HELPING YOU MANAGE YOUR LANDSCAPE ASSET

We consider ourselves our customer’s Landscape Asset Manager. As a part of helping your business, association, or organization be successful, accurate budget planning is key. We understand this very well as we have always provided budgetary information to customers in the fall to assist them with their budgeting process.  Whether it is standard enhancements such as barkdust, moss control or flowers, or one-time irrigation or re-landscaping projects, we will provide you ideas and recommendations to maximize the value of your landscape.   

Part of managing a landscape asset is to evaluate landscape and irrigation system and determine if there are any structural or age related issues that are or potentially impacting the landscape has on the value or maintenance cost of a property. Our budget proposals will include thoughtful recommendations on how to modify or upgrade the landscape to ensure it is providing the property with the intended asset value. Some project considerations will include:

·      Smart (weather-based) irrigation to save 20-30% water

·      Water Conservation Plans to evaluate properties for water saving projects

·      Water Conservation projects to reduce water costs and operational expense

·      Lawn conversion where lawn is difficult to irrigate and maintain

·      Safety, security, and hazard elimination projects to reduce liability

·      Replacement of old tired, inappropriate placed plants with new easier to maintain plants

We are beginning to prepare our budget proposals now and would like to meet with as many customers as possible during the next few months to ensure we understand your specific situation. Please contact us and let us know when you are available as we want to work around your schedule and provide you with the best budget information possible. We are a part of your team and will help you in any way we can.

MANAGING RISING COSTS

It has been a challenging year for most as costs are rising and inflation is becoming real. Last summer economists created a new term “transitory inflation” promising that it was a short term issue and all would settle down as supply chain issues were resolved. Well, that was wrong as inflation continued to rise and a year later, we peaked at 9% inflation year over year in April.

Over the past 6-7 years most of our costs have remained relatively stable except for labor. Labor is our greatest cost, driving our overall costs to rise faster than base inflation rate as we work to attract and retain our great team. This year with many of our next highest costs, fuel, fertilizer, and equipment have rising significantly faster than the base inflation rate. Continued record low unemployment has been keeping labor costs rising still. 

Fuel costs up but we haven’t considered fuel surcharges

With fuel up over 50% compared to last year, we’ve heard that several of our competitors have tried to pass on a fuel surcharge. Although this is a significant cost for us, we honor our contract rates and have not considered a surcharge. We have also heard of some of the surcharge rates being around 5% which we believe is significantly greater than the cost increase, turning the surcharge into a profit center. It is frustrating when businesses take advantage of rising prices to increase profits. 

Fertilizer costs have over doubled

Mostly due to the fact that Russia produces much of the raw materials used in fertilizer, the war in Ukraine has disrupted the supply chain driving up costs to over double since last summer. As a key part of our service to keep lawns and plants healthy, fertilizer costs are unavoidable. We will fertilize despite. 

Equipment costs have risen by over 20%

Two examples are our production truck cost hast risen from $62,000 to $76,000 since 2019, 22% and our 21” hand mower cost has risen from $1,128 to $1,499, 33% We are proud to have one of the most updated truck and equipment fleets to ensure our team has the proper tools to perform the great service. This keeps us efficient and assists in our goal to reduce our carbon footprint as newer equipment have lower emissions. It is difficult for us to consider to allow our equipment to age reducing our efficiency and slowing our goal of lower emissions. 

Labor costs continue to rise

Labor costs have risen for most service businesses as a combination rising minimum wage rates and low unemployment have driven our wages 75% in the last 10 years and 30% over the past 5 years. In addition, mandatory increases in health care, sick leave and other personnel costs have also driven up labor costs. We have to keep up with these costs to attract and retain the workforce to provide the service our clients expect.   

Working to improve efficiencies to offset cost increases

We have always worked hard to offset increased costs and are proud that during our long history we have offset most cost increases. For example, as stated above, with labor costs risen 75% in the past 10 years, our costs to most clients have risen only one third of that through our work to improve efficiencies. With a strong commitment to training when we formed 21 years ago, we are proud to have the best trained and efficient team. We have also worked through LEAN process planning to have mapped and developed critical paths to improve efficiencies on all properties. We also have utilized plant growth regulators to reduce pruning frequencies. We are always working hard to offset labor cost increases.

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