MAINTENANCE: The Magic Number

There’s no doubt mowing and maintenance is an attractive service offering. Often it’s the turn-key service for many contractors entering the landscape market.
 
Nearly 70 percent of contractors offer mowing and maintenance services, according to recent Lawn & Landscape research. On average, 40 percent of landscape contractors annual revenue stems from mowing and maintenance services, the data says. In addition, gross revenue for lawn mowing and maintenance services increased 15 percent from 2006 to 2007.
 
When assembling mowing crews, though, flexibility is the name of the game. “Having different size crews is important because you want to be able to handle any type of account that you may get hired for,” says Sage Holbrook, owner of Sage Landscape Maintenance in Olympia, Wash. “If you are not flexible, then the work will end up suffering in the long run.”
  
As contractors strive to expedite what it takes to do a quality job, the equation for efficiency and profitability comes down to the combination of workers manning a mowing crew. Too few people and the crew spends too much time on a job site. Too many people and there is not enough work to keep everyone busy. The conundrum is finding a happy medium that works for an individual landscape outfit.

TWO TO TANGO. By far, the two-man crew is the most popular setup among maintenance contractors.
 
Shayne Newman is an efficiency guy, and he prefers two-man mowing crews for this reason. “We ruled out three-man crews early on because they eventually lead to too many job site inefficiencies,” says the president of YardApes Landscaping & Lawn Care in New Milford, Conn. “The one-man crew may be fine for the small job sites, but we’ve found that many guys prefer not to work alone.”
 
Depending on the time of year, a two-man mowing crew can obtain anywhere between 70 to 85 percent efficiency, Newman says, meaning he can bill out 70 to 85 percent of the hours that crew logs that day. Downtime and drive time are the most common factors contributing to lost time, he says.
 
Newman estimates a two-man crew equipped with a riding mower, walk-behind mower and a pair of string trimmers and backpack blowers can get on and off the average job site (about 40,000 square feet) in 45 minutes.
 
Regardless of whether it’s a commercial or residential mowing job, Jim Thorpe, president of The “J” Boys, in Pennsauken, N.J. is most efficient running a two-man mowing crew outfitted with a pair of zero-turn mowers, two walk-behinds, a trio of string trimmers, a pair of blowers and a stick edger.
 
“Our company uses a two-person team with most mowing jobs budgeted under six-man hours,” Thorpe says. “If the job is going to take more than a half-day, then we’ll send two, two-man crews to complete the job.”
 
Two-man mowing crews have worked well for Mike Russo over the last nine years, with each crew logging between 16 and 20 man hours per day. “We have found that accountability dramatically increases with just two workers on a crew,” says the owner of Russo Lawn & Landscape in Winsor Locks, Conn.
 
However, factors such as bad weather or an early leaf season can create a backlog that overwhelms a two-man crew, says Mike Neese, president of Grayson South in Fort Mill, S.C. “In some instances we’ll run a crew of three men or a solo route, if needed,” Neese says. “In addition, we have several ‘floaters’ from our design/build crew who can help out the maintenance crews during bad weather or during specific seasonal situations.”
 
With regard to crew structure, in a two-man setup most contractors say the individual who operates the riding mower is the crew leader and the individual responsible for the bulk of the maintenance duties is the subordinate.
 
Newman, though, is experimenting with reversing this crew hierarchy.
 
“The traditional thinking is that the crew leader is the guy working the riding mower, that you earn the right to use the riding mower,” he says. “But shouldn’t it be the other way around? The new guys should get a mentor who begins training them on the proper way to mow a property and run a crew. Most guys, if they mow under a foreman for a season, are ready to move up and be a foreman of their own crew come next season.”

THREE’S COMPANY. The standard mowing setup at Perfect Lawns and LandWorks of Austin in Austin, Texas is a three-man crew, says Randy Martin, the company’s assistant sales and marketing manager. This trio is relegated to mowing, edging, blowing and bed weeding. The three-member system is used to tend to both commercial and residential accounts, he says.
 
As the company grew and gained larger residential and commercial accounts, the three-man crew made the most sense, Martin says, because the workload was too taxing for a two-man crew. “We developed this system through trial and error,” he says. “Flexibility is what we gain by using this system. Sometimes we run two-member crews in residential subdivisions that contain smaller homes on small lots, but our larger properties are quite a bit more challenging for members of a two-man crew. Three members can handle a large number of properties and can work hard all day. And on extremely large properties we will send out multiple crews.”
 
David Gantt, owner of Springdale Outdoor Service in Blythewood, S.C. prefers a four-man set up to his mowing crew – two mowing while two do detail and trim work. “Over the years we found that three guys on a mowing crew just wasn’t enough and five guys was just too many,” he says. “For us, four people per crew is the best and easiest solution because we’re able to pair up workers – two with mowing and two with the other work.”
 
While he prefers two-man crews, Thorpe will assemble a three-man crew when a property requires a large number of man hours. “These larger teams are used for some of our tighter routes where the ride time is not an issue or when the jobs are budgeted for more than 16 man hours,” he says. “We benefit from larger crews when we get the bigger mowing jobs, but the weakness for us has been getting strong leaders to oversee these crews.”
 
Holbrook believes an ideal mowing setup is to have two, four-man crews and a single, two-man crew with a floating supervisor that oversees each crew and makes sure everything runs smoothly and efficiently.
 
Crew size, though, is many times an individual decision that each owner needs to make based on the requirements of their particular market
 
“Depending on the size of the account, sometimes it does not financially pan out for more than two employees on a mowing crew,” Holbrook says. “Some owners think that having more employees on a mowing crew cuts downtime. However, in the long run it doesn’t. “ LL