At Grunder Landscaping Co., I have been known to overcomplicate things. In my quest to be perfect, I have sometimes asked for too many things to be tracked or for too many processes to be created to satisfy my quest for knowledge and data.
If you have been following us for any amount of time, you will know that we have always worked really hard to keep our indirect time as low as we possibly could. In short, indirect time is the time that we are paying our team but we aren't billing a client. Depending on how you price things and recover your overhead, that could mean items like training, loading and unloading, drive time, callbacks and warranty work, and the ever-growing category of "shop time".
This can be a lot to keep track of, but I don't want you to lose sight of the main goal here: to have crews onsite billing work for as many hours in a week as we can.
To help drive this point home, at Grunder Landscaping, we have started to use and track a simple phrase everyone on our team can understand: Onsite Time.
Onsite time to us is exactly what I mentioned: how many hours per week is our team on a client's site for billable work compared to the number of hours the team is clocked in.
This week, track your onsite time compared to your total time and see what percentage that equals. Depending on the business mix, you might be around 85%. If you are well below that, start digging into the WHY. Is it routing? Is it morning inefficiencies? Is it unnecessary stops at gas stations or corner stores?
If you want to see exactly how Grunder Landscaping keeps our onsite time as high as possible, come see us for a Fall Field Trip and you'll get an inside, confidential look at how we sell, schedule, operate, and plan for success for our teams.
Have a great week and I'll talk to you next week!
Marty Grunder
President & CEO
The Grow Group & Grunder Landscaping Co.