Coaching for Landscapers
Landscaping businesses face challenges most coaches don’t understand seasonal revenue swings, weather delays, a transient labour market and clients who want the world for next to nothing. Keith Collins has helped trade and service business owners across Australia fix exactly these problems and build businesses that last.
SOUND FAMILIAR?
The Challenges Every Landscaper Business Owner Faces
Revenue dries up every winter
Summer is flat out, winter is dead. Cash reserves built over the busy season disappear fast. You need a business model that generates income year-round – not just when the sun shines.
You're undercharging against competitors
There’s always someone cheaper. You drop your price to win the job, finish it, and wonder why there’s nothing left. Competing on price is a race to the bottom – and it’s killing your business.
Staff don't show up, don't care or don't last
Landscaping labour is tough to find and harder to keep. Casuals that don’t show, experienced crew who leave for competitors, and training people who walk out six weeks in.
You're doing everything yourself
Quoting, scheduling, supervising, customer calls, supplier orders, invoicing – it all falls to you. There’s no system, no structure and no way to grow without burning out.
25+ years coaching trade and service business owners just like you across Australia.
HOW WE HELP
What Keith Works on With You
Year-Round Revenue Planning
Develop service packages and maintenance contracts that generate consistent income through every season.
Pricing Confidence
Stop guessing and start knowing. Build a pricing model based on real costs so every job you win is profitable.
Staff Recruitment & Retention
A hiring system and team culture that attracts reliable crew and gives them a reason to stay long-term.
Quoting & Winning Work
A structured quoting process that helps you win the right jobs at the right margin – and politely decline the ones that aren’t worth it.
Systems & Scheduling
Job scheduling, crew management and supplier processes that keep projects running smoothly without you supervising every detail.
Business Planning
A 90-day action plan and annual target that gives your business direction – and a clear path to a business you can eventually step back from.
CLIENT STORIES
Hear from Real Trade and Service Businesses
Client: Alistair Nichol
Business: Linkfire
Industry: Essential Services
I started as a one man show, not really knowing how to run a business. I was actually a control freak and thought nobody would know how to do it better than I could! In the early years I was working 60 – 80 hours a week – I seemed to spend all day doing the work, and all night doing the “other stuff”. I was never “off”, I worked at night and worked all weekends, with very little family time.
I learnt from Action Centre how to let go… how to let your staff grow.
Recently as a family we went to Bali for a week, and we are able to do that. When we got home I went motorbike riding for 2 weeks, which I really enjoy. So that’s the biggest benefit for me, giving me more me time.
When I first started out we were turning over less than $1million, now we have 40 full time staff and turn over more than $8million.
Client: Matthew Kent
Business: Mariljohn
Industry: Design & Manufacturing
We’re a design construction company in the hospitality space. We haven’t been taught in the business sense of running a business, to maximum profitabilities, on how to know our numbers and that sort of things.
Experience with Action [Victoria] I believe has been really beneficial for the overall company. As in the Director’s getting their heads around business development. We’ve now been able to identify what our strengths are, and target those strengths and now we’re looking at bringing key personnel to replace where we are weak and that allows us to be even stronger in those separate fields. And that’s probably been the biggest shift in the business is to start getting the right people in the right spots.
Before we were across everything. You just can’t do it. You don’t have enough hours in the day. It’s tough to implement everything but without someone structuring it, making you and keeping you on course, we tend to drift straight into operations and day-to-day issues you have with the business, and not really spending enough time dedicating to developing a business.
In the last three years we’ve able to take our company from about a seven-odd million dollar company to 12 million dollars. We have a goal to get to twenty million dollar turnover by 2020. That’s our goal at the moment, but we want to do it the right way.
Probably the biggest benefit we’ve seen from having coaching involved for a number of years now, is the fact, we are still flat out, we still have to do a lot of hours in the business and we don’t want to change that, but when we do have our time of either a golf day or going away with family we have back-up and resources built into the business now that you can handle the issues of day-to-day through using your team. And that wasn’t there before, if you went away, it was your job, and basically you had to get back on the phone with the builder and solve that.
Now we have great project managers and we’ve put infrastructure in place that we can at least cover any of those holidays and that allows us all, between the team, to be able to have some time away and catch up with family.
Ready to Build a Better Landscaping Business?
Book a free, no-obligation strategy call with Keith. In 30 minutes you’ll get clarity on what’s holding your business back and what to do about it.