This makes it a good time to revisit our Pricing Pyramid. It can help you adapt to smaller purchases while protecting the profitability your company needs.

Smaller Jobs Should Carry Higher Margins

The Pricing Pyramid follows a straightforward principle: As jobs get smaller, your target profit margin should increase.

Larger projects form the base, with progressively smaller, higher-margin projects above them, as the visual illustrates.

These are NP targets, not markup percentages.

Set your targets based on your budget, overhead, service mix and market.

Even a small project requires client communication, estimating, scheduling, purchasing and mobilization. These activities can consume a disproportionate amount of time relative to the revenue produced.

Give Clients a Smaller Purchase

When a client hesitates over a proposal, find out whether the concern is total investment, timing or perceived value before discussing price and scope.

A homeowner or property manager who will not approve a $30,000 enhancement may be comfortable investing $10,000 now, with additional phases planned for later.

Help the client identify which improvements matter most and create a manageable first step. Each phase should stand on its own, with its own scope, mobilization costs and appropriate profit target.

Do not automatically divide the original price into three equal pieces. Three separate projects will likely require more coordination and more trips than one continuous installation.

Sell Smaller Work Faster!

It’s critical to match the higher margin with a faster sales process that captures the client’s enthusiasm.

If every small enhancement requires a custom design, multiple site visits and a lengthy proposal, your selling process will slow down, and it will also consume the profit before production begins.

Create a short menu of improvements your team regularly sells, such as planting upgrades, drainage corrections, lighting additions, irrigation improvements or bed renovations.

For each, establish a clear scope, standard options, pricing guidelines and a minimum charge. Identify what information or photos your estimator needs and when a site visit is necessary.

Give account managers and salespeople enough guidance to move straightforward opportunities forward quickly—ideally quoting on the spot, while the client’s enthusiasm is high.

The key is to strike while the iron (and the “high” of buying) is still hot.

Look Closely at Existing Properties

If leads are slow, your existing clients provide a natural starting point.

Walk their properties and identify improvements that solve problems or make their outdoor spaces more enjoyable, useful or safe.

A client may postpone a complete renovation while approving the drainage correction that protects an area, or approve lighting that makes the entrance safer.

Price these enhancements according to your Pricing Pyramid. An existing maintenance relationship should not automatically mean that additional work receives your maintenance labor rate or margin.

Your Challenge: Getting Everyone on Board

Bring your sales, estimating and operations leaders together to review your last ten small jobs. Did you apply higher profit targets? How much effort went into selling them? Where did production lose time?

Use those answers to update your pricing and simplify your sales process.

The Pricing Pyramid gives your team a practical way to meet clients where they are while continuing to build a profitable business.

You got this! Jeffrey Scott

P.S. Do you need confirmation on pricing and markup standards across the industry?

We will cover them in our upcoming Financial Masterclass—now using our AI Financial tool.

Our early bird ends in 2+ weeks—November 5. So register now.

The post The Pricing Pyramid Revisited: protecting profit in a tighter economy appeared first on Jeffrey Scott.

To learn about our Leaders Edge Peer Group go here.

Dan Barefoot is a landscape architect with V3 in Charlotte, North Carolina, and an Olympic skeleton athlete. What began as a search for a new challenge became a decade-long journey to competing on the world’s biggest stage.

In this episode, Dan joins Jeffrey Scott to discuss balancing his professional career with Olympic training, why comfort can hold you back, and how big goals change the way you approach obstacles. He shares his experience facing an injury just days before the Olympics, the visualization techniques he uses to prepare for competition, and the mentors who helped him along the way.

For landscape business owners and anyone pursuing an ambitious goal, Dan offers lessons on handling pressure, moving beyond overthinking, and making room for more than one passion.

Key Takeaways

His text captured a challenge many owners face: How to combine their concern for people with clear expectations, accountability and the financial strength to support their future.

Your People Need a Future You Can Fund

When I wrote Destination Company, I wanted to help owners create businesses where great people would thrive. Delivering on that promise requires an ongoing investment in:

• Competitive pay and meaningful benefits.
• Reliable, modern equipment that makes work safer and easier.
• Training that supports employees’ professional goals.
• Management support that reduces chaos and employee burnout.
• Career opportunities that give talented people reasons to stay.

Strong profits and cash flow give you the ability to invest in your people while funding the company’s growth.

Your Challenge: Measure and Manage Both Sides

Start by asking your larger team (anonymously by department):

• How likely are you to recommend our company as a place to work, on a scale of zero to ten?
• What do you value about working here?
• What would you warn a friend about?

