You can find the original article by Lauren Spiers HERE.  

Properly scheduling and routing crews can often be a complicated, mind-bending exercise.

Ensuring that every crewmember receives his or her required hours per week, creating efficient routes for crews to follow, contending with weather issues or crewmembers who need to take a sick day – it all spells R-O-L-A-I-D-S for operations managers and company presidents trying to make everything fit together.

Creating efficient and effective routes and schedules really is like putting a puzzle together, and finding those helpful edge and corner pieces first can make the process easier. Here are a few tips contractors offered to help ensure the rest of the pieces all fit nicely.

• Work one step at a time. “The more [crews] you have, the more difficult it is to route and schedule, but if you just break everything up into little pieces and try not to schedule everybody at once, it’s much easier,” assured John Luznicky, general manage
...

“Crucial Conversations draws our attention to those defining moments that literally shape our lives, our relationships, and our world. . . . This book deserves to take its place as one of the key thought leadership contributions of our time.” (From the forward by Steven R. Covey)

Crucial conversations are those we have with important people in our lives, both personal and professional, where the outcome of the conversation will have a significant impact on our lives. This book teaches you how to manage and use these conversations to their full potential in order to build a better life.

No one likes difficult conversations. But they are necessary and they're important for the health of our business, our relationships and our mental wellbeing. Using the tools outlined in the book, you'll be equipped to handle these conversations with confidence, care, and clarity, making it safe to talk about almost anything and be persuasive, not abrasive.

Crucial conversations involve 3 key componen...

Source: Monster.ca. The original article can be found here. 

Getting organized comes as second nature to some of us, while others may choose to procrastinate on any “spring cleaning” or organizational tasks. For those people, just the mere thought of cleaning up and getting organized can be daunting.

Whether or not keeping organized is one of your strengths, it’s a habit everyone should get into. If you’ve ever kept your boss waiting because you couldn’t locate an important document, or if you’re guilty of arriving late to meetings frequently or missing an important deadline, getting organized should be at the top of your to-do list.

If you’re looking for some guidance, below you can find some benefits of keeping organized, as well as tips on how and what to organize to get the most out of your day–to-day work.

Benefits of keeping organized:

You can increase your productivity. By keeping organized, you will save time looking for things and will have more time to work on important ...

In our last blog, we talked about improving your snow business (or any contracting business, for that matter), and focused on 3 areas: leadership, customers and staff. Today, we'll cover the final three areas: finances, operations and safety. 

4. FINANCES

• Create and review your budget: Your budget keeps you on track and lets you know how you’re doing. Create a budget and then review it monthly against actuals to measure how well you’re doing and address any issues before they become problems.
• Check your margins: Is each job profitable? Are you charging enough to cover your costs and make a profit? Job costing will provide great insight into where you may need to make changes.
• Everyone gets a number: How do you measure a win? Give everyone a clear and measurable goal that helps you determine how well the business and the employee are doing.  

FINANCE KPI’s/REPORTS

• Profit - gross/net by division
• Cash flow
• Expenses (labour, materials, equipment, overhead)
• Sales
• Accounts Re
...

I had the opportunity earlier this month to speak at the Landscape Alberta Green Industry Show & Conference (GISC). One of the seminars I led was Grow Your Snow Business. As we’re just starting the winter season, I thought that some of the information I shared at that seminar might be helpful and get you off to the most efficient start. Although I was speaking specifically about snow businesses, all this information is easily transferable to any contracting business.

We talked about six areas of business: Leadership, Customers, Staff, Finances, Operations, and Safety. Below I’ve listed some key points for the first three areas. each area, as well as some KPI’s to help you have success in that area.

1. LEADERSHIP

• Invest in professional development opportunities: Always be learning. Attend conferences, get involved in your local landscape organization, listen to podcasts, read books, network with others, join a peer group.
• Implement regularly scheduled meetings: A regular meeting r
...

With winter on the way, it's important to put a client communication process in place for before, during and after a storm. There is really no such thing as communicating too much with clients. With that in mind, we've created the following as a template you can use for your clients. 

Government of Canada announces Workforce Solutions Road Map – further changes to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program to address labour shortages across Canada 

Did you know that as recent as February 2022, our unemployment rate in Canada was 5.5% -the lowest it has been since the start of the pandemic?  In fact, Canada’s economic recovery is outpacing the ability of many employers to find workers. In a recent press release from the Government of Canada, the outlined focus was on continued economic growth and building a strong, resilient workforce in all sectors.

That is why, in early April 2022, the Minister of Employment, Workforce Development and Disability Inclusion, Carla Qualtrough, announced the Temporary Foreign Worker (TFW) Program Workforce Solutions Road Map. This initiative marks the next step in an ongoing effort to adjust and improve the TFW Program to ensure it continues to meet the labour market needs of today. Central to this is addressing labour shortages, enhancing...

The original article can be found here.

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Covid restrictions are lifting in some parts of the world and the economy is booming in some sectors. Some labor and material costs are rising due to shortages, as is customer demand. Many brands have high pricing power at the moment, making price hiles almost inevitable. Brand managers may be clued in on the size of their price increase, but it's no easy matter to communicate this unwelcome news to customers. 

Many companies, and even entire industries, routinely raise prices without ever telling customers. In the consumer packaged goods space, for instance, it is common practice to reduce quantity (the grammage of a package, item count, etc.) and maintain the price. This increases the per-unit amount paid by shoppers but keeps the more visible package price unchanged. Alternatively, brands may cut down on trade promotions, couponing, and other forms of discounting, raising prices indirectly. For instance, when faced...

Want to eliminate a lot of stress? Invoice and review A/R & A/P reports on a weekly basis with your team. Too often I speak with owners who have completed a lot of work but haven’t invoiced or collected on those projects and find themselves in a cash flow crunch.

If you review the following items weekly you will always have a clear understanding of where you sit financially. Waiting too long to invoice, or to follow-up on outstanding invoices can often result in the final payment never being collected, since many owners feel awkward trying to collect on a job that’s been completed for a long time. 

Weekly Accounts Payable/ Receivable Checklist:

• Create invoices for work completed in the last 7 days
• Create files for work to completed next week 
• Track incoming receipts per job 
• Follow up on outstanding invoices from the last couple of weeks
• Review incoming payables
• What needs to be paid this week
• What gets paid at the end of the month

Do you avoid reviewing AP and AR...

Bookkeeper, Controller, CFO. Are you uncertain about what each role emcompasses? Or when you should outsource the role vs. hiring someone in-house? We hope this will help! 

Should I hire a bookkeeper?

I get this question a lot. The truth is that a business of any size needs a person to handle their books. When first starting out, outsourcing a bookkeeper is the best option as it reduces your costs since you only pay for the time you need. And by having a bookkeeper throughout the year, you will save money on your accountant at the end of the year, since there’s less for them to do.

A big mistake that small business owners make is thinking they can do the books on their own. Once the season gets busy, the last thing owners want to do is the books at the end of the day. The result of leaving the books until the off season is a nightmare that ends up costing you more money and more headaches.

So, what does a bookkeeper do? The bookkeeper will enter all the payables, record payments re...