LANDSCAPING · LANDSCAPE AND IRRIGATION · FIXED BY STEP 04

An October plant list meets a September price book

You bid the plant schedule off one season's availability sheet and buy it off the next one, and no GC will write escalation language into a list that looks like part numbers.

WHY IT'S A LANDSCAPING PROBLEM

Steel and copper escalation arguments run off a public index both sides can read. Your exposure is living inventory plus trucking, with no index, no futures market, and a price book that resets on a growing season. On a job bid 12 to 18 months before buyout, the plant and bulk lines absorb the entire move by themselves.

WHAT IT COSTS

The size of it

On a material-heavy landscape job, one season of grower repricing is enough to erase the gross margin you bid.

OVERHEAD AT $1M–$5M

15%

CFOS target 14% for landscaping.

GROSS MARGIN AT $1M–$5M

22%

CFOS target 24.5% for landscaping.

NET PROFIT AT $1M–$5M

CFOS target 10.5% for landscaping.

Growers publish new availability and pricing every season. A winter storm, a drought, or a disease quarantine moves price hard on specific genera, and it hits the species the landscape architect specified rather than the list as a whole. A plant schedule reads like a catalog, so GCs and owners refuse escalation on it the same way they refuse it on light fixtures. The same bid also includes topsoil, mulch, aggregate, and decomposed granite, where freight and fuel surcharge can exceed material cost per yard and the haul distance is set by where the pit is, not by your number.

WHAT TO DO

Three moves, in order

STEP 01

Date-stamp every plant and bulk quote in the estimate and write the quote expiration into the proposal as a condition of the price.

STEP 02

Split the estimate into plants, bulk material, irrigation material, and labor so you can see which bucket moved when the job goes sideways.

STEP 03

On any job with buyout more than a season out, ask for a plant allowance or a stored materials clause, and price the holding cost if you get one.

THE FIX

Step 04: Estimating system

The estimate maps one to one onto the job cost codes, so variance means something the day it appears.

CFOS-04 · CHAPTER 4

Make the estimate and the job cost report match

What this step changes, what it depends on, and how to tell it's installed.

BENCHMARKS

Landscaping by revenue band

All 7 bands are published. The CFOS target is beside the figure up to $10M to $25M, and the 4 bands above that are labelled modeled.

ACROSS EVERY TRADE

The estimate and the actual never match

You can compare the estimate to the job cost report, but the two use different words, so the comparison means nothing.

SAME TRADE

What else costs landscaping contractors money

LANDSCAPING · CFOS-06

The meter set you don't control ends your job

Every head is in the ground, the trenches are closed, and you can't pressurize a thing because the water purveyor hasn't set the meter yet.

LANDSCAPING · CFOS-01

A 22-week pump skid wants half down before you bill

The pump station quotes in quarters and the vendor wants 30 to 50 percent at release, months before the job produces a single dollar of billing.

LANDSCAPING · CFOS-01

Sleeving goes in month two and bills like nothing

Fifteen percent of your material goes under the pavement early and bills as three percent of a pay application, because the whole scope rides on one schedule of values line.

LANDSCAPING · CFOS-04

The tree can't be expedited at any price

A 3 to 4 inch caliper shade tree is 8 to 12 years in a field, so when the regional growers are short there's no rush fee that fixes it.

LANDSCAPING · CFOS-06

Your establishment clock starts when they walk it

You finished planting in April, they inspected in June, and you watered and mowed for eight weeks with no billing event attached to any of it.

SAME MECHANISM, OTHER TRADES

The same mechanism in other trades

CIVIL

You bid cubic yards and pay by the ton

You bid 40,000 yards of import and every scale ticket comes back in tons. The biggest cost line on the job is measured in a unit your contract never defined.

CONCRETE

Your Ready-Mix Quote Expired Eleven Months Before the Pour

Concrete has about a 90-minute working life from batch to placement, so your supply market is a haul radius with two or three plants. They quoted a market that's gone.

DEMOLITION

Your Bid Locked A Scrap Price The Market Never Honored

You priced the steel credit in February and crossed the scale in October. The market moved and the subcontract had no escalation language for it.

QUESTIONS

What landscaping owners ask

Plant prices went up between bid and install no escalation clause?

You bid the plant schedule off one season's availability sheet and buy it off the next one, and no GC will write escalation language into a list that looks like part numbers.

What does it cost?

On a material-heavy landscape job, one season of grower repricing is enough to erase the gross margin you bid.

What do I do first?

Date-stamp every plant and bulk quote in the estimate and write the quote expiration into the proposal as a condition of the price.

What are landscaping contractors supposed to be making?

Landscaping runs 22% gross margin, 15% overhead and 7% net profit before taxes at $1M–$5M. The all-trade average is 7%, so this trade is right on it. The CFOS target is 10.5%.

Which part of the system fixes it?

The step is number 04, estimating system. The estimate maps one to one onto the job cost codes, so variance means something the day it appears. It comes from chapter 4 of CONTROL: The Construction Financial Operating System.

OR HAVE IT HANDLED

Everything on this page is something you can install yourself, andCONTROL is the order to do it in. If you would rather buy the finished result, SPM The Construction CFO does this work for landscaping contractors as a service. It is a separate firm, Sulphur Prairie Management, LLC, run by the same author.

What a fractional CFO does for landscaping contractors

AUTHOR

JOSH LUEBKER

MASTER ELECTRICIAN · 150+ PROJECTS · $2.1B+ MANAGED

Wrote CONTROL, the 8 step system behind these figures. More about the author.