Then examine whether your financial plan supports the workplace you promise. Becoming a best place to work requires working on “both/and” and mastering both.

The post The Hidden Link Between Great Workplaces and Strong Profits appeared first on Jeffrey Scott.

But hiring them increases your overhead often before the additional revenue arrives.

How do you know when to invest in more people—and how much business an expanded team should support?

These questions can leave owners stuck, wavering between spending too much on overhead and investing too little in talent.

Here is a solution.

Give Your Org Chart a Financial Expectation

Building your org chart should not be a black art.

Adding more overhead staff means you need more business to pay for them. But you can’t just look at revenue.

For example, two landscape companies with identical revenue can have very different contribution margins (i.e. the profit that remains after paying for materials, subcontractors and direct labor.)

Those margins affect your capacity to invest in management. Ironically, stronger management may be just what’s needed to improve your margins. It’s a classic chicken and egg scenario.

Use This Ratio as Your Guide

Greg Crabtree, author of Simple Numbers, popularized the “management Labor Efficiency Ratio”, or mLER. We like to call it “Leadership Leverage”

Leadership Leverage = Contribution margin / Management labor.

Put simply, Leadership Leverage shows how many dollars of contribution margin your business generates for each dollar invested in management (overhead) labor.

For the green industry, we like to see a leadership Leverage of 3.5 to 4.5x or greater.

Here is an example to explain it.

Suppose your entire leadership structure (everyone not in the field doing the work) costs 500k annually.

A Leadership Leverage target of 4x means your contribution margin needs to be four times your management labor cost, i.e. 2M.

(To calculate the revenue needed, divide that required contribution margin by your contribution margin percentage. For example, at a 50% contribution margin, divide by 0.50.)

I know, its a bit of math, but not too complicated…

The point is, you can’t just add revenue if your margins are weak. You have to focus on the margins as well.

Hire With a Plan

Sometimes you need to hire before the revenue arrives. Waiting too long can stretch your team thin and cause you to miss excellent hires.

Growth comes in stair steps. Your Leadership Leverage ratio may initially decline as you add management capacity or increase compensation. The important question is whether you have a credible plan and timetable for bringing the ratio back to your target.

Likewise a weak ratio does not automatically mean you should cut a manager. Your pricing may be inadequate. Your crews may be inefficient. Or your management capacity may be underused or underpowered.

Use the Leadership Leverage ratio to ask better questions before making a staffing decision or approving another salary.

Your Challenge: Evaluate Today’s Team and Tomorrow’s Hires

Calculate Leadership Leverage for your current org chart.

Then add the overhead hires you are considering and calculate it again. How much additional revenue, at your contribution margin, would support that expanded team?

The first time you look at this, it can be confusing.

At our Financial Masterclass, we will simplify it for you, and show you how the best companies perform on this benchmark.

This year, you will also be able to use our new Financial AI tool to help you quickly compare your numbers and develop strategies to make improvements.

Ultimately you have to add people to grow – this ratio will help you confirm you are doing it wisely.

Regards, Jeffrey Scott

P.S. Register before November 5th (our early bird date) to save 200 per ticket for the Financial Master Class. Additional attendees save even more.

The post How Much Revenue Should Your Org Chart Produce? appeared first on Jeffrey Scott.

To learn about our Leaders Edge Peer Group go here.

Mitch Katz, Director of Operations and Executive Coach at Jeffrey Scott Consulting, joins Jeffrey Scott on The Ultimate Landscape CEO to discuss how landscape business owners can use AI and financial benchmarking to make better decisions. They explore why reviewing financial statements regularly matters, how comparisons with peers can reveal missed pricing and profit opportunities, and how their new AI financial tool helps owners analyze results and test decisions before committing. Mitch and Jeffrey also preview the updated Financial Master Class and explain why giving managers financial context helps them understand how daily operating decisions affect the company’s performance.

Key Takeaways

We got feedback that when owners wanted to bring their people, it could be better organized for that. And owners wanted more advanced learning.

We have provided that – and more. We have also developed a Financial AI tool to help you with analysis of the anonymous data.

Note: All Data Will Be Confidential and Anonymous.

Five Big Improvements for this year’s Financial Masterclass.

• Advanced Learning: We reorganized the two days, and will teach foundations on day 1 (P/L, expense management, pricing and margins) with many new case studies to bring the learning to life! On day 2 we will cover several advanced topics (for owners / execs) to help fund and grow your business.
• Smoother Submission: The submission process for your financials has been simplified with our AI account mapping tool.
• Interactive AI Powered Tool & Report: You will get access to our new AI powered tool that will help analyze the anonymous data compared to yours and identify all the opportunities to improve your financial position.
• Earlier Results: Results will be available a month earlier than last year – before year end!
• Half off: Any additional tickets are now half off, if you want to invite your team.

