Four things every lawn care, landscape, and tree care owner should know before annual planning for next year!
Most business owners know they should spend more time working ON the business instead of constantly working IN it. The challenge is making it happen.
As a lawn care, landscape, or tree care company grows, the operation becomes more complex. More employees. More crews. More clients. More equipment. More managers. More decisions. Before long, instead of you running the business, the business starts running you.
That’s why annual business planning matters. But before you gather the management team, start building budgets, and establish goals for 2027, there’s an important step:
You have to Prepare to Plan.
Good business planning answers three questions: Where are we today? Where do we want to go? How are we going to get there?
To answer them, start with four areas.
1. KYS — Know Yourself
Before evaluating everyone else, start with the person who has the greatest influence on the company: the owner. Before You Evaluate Your People, Clients, Numbers, or Goals…Look in the Mirror.
Your decisions, habits, leadership style, and willingness to delegate helped create the business you have today. But what got you here may not get you where you want to go next.
Ask yourself: Where am I spending my time? Where should I be spending it? What decisions am I still making that someone else should own? Where have I become the bottleneck? What should I STOP, START, DELEGATE, or KEEP doing?
Most importantly:
What must change about ME for the company to achieve its 2027 goals?
A business can outgrow its systems, equipment, organizational structure, and people. It can also outgrow the way its owner leads.
Before asking what your company needs to do differently next year, determine what you need to do differently.
2. KYP — Know Your People
Your 2027 plan won’t succeed unless your people understand their roles and what is expected of them.
Before planning, ask key leaders and managers six questions: What am I supposed to be doing? What are the expected standards? How does my performance compare? What do I need to improve? What happens when I succeed? What happens when I fall short?
Their answers can expose unclear roles, accountability gaps, training needs, and differences between what the owner believes is happening and what managers experience every day.
Don’t build next year’s plan around an organizational structure that isn’t working today.
3. KYC — Know Your Clients
Owners spend plenty of time discussing what they think clients want. Why not ask them?
Client feedback can uncover satisfaction levels, improvement opportunities, relationship issues, enhancement opportunities, and potential referrals.
Ask: What would make us a 5? What should we do more of? Less of? Stop doing? Start doing? What are the three most important things you want accomplished next year?
Now your planning meeting includes the voice of the client, not just the opinions of management.
4. KYB — Know Your Business
Finally, understand where your business is in its development.
A $1 million owner-operated company shouldn’t operate like a $5 million company—and a $5 million company cannot continue operating the way it did at $1 million.
As companies grow, they move from owner dependency toward functional management, stronger systems, departmentalization, and eventually a developed management structure.
At the $4–$6 million Take-Off stage, for example, departments are developing, managers must assume greater responsibility, and the company begins moving from founder-driven to systems-and-process-driven.
Now You’re Ready to Plan
Before creating your 2027 budget, goals, and strategic priorities, do your homework:
Know Yourself…Know Your People…Know Your Clients…Know Your Business.
Then establish your Current Reality, identify the Gap between where you are and where you want to be, and create the priorities, owners, measures, and action plan necessary to close it.
Annual planning shouldn’t produce another binder or list of good intentions.
It should create a roadmap your people can execute—and a business that becomes less dependent on you to make everything happen.
Don’t just plan for 2027…
…Prepare to Plan for 2027
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.
Fred
To Learn More About Creating an Annual Business Plan Contact Fred For The TrueWinds Business Planning Kit…
(619) 665-7854
