Understanding the Landscaping Business Model

If you have ever owned a business or even merely worked for a landscaping company, you likely have an idea as to how the business is run as a whole. Although people can call up a landscaping company and put in a request for a quote to get some work done as a one-time deal, the majority of work that landscapers do is for regular customers, whose properties they visit regularly to manage the overall upkeep of the location. Although not too many companies in the past set up written contracts, signed by both parties, because a lot of these companies were run illegally, many companies are starting to adopt a more modern system, where they will attempt to get customers and then sign contracts with them.

One-Time Jobs vs. Regular Clients

There are a ton of benefits that a company experiences through developing contracts, but there is one thing that sticks out head and shoulders above the rest.  A great deal of business owners simply want to get the business, and they will go out and do the various jobs that they have on the schedule for the day, and then they plan to pick up the money, usually every two weeks or at the end of the month. The biggest problem these landscaping companies face is that people refuse to pay or are late, which can create a huge problem for the business.

When you consider the fact that running a landscaping company involves buying and maintaining all sorts of equipment, gas to run the equipment and to get to each job site, the wages of employees, and all other business expenses, you can start to see how massive a problem it is when people do not pay.

The Shift Toward Written Contracts

This is where landscaping contracts truly shine, because they have a setup schedule that maps out the work that is going to be done, as well as the dates for payment. The switch that has been occurring lately is a great one, in that the smarter companies will not do work for an individual or another business, unless they put a credit card on file that is agreed to be charged periodically, for a given time, usually of six months or a year. This guarantees the company that they are going to get paid for the work they do and avoids all the problems related to not getting paid or simply being paid late for a job.

Although in the past, these landscapers still did work with regular customers in the same fashion, there were rarely any written contracts to go along with the work, leaving the landscapers in a very vulnerable position.

Filtering Out Problem Clients

 Perhaps one of the best things about this switch is the fact that you may lose the customers that are not paying on time, probably because they do not want to put a credit card on file, which they would still do for literally any other service, but the beauty is that you do not want these customers anyway. Nothing is worse than dealing with customers and clients who do not respect the hard work that you are doing for them, and setting up contracts is sort of a way of weeding out the bad clients.