As accountants, we love to focus on margins and other KPI’s relating to the financial performance of the landscape companies we work with. Even though revenue doesn’t tell the whole story, the ability to increase top-line revenue is a necessity! Below are ways to increase revenue in your green industry business:
Grow your geographic reach: exploring other markets can open the door to opportunities, especially if other markets are not being serviced well by the existing contractors.
Upsell current customers: Chris Penny from Lucrative Landscaping says “the easiest sales to make are always to the people who already know and trust your business. Have your crews look for work opportunities and pass them back to the office for them to follow up with the client.”
Bundle services: Not only will you gain more revenue, but this will also help for you to retain clients for longer periods.
Build a subscription model around your services: having recurring services simplified into a subscription model will allow you to scale faster than most companies in the industry! Complicated services and systems will add friction to your growth strategy!
Improve sales close ratio: Chris Penny says, “your team’s ability to close more customers comes down to the training process, resources offered to your sales team (scripts, offers, tools, etc.), and quality of leads they have to work with. Monitor the ratio of marketing qualified leads and sales qualified leads, to ensure that your marketing team knows what good leads look like. Align sales and marketing objectives!”
Build your reputation: check out the article we wrote on this here.
Increase volume: This can be done by increasing your marketing and sales budget, optimizing your website sales page, etc. Chris Penny says, “make sure your website is doing it’s job. This starts with proper tracking of qualified leads that come through to the website relative to the number of visitors. In order to do this you need to have the proper tracking setup, 99% of landscaping businesses STILL do not have this. Your marketing needs to be able to identify who out of all the people contacting your business are the good leads. You can do this with tools like CallRail, and use menus and call scoring based on the length of the calls to determine this with a high degree of accuracy.”
Increase size of projects: As your business evolves, your experience and relationships in the community typically leads to opportunities for larger contracts or projects. With larger projects, comes increased financial risk. Be sure to job cost, especially as the projects get larger.
Increase pricing: gaining new customers is great, but with new customers comes an increase in expenses. A price increase is a faster way to increase profits, since there is no increase in administrative or direct expenses that comes along with it!
Add additional service-lines: we don’t recommend adding every service-line under the sun if you don’t have the expertise and team to support it. Focus on the service-lines you do best, then as your business grows it will open more opportunities to provide new services.
Work with subcontractors: its no secret that relationships in business are important. Are you leveraging other contractors in your area with work that could be supplementary to the contracts and projects you already perform? We work with many landscaping businesses that have created a win-win relationship with subcontractors.