Plans for crew size

May 30, 2017

If culture is somewhat abstract, your plans for crew size are very concrete and it pays to think about them early. This industry is in the business of selling time. The number one line item on our profit and loss statements is labor, and labor is either efficient or inefficient based on a number of factors including crew training, job site, equipment, but most of all crew size. Crew size directly affects the profitability of your business because it determines the productivity and efficiency.

There are two primary ways to evaluate your crew size. First, determine your hourly man hour rate that by service type, by crew, and by property. Next, determine how much non-billable, non-productive time you’re incurring. The more people you put onto an inefficient crew, generating a high level of non-billable time, the more money you cost yourself. For example, imagine that you have a two-person crew that works eight hours a day, and they incur three hours of non-billable time a day. If you give them a third person without increasing efficiency and they are still incurring three non-billable hours a day, you’ll have added another three non-billable hours to your payroll, which costs you in profit.

For my business, three person crews are best because of management, the way we pay, and other factors, but if I were starting over, I would run two person mowing crews for smaller properties and four person crews on commercial properties or large acreages that took up to 32 labor hours. If you are dealing with very large properties that contract more than 32 hours at a time, look into specialty crews for the primary assignments. You will lose some efficiency from having different crews come to a job site — especially if there is a lot of driving involved — but we believe from testing and trying things that huge efficiencies can be gained if there is enough time needed on the property.

To summarize, if the crew size is the heart of running a profitable operation, then the company culture is the soul. There are so many variables that you’ll need to keep in mind as you build your company, and they’re worth thinking about from the start, because you’ll want to have a plan for growth that maximizes productivity and minimizes stress as much as possible.