Every year thousands of folks dream about starting a lawn care business. The idea of being your own boss, working outside during the best times of the year while getting a tan make this industry very attractive to the typical office dweller or anybody who wants to be a lawn care business owner. The unfortunate thing is that as a lawn company owner, you are at the mercy of the weather when you are managing your outdoor service business.
Weather Affects Your Entire Business
When you perform lawn services for clients and have a full schedule of jobs for an entire workweek, the weather is going to affect your lawn care and landscaping company. If a rainy or unseasonably cold day arrives, you must be prepared to work on the weekend or at a minimum change your dinner plans because you’ll need to work from sun up to sun down to catch up since the rainy weather stopped your service production. Weather can put a strain on your business plan, as well as your personal life as well. If a family member or friend has plans, they may need to be adjusted if a rainy day occurs and you must work late the next day.
Beating The Weather
Many lawn care company owners will book out their work for five, eight hour days. This can cause issues with their employees when it rains because then they have to work on the weekend, when most don’t want to work as they want to enjoy time with their friends. This can bring down morale across the organization and can make for a negative environment. You want to avoid this at all costs.
The solution to setting up your lawn mowing workweeks is to have Monday through Thursday be your days to perform regular services by working ten hour days, to allow Fridays for extra jobs such as landscape maintenance or use them as a catch up day in the event of inclement weather. This is a technique taught in the best online lawn care start up training guide, where you can learn insider strategies for starting, operating, and managing a profitable lawn care business. The guide will also teach you how to plan for inclement weather when it affects your lawn business.
Overtime For Your Lawn Care and Landscaping Crews
The best thing about having four work days with ten hour days is that Friday opens the door for your team of workers to get overtime. If you’re new to business ownership, overtime is where employees get paid time and a half or double their typical hourly rate when working because they’ve worked over forty hours in a week’s period. Employees that are motivated to work will thoroughly enjoy this because they’re getting paid more. When you have your work weeks set up like this, it’s important to be aware of your costs of doing business so that you bid higher for the extra jobs since your employees are paid overtime, it will cost more per hour they are working on the job site. The positive takeaway for this is that your firm is making more money with the extra jobs and your employees are making more money for doing extra work that isn’t apart of the everyday, normal grind that they’re used to.