BEST OF THE WEB: The Seven-Day Itch

Instead of buying and equipping another truck, have you ever wondered how you could leverage the equipment you already have to a greater extent?

That was one landscape contractor’s thinking in a recent Lawn & Landscape Message Board discussion. “Has anyone tried working a seven day workweek?” she asked. “I’m thinking about working crews Monday through Thursday and another crew Friday through Sunday. It would cost a great deal of money to buy and equip another truck so this would solve my problem. This would be for new installations on new homes so there is not a problem with being on a jobsite on Sunday. What do you think?”

Paul Sessel liked this approach. “That is a smart way to keep your equipment going without having to pay overtime – I think you’d see your bottom line go up,” says the president of Creative Displays, Overland Park, Kan.

“Not a bad idea at all,” agreed another landscape contractor. “Work seven days in the field during busy season while you get to relax on weekends while the work is being done. Nice.”

But is this strategy really that simple? Fellow landscape contractors chimed in with their comments on this scheduling technique.

EMPLOYEES, OVERTIME, CUSTOMERS, OH MY. Though many Message Board participants agreed that the seven-day-workweek idea was sound, they had some questions to work out.

“The first question is would you be able to find crew members who would want to work Friday through Sunday?” asks Chris Haddock, owner of Laconia, N.H.-based CBH Landscape Contractors.

Aaron Smith, owner of S&D Lawnservice, Essex Junction, Vt., thought so. “You could find such workers, but it would be two different crews – a set for Friday and Saturday and a Sunday crew (everyone wants at least one day off per week),” he explained.

Also, “in my area, overtime is a fact of our industry and many crewmembers count on that overtime as part of their annual pay,” Haddock shares. “By having the split week it would reduce overtime but would the crewmembers like that reduction in overtime?”

Darin Bowers runs his full-time crews Monday through Thursday, leaving Friday open in case of rain on another day. The owner of Pro-Mow Lawn Care in Charleston, Ill., hires part-time college students to work on Saturday and/or Sunday to cut down on overtime.

In fact, the seven-day strategy might keep overtime to a minimum – a good thing for business, wrote Paul Wieting, Seagull Lawn Services, Houston, Texas. “If you have the business to work your guys a lot more than 40 hours during the busy season, then perhaps when things slow down, you’ll still have enough business to keep most of your workforce employed at 40 hours. Of course, the extra profit would also be nice. The thing to be careful of is crew fatigue and burnout.”

In addition to employee concerns, contractors wondered about client-related worries relating to a weekend schedule. “Would you find customers who would want you on their properties on the weekend, especially on Sundays?” Haddock asks. “I have a lot of contracts that state there is no work to be performed on weekends.”

“Commercial properties are easier to mow on weekends, Bowers says. “There are no cars in the parking lots and fewer people around.”

THE EQUIPMENT EQUATION. Maximizing equipment was the No. 1 reason to extend the workweek, according to contractors. Some contractors even thought about extending the workday to get the most out of their units. Bowers leases most of his mowers – he’s allowed unlimited hours on these units with two-year leases. “We’ve even thought about adding some night crews to spread the overhead a little further,” he shares.

Though the thought of extending equipment life and spreading out the cost is appealing, Message Board participants had the most questions in this area.

“You would be able to maximize your equipment, but at what cost?” Haddock asks. “A piece of equipment is good for only so many hours. So you would have to replace that piece in half the time. You would have less time to maintain the equipment because of less down time.”

Though the contractors agreed on the reduced maintenance time – adding that they could schedule this in during evenings or one specific day each week – many contractors thought that if they are working more hours, they should be bringing in more money, which evens out the extra cost going into replacing equipment more often.

Smith recalls a previous landscape company experience he had where the owner didn’t like the trucks sitting nights and weekends and wanted to maximize their use. “He turned over trucks every one or two years anyway, so wear meant nothing to him,” he says. “But we had to keep those trucks so clean so you would be unable to know truly how hard they were used.”

Michigan-based landscape contractor Jeff Patterson thought this additional equipment wear, assuming a contractor still had time for maintenance, shouldn’t even be an issue. “This is because any piece of equipment should be bringing in more per hour than it costs per hour (initial cost divided by hours of life),” he explains. “So if the machine is paying for itself and wears out, just turn it over for a new one and you’re not out anything. So as long as the equipment is paying for itself, the fact that it would have to be replaced more often shouldn’t enter into the equation. Equipment is also considered a sunk cost and should not necessarily be used for these types of accounting exercises.”

But the number Patterson thinks should be considered is overhead burden. “This is really where adding more work can make a difference,” he says. “Your hourly overhead burden would get divided by the number of billable hours (example: $200,000 divided by 10,000 equals $20 of overhead per billable hour). This means, the more hours billed, the less overhead per hour billed. This works because overhead is a fixed cost – it exists whether you work one hour or 100. So if you are wondering if working extra hours will help the bottom line, look at your overhead burden rather than equipment costs. Equipment should be viewed as a consumable rather than a concrete fixed cost, almost more akin to a variable cost. For the typical business, the more billable hours, the more profit you will see as overhead burden falls.”