were shrub replacement, mulch by the bed, a sprinkler head swap, a one-time bed cleanup with pre-emergent, and a downspout extension where water was pooling against a foundation.

Write the five on one page and put a price next to each. A band is fine, $180 to $240 depending on bed size. A crew leader will not open his mouth about a number he has to guess, and that single detail is why most versions of this fail.

Underneath the prices, write the sentence you want him to say. The actual words, not the idea of the words. Something like: Mr. Harmon, that row out front is not coming back, we replace those for about a hundred and ten a plant. Want me to have the office send you a number tomorrow? Then leave three blank lines for property, date, and what he saw.

Hand the page to one crew leader. Your best one, the man customers ask for by name. No meeting, no announcement, no rollout to all five crews. Tell him two things: he is mentioning, not selling, and the office handles everything after that. Three weeks, then the two of you talk about it.

The part that kills this is your end. A flag that sits four days is a customer who already called somebody else. Whoever prices work takes the page every Friday and the quote goes out inside one business day, including the weeks you are slammed. Especially those.

After three weeks, count four numbers: flags raised, quotes sent, jobs sold, dollars collected. If it produced nothing, the prices are wrong or the man is wrong, and both are cheap to change. If it worked, hand the same page to your second crew leader and pay the first one twenty-five dollars for every quote the office actually sends. Not per sale. Per flag that turns into a real number, because the behaviour you are buying is the mentioning.

What you stop hearing about second-hand

The first change is a complaint that stops reaching you. A customer had work done by somebody else on a property your truck visits weekly, and you heard in passing. That used to happen twice a month. Invoices to existing customers stop being one line. Your estimator starts quoting things nobody asked for, because he has watched small jobs close at forty percent.

That Tulsa company got irrigation and small repair to twelve percent of revenue instead of nine, sold almost entirely to people already on the route. It took eleven weeks. The property manager still held a large number, and it bothered the owner less, which is a different thing from mattering less. He had started calling builders by then.

Revenue looks like one number going up. Inside your company it is four or five different businesses stacked together, and they do not pay the same. You choose which of them grows, or the market chooses, and the market always chooses the easiest thing to sell. Most of this work is the choosing. A page and one sentence, said out loud in a driveway.

Revenue Mix and Transaction Size is four statements in the Business Check-in, and this article sits under all four. The check-in is free and runs about ten minutes, and those four usually explain a flat year better than the market does.