Find out more here.

This 2-day masterclass will give you the landscaping industry’s most powerful financial and operational benchmarks — plus a new cutting-edge tool to help you make smarter decisions, improve performance, and plan confidently for 2027.

Each day is 3.5 hours of high-impact learning, with built-in breaks to keep you fresh and optional breakout rooms to connect with peers.

You send us your QB financial report (Oct ’25–Sept ’26) or you can plug in your data manually. You give us some of your pricing data as well, and we do the rest.

Go HERE for the benchmarking details and to register.

Early Bird Deadline: Save $200 per person when you register by Nov 5th.

We will help you make this your best year!

Jeffrey Scott

The post Announcing our 7th Annual Financial Masterclass – Earlybird Ends Nov 5th appeared first on Jeffrey Scott.

But how much do you really know about another person’s finances or priorities?

Former private banker Elizabeth George spent 20 years working with wealthy clients.

In a recent blog post, she describes the surprising gap between people’s apparent wealth and their actual financial lives.

• Some modest households had substantial fortunes.
• Some big spenders had little financial cushion.
• And even very wealthy clients worry about money – just like you and me.

Elizabeth’s observations made me think about how we define success in the landscape industry—and how those assumptions affect our approach to both management and sales.

Is Your Wealth Growing With Your Business?

Landscape entrepreneurs measure progress in terms of # of crews, equipment, clients and revenue. Those achievements do take effort, but they don’t always translate into financial success.

Growth is good, but expansion comes with increased commitments. Equipment needs maintenance, crews need leadership and overhead needs covering––even when sales are slow.

Bigger––without a clear strategy––is not the answer to producing more profit and free cash flow. To judge whether growth is paying off, first define what you want it to deliver for you personally.

Start with the end in mind

Before setting next year’s growth targets, consider what you want out of the business:

Do you want greater financial security (for you or your team), more time with your family, or the ability to support causes you care about?

Discuss those goals with your family, then work with your leadership team to translate them into business targets. (When in doubt, talk to your peers)

Identify what profit and free cash flow would support yours goals? And what revenue and margins are needed to produce them?

These discussions will help you and your team decide how much revenue to pursue and which kind of work to go after.

Find Out What Success Means to Your Client, Too

Don’t assume you know how much a client will spend. You can’t always tell by looking. Your job is to understand your prospects underlying goals and priorities before recommending how they spend their money.

A residential prospect may ask for a new outdoor living space, but the project’s real importance might be bringing family together. A commercial property manager may want reliable maintenance to reduce tenant complaints.

You discover those motivations by asking better questions, not just by assessing the style, quality or value of the property.

Where Are They Comfortable Investing?

Once you understand your clients needs and goals, you can discuss how much they are comfortable investing.

Remember, you are the expert. It’s your job to explain the options and tradeoffs, but let them decide how much to spend – and you can tell them if it will work.

If the client questions the price, stay curious. Find out what concerns them before getting defensive—or, God forbid, simply dropping your prices.

Pro Tip: Financial resources don’t eliminate a person’s desire to spend wisely.

Your Challenge: Clarify the underlying goals.

Before setting next year’s targets, define what that growth should accomplish for you personally and professionally. If you want financial freedom, think twice about how you set your plan for 2027.

And before presenting your next proposal, dig deep to understand what the investment should accomplish for your client.

The post Is Your Financial Freedom Growing With Your Landscape Business? appeared first on Jeffrey Scott.

To learn about our one-on-one coaching with an Executive Coach, go here.

Ivan Katz, founder and owner of Great Lakes Landscape Design in Oak Park, Michigan, joins Jeffrey Scott to reflect on hosting the Summer Growth Summit and what the experience taught him about his team. Preparing to welcome more than 200 industry peers gave the company a shared goal during a busy season and a period of leadership changes. Ivan shares how that commitment strengthened communication, brought employees together, and gave team members the confidence to step forward and showcase their work.

The conversation also explores the decisions behind the company’s progress, including restructuring the leadership team, helping longtime employees adjust to new roles, and keeping people informed throughout the transition. Ivan explains why owners must follow through on the commitments they make and support the people responsible for delivering them. With the summit behind them, his team is focused on keeping sales ahead of increasingly efficient production, protecting profitability, and earning profit-sharing checks together.

Key Takeaways