Landscape and Irrigation is read by decision makers throughout the landscape and irrigation markets — including contractors, landscape architects, professional grounds managers, and irrigation and water mgmt companies and reaches the entire spetrum.
Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/108761
Business Management you're getting out ahead of those types of issues." Having founded Mountain View Landscape and Lawncare in Chicopee, Mass., back in 1976, Steve Corrigan is, by any measure, an industry veteran. He's also a relative veteran to the financial planning process, having just completed his fourth plan with LandOpt. "It's a nice, step-bystep process for doing your homework and putting a financial plan together," said Corrigan. "For example, we can put in employee salaries and allocate the time they're dedicating to different departments. We can account for the backlog of work coming forward into the next year and consider what we may lose in attrition from maintenance accounts. Having worked with financial plans for years, I can say this method is a lot more systematic." Shawn Knight and Jeremy Durgan coown Green Earth Landscape Services. Founded in 2006 in Panama City Beach, Fla., the company acquired a second location in Santa Rosa, Fla., in April 2012, just a few months after joining the LandOpt network. "Since it was our first year being involved with financial planning, we spent the summer updating our data and build- 22 Landscape and Irrigation February 2013 ing a plan," said Knight. "You evaluate your labor and equipment and then break down your entire business. And then in addition to gathering and evaluating data, we participated in periodic webinars with licensees and success coaches, so we felt really prepared going into the financial planning meeting." David Arnold, president of Corion Landscape Management in Ferndale, Wash., was another rookie at the November planning meeting, having joined the network in May 2012. "We were really looking for structure," said Arnold, who founded the company in 2001. "I thought the budget I put together for 2012 was Having a well thought out financial plan — and the best intentions to execute it — doesn't mean it will come perfectly to fruition. pretty detailed, but it was nothing compared to what LandOpt drove us toward. So starting off there was a lot of data entry — sales costs, management costs, hourly rates. Preparing for the planning meeting could potentially have been more difficult, but since we had literally just gone through the initial process of establishing a basic financial plan as a new contractor, a lot of it was pretty fresh." Getting a handle on planning It's clear that compiling data is a huge part of the battle in tackling the LandOpt financial planning process. But it isn't the only part. "You can get some pretty good answers once you're familiar with all the line items and know where to pull information from," said Corrigan. "But you also need to forecast the mix of work you'll need to sell in order to achieve a given growth number and have real expectations for where the revenue will come from." "There are a number of moving parts," added Henry. "The addition of one key team member changes a lot of metrics, not only from a revenue-producing standpoint, but also all the ancillary costs on top of salary, like health insurance, office supplies, vehicles. Trying to look into the future and account for all those things can be difficult." Forecasting is an even more difficult task for the newer contractors, who often don't have enough historical data to be accurate with their financial plan, forcing them to make some sophisticated projections. "I think the biggest challenge was being able to pull enough detailed information from our current records just to have some benchmarks for comparison," said Arnold. "The process covers everything — sales plan, cash flow assumptions, financial planning – so we'll be making adjustments through 2013 as we watch the actuals stack up and actively work toward redeeming the plan." "In the past we would build a budget and project sales, but it wasn't done with proactive reasoning," said Knight. "We would look at profit-and-loss from prior years, take an average and make a projection. We had never used sales and labor plan forecast for planning. For our company it was a very different way to approach planning for the next season." www.landscapeirrigation.com