Landscape Business Consulting
Know which jobs make money.
And which don't.
Job costing and margin visibility frameworks built so your team can see, in real time, whether the work you're doing is profitable.
Every landscape business runs jobs that lose money. The dangerous ones are the jobs that lose money quietly. We help your team install the job costing structure that surfaces margin issues while there's still time to act on them.
Why This Matters
If you can't see margin in real time, you can't manage it at all.
Job costing is the feedback loop that tells you whether your estimate matched reality. Without it, every job is a gamble that gets settled at end-of-month, weeks after anyone could have changed the outcome. Owners learn whether a job was profitable when it's too late to influence whether a job was profitable.
The companies that grow margin year over year are the ones that built the loop. They cost jobs while the work is in progress. They review production hours against estimated hours weekly. They know which crews are running high, which services are bleeding, and which divisions are subsidizing the others.
Job costing isn't an accounting exercise. It's the operational signal your business runs on.
Our Approach
We install the job costing loop and the visibility around it.
Job costing involves estimating, production, payroll, and accounting all feeding the same view.
Current state assessment
We start by understanding how your team costs jobs today. What's measured, what isn't, who reviews it, what gets done with the data.
Review cadence and discipline
The loop only works if it runs. We help your team install a weekly or bi-weekly review cadence where job-level margin gets surfaced and exceptions get flagged.
Cost structure design
We define how costs should flow into each job: labor, materials, subcontract, equipment, overhead allocation — division by division, service line by service line.
Variance analysis framework
A standard way of investigating jobs that miss their estimated margin, so the learning compounds over time.
Reporting layer
Costing is only as useful as the visibility it produces. We design reports and dashboards that surface margin in real time, by job, by service, by crew, by account manager.
Leadership-level roll-ups
Company-wide and divisional margin trends that give the owner the picture they need without drowning in job-level detail.
What You'll Walk Away With
Tangible outputs your team can use on day one.
Every engagement is custom, but here's what most Post-Implementation System Review engagements produce.
Current state job costing map — A documented view of how costs flow today, with the gaps and inconsistencies surfaced.
Cost allocation framework — A defined structure for labor, materials, subcontract, equipment, and overhead, by division and service.
Job costing reports — Real-time and weekly views of margin by job, by crew, by service, by account manager.
Review cadence — A documented weekly or bi-weekly process for catching margin issues while they're still actionable.
Variance analysis framework — A standard way of investigating jobs that miss their estimated margin.
Leadership-level reporting — Roll-ups for the owner and leadership team showing divisional and company-wide margin trends.
Self-Check
Best for, and not for.
An honest look at who this engagement is designed for.
Best For
- Companies who can't tell, in real time, whether the jobs in production are profitable
- Owners who learn job-level margin at end-of-month, weeks after they could have acted
- Teams where production data and financial data live in different systems or don't reconcile
- Businesses growing fast enough that margin guesswork is becoming costly
Not a Fit
- Companies whose estimating logic needs rebuilding first (start with Estimating & Pricing)
- Teams without the operational discipline to capture cost data consistently
- Businesses with no defined service lines or divisions to allocate against
- Owners looking for a one-time costing study rather than a sustained system
A Client Story
Stories from our consulting engagements are on their way.
"Having David and Julia in our quarterly reviews has changed how our leadership team thinks. The conversations are different."
Client story coming soon
3+
Years — average advisory client tenure
Works Well With
Where this fits in the bigger picture.
Estimating & Pricing rarely stands alone.
Estimating & Pricing
Estimating sets the target. Job costing tells you whether you hit it. The two work together as a feedback loop.
Production & Work Ticket Workflows
Tight production workflows produce the cost data the costing system depends on.
Ongoing Advisory & Coaching
The discipline of weekly margin review is built once and reinforced every week inside the advisory relationship.
Let's see if we're the right team for this work.
Bring your last few months of job margin data, or your suspicion that you don't have any. We'll tell you honestly whether Job Costing & Margin Visibility is what you need.
Two Twelve Advisors
Helping landscape companies install the financial clarity, operational structure, and accountability that turn a hardworking business into a profitable one.
Consulting Services
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