Landscaping Solutions

The landscaping industry has a labor problem that no amount of hiring can solve. The National Association of Landscape Professionals reports that 85% of landscape companies cite labor as their top business challenge — not finding clients, not managing cash flow, not buying equipment. Labor. There are not enough people, the people you find need training, and the people you train leave for two dollars more an hour.

What most landscaping company owners do not realize is how much of their labor problem is actually a systems problem. When your crew lead spends 30 minutes each morning figuring out the day’s route because the schedule lives in three different places. When your office manager spends half of Friday chasing subcontractor insurance certificates. When your best salesperson loses a $40,000 design-build project because the estimate took two weeks and the homeowner went with someone faster. These are not labor problems. These are workflow problems wearing a labor costume.

The U.S. landscaping services market reached $176 billion in 2024, with approximately 650,000 landscaping businesses operating nationwide. The vast majority — over 90% — are small businesses with fewer than 20 employees. These companies operate on net margins of 5-10% on maintenance contracts and 15-25% on design-build projects, but only if they estimate accurately, schedule efficiently, and avoid the overhead creep that turns a profitable crew into a cost center.

The scaling challenge in landscaping is different from most service industries because it involves managing three distinct business types simultaneously: recurring maintenance (weekly mowing, monthly full-service), project-based work (installations, hardscaping, design-build), and seasonal surges (spring cleanup, fall aeration, holiday lighting). Each has different scheduling patterns, equipment needs, crew skill requirements, and billing cycles. A company doing $1.5 million in revenue might have 80 weekly maintenance accounts, 15 active hardscape projects, 4 subcontractor crews, and seasonal demand that triples the workload for eight weeks in spring and fall.

Managing that complexity with whiteboards, text messages, and a shared Google Calendar is how landscaping companies hit the wall at $750,000 to $1.5 million in revenue. The work is there. The demand is there. But the owner is spending 20+ hours per week on scheduling, dispatching, communicating with clients, chasing paperwork, and doing the administrative work that should be running itself.

Jobber and ServiceTitan have become the default platforms for landscaping companies graduating from pure spreadsheet management. Jobber handles quoting, scheduling, invoicing, and client communication for smaller operations. ServiceTitan offers deeper capabilities for larger firms. Both platforms are solid at their core functions. Where they leave gaps — and where landscaping companies bleed the most time — is in the operational workflows that connect those core functions to the rest of the business: onboarding new subcontractors with complete insurance documentation, coordinating between in-house crews and specialty subs on the same project, automating the seasonal communication cadence that drives upsells and renewals, and tracking crew productivity at the job level rather than just the payroll level.

The companies that break through the revenue ceiling are not the ones that work the most hours. They are the ones whose systems handle the repetitive decisions — which crew goes where, which sub is compliant, which client needs a renewal call — so the owner can focus on selling work, managing quality, and building the team. Every hour an owner spends chasing an expired insurance certificate is an hour not spent on the $60,000 commercial bid that landed in their inbox this morning.

The article below tackles the subcontractor onboarding challenge that sits at the heart of landscaping’s growth bottleneck — because you cannot scale past your own crews without reliable subcontractors, and you cannot use subcontractors reliably without a system that guarantees compliance.