In an article posted earlier this fall, landscape contractors talked about what they feel are their biggest opportunities in 2012. The top three are: improve sales and marketing, expand, and improve the workforce. These three biggest opportunities mirror the three biggest challenges which contractors also cited: intense competitive climate, ultra-tight customer budgets, and labor uncertainty.
Below are some of the more interesting comments surrounding the No. 3 issue—tight customer budgets—directly from the mouths of Green Industry PRO readers. Take a look and see if you feel the same way, and feel free to post your comments at the end of the article or on our forum.
“People just aren’t spending as much as in previous years.”
“My HOA customers especially have really tight budgets.”
“People are getting more bids than ever before.”
“With the economy like it is, everyone is shopping. Selling value is key.”
“You need to be able to bid to win, but also find a way to maintain margins.”
“Being competitive with our pricing is the biggest challenge we face. To stay in business and maintain a legitimate way of doing business, keeping prices the same is necessary as insurance and other overhead costs don’t seem to be going down. In fact, they’ve gone up. We’ll have to try and rely on our reputation to keep us alive.”
“Providing our customers savings in providing our services—while still making a profit—is by far our biggest challenge. Usually, the sum of all of our properties is strong enough to cover the ones where we have to bid lower in order to have a chance.”
Watch for other installments of this series right here at greenindustrypros.com.
