Plug the leaky bucket

I was recently talking with a few of our supervisors at our mid-year planning session and received some great feedback that I think many of us overlook. The busy rush of summer brings more work than available people, more leads than estimators and more to do than time allows. This leads to increased stress and reduced efficiency. We also tend to lose sight of important data points like “shop-time,” “drive-time” and “non-billable time,” or in other words, time spent by employees that you do not get paid for. This was what our supervisor team was worried about.  

Not only does this happen on the jobsite but it happens in the yard, at the store and on the road (windshield time). If you are not measuring and tracking these occurrences, then chances are you are spending much more time in these areas than you think. At K&D, we use a comprehensive software to provide daily, weekly and monthly reports on these metrics. We realized that from January to July we almost doubled the amount of wasted time, which means we have a huge leak in our bucket.

Drive time is the worst waste for us right now, with over 15% of our maintenance/lawn care hours being spent in the truck. There is always going to be drive time, but the question you have to ask is, are you doing everything possible to improve routing and scheduling of properties to reduce drive time? Traffic, property time restrictions, noise restrictions and more need to be taken into account to ensure that any changes you make have a positive impact. As your sales team piles more properties on your routes, be sure to rearrange crew scheduling for the highest efficiency.  

 The next largest leak is most likely going to be the time that crews spend in the mornings at the yard. From the point when the crews clock in until they leave the yard in the trucks, they are usually using time you did not plan on spending. Depending on your operation and morning dispatch process, this could be soaking up another 3-15% of your total hours. I provide this range because we have been as high as 15% and as low as 3%. To improve this, create goals for your team around minutes spent in the yard and use alarms, music, or other announcements to encourage efficiency in the morning.  

 Another area that could be a profit leak is store visits. Our crews love to drop by the irrigation supply house in the morning and grab some coffee and a few fittings that they “forgot.” Or the crew leader will leave halfway through the day to go pick up some screws they need to finish the deck. There are obvious issues with these situations and both of them drain profit from the bucket. You should be measuring and managing the number of store visits per week by the crew. You could even create a game out of it where the lowest scoring crew every month wins a prize, like a free lunch, gift certificates, etc.  

If you add just those three areas together, you could be wasting up to 10%, 20%, maybe even 50% of your total labor hours on non-production related tasks. You will never be able to eliminate drive time, store visits or shop time, but you can manage it. Imagine if you improved every time-draining area by 10% this month. What type of gross profit gains could that bring your team? It comes down to awareness and communication; if you are talking about this with your team, the numbers should start to improve.

I recommend going a step further and creating a company policy that fits your situation and incentivizing your team on these time buckets.

If you can increase the time spent installing and maintaining landscapes every week without increasing your payroll or headcount, your top and bottom line should go up rapidly.

Raise the bar is a monthly column by Justin White, CEO of K&D Landscaping, written to help improve professionalism in the green industry. He can be reached at jwhite@giemedia.com.