Do you know where your money is coming from? Part 2

Blog - part 2

Welcome back to the conversation with Ryan from Mountview Landscaping. We received such great feedback last week about this interview style blog post so if there is an area of your business that you’ve worked on we would love to hear from you. We can all learn from each other. 

Last week we covered the different things that Mountview tracks and how they track them. You can read that blog post here. 

Here’s part two from our interview with Ryan of Mountview Landscaping:

Why did you choose to measure these particular things?

So I can sleep!  Honestly it relieved so much stress. I like to be able to plan, know whats going to happen, have an idea what we need to do or change. If we wait till the end of the year it's too late. 

Measuring is a predictive tool that allows you to predict if you will make money but tracking also helps us when we are quoting on jobs. Let’s say a potential client told us they needed us to drop this quote by 10% - knowing the numbers allows us to be confident in our response when we let them know we can drop by the quote by 3% but anything beyond that we would need to look at changing the scope of work and reducing man hours because we already know historically what things actually cost. We don't quote against the competition we quote against our operation and our budget. 

When you are a smaller company your losses aren't as big so it doesn’t impact your business as much but as you grow your losses are bigger and one big mistake can shut the doors so being proactive with finances is key.

How has measuring or tracking these matrices help the success of the business? 

The stress that it takes off is huge. Because we are able to predict so much more it has allowed us to make large purchases with confidence because of the budget. We know what it will cost over the years, what the life of the purchase is, how much money it will make us, etc. 

When you already know all of those numbers and something happens, like a virus, we can see in advance what we will lose in revenue, but we can also see what we will save in maintenance, fuel savings, and labour. So right now we’ll make 3% instead of 10% and I’m okay with that because it's been a challenging year. 

How are you using the financials and or matrix as part of your team meetings?

With the whole company a lot of what we focus on is sales numbers because they have a hand in that. We are currently trying to figure out how to present this to the company in a way that's not too overwhelming - we’d like to share more.

We just finished our fiscal year and hit our goal so we are now working on how to reward our staff for their hard work for the year. 

How often do you meet as a team?

We meet weekly for 15-20 minutes on Wednesday mornings. What's going well, what hasn't gone well - have clients given us compliments or shared concerns? We try to give them updates on what we’ve been doing in the office specifically so they know we are busy and working hard as well - I like to let them know what we are doing 6-9 months from now. 

We also meet monthly meetings to review goals - where we’re at, what we need to tweak, what our organizational chart is now, the growth we want to achieve and what that means in regards to opportunities we will have for our staff going forward, how staff can grow within the companies. Give them a vision for the future. 

What advice would you give yourself 10 years ago in regards to financial measuring/matrix? 

Start this 10 years earlier! We started this company in 1997 and for a number of days we just winged it. We worked hard, and hoped we would make a little money. For a number of years we just broke even because we would have a couple of good years and then a bad one that would wipe out the profits from the previous years.

The growth of the company forced us to behave more like an actual company. More families and more lives depend on us so I was more cognizant of the fact that we had a responsibility to provide for their families as well. 

You cannot start budgeting and planning soon enough. I wish we hadn't been forced into it. I wish we had stepped into it immediately. 

So much incredible information the past couple of weeks. If you have any questions about what he is tracking or how to implement some of this for yourself please give us a call or email us at [email protected] - we’d love to hear from you and we’re here to help.