Seasonality – A Hidden Opportunity
May is high-season in the Landscaping and Lawn Care industries. Crews are rolling out every morning, and new customer accounts are still rolling in on a regular basis…. Good Times!
It might seem like an odd time to prepare for the seasonal slowdowns coming with late-summer, but that’s exactly what you should be doing; looking ahead to the late season. Why? Because the seasonality you probably see as a threat is an opportunity in disguise.
The Traditional Model
Most Green Industry businesses struggle to meet the demand of the high season, 14 weeks or so between March and July (It varies a bit by location) when they often have more work than they can get done.
We staff up and do whatever we can to meet this demand, knowing that eventually the market will start to slow. And many of us just accept that sooner or later we’ll start cutting hours or cutting staff as the season winds down into the fall. We accept it as fact and think there’s not much we can do to change it.
The Opportunity
But you’ll have the capacity to do more… to book more business and to bill more work. You’ve already done the hardest part. You assembled the workforce and equipment to get it done; wouldn’t it be great if you could just continue to use them?
What if you could just keep running at this speed for a bit longer? What if, come August, you still had enough work to keep those crews running at full capacity?
Lots of companies spend this time of year pulling in all their resources to execute work they’ve already won. What if, instead, you push all your resources to Sell More? Could stretch your ‘busy’ season out for even a couple of extra weeks? How would that affect your bottom line when you wrap up the year?
We’re betting it would be worth it.
What to do?
So, even though it might seem crazy during this already-busy time, the best thing you can do, today, to maximize your business, might just be to focus all your efforts on selling like crazy. Book as much work as you can, so you can keep your crews working at full capacity further out into the fall.
Consider these and other questions.
- Should you shift all your available resources to selling more work to build your backlog?
- Should you offer your flexible clients better terms to accept work later in the season (so you can work on time-critical jobs now)?
- Should you focus on up-selling fall work to existing clients now, so you’ve got that work booked ahead of time?
- Should you add fall-specific services like leaf removal or holiday lighting to stretch your season?
… It’s definitely worth thinking about!
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