Trusted Industry Insights
The Herring Group landscape Industry Benchmark ReportWelcome to The Herring Group Landscape Industry Benchmark Report, a trusted source for financial information allowing owners to make better business decisions and empowering teams to be more successful.
Participation is CLOSED for the 2024 Benchmark Report. Get notified when participation opens for the 2025 report.
Greg Herring
Founder & CEO of The Herring Group
If you’ve participated in past years, you know the more participants the better. Share this info with any landscape business owners who would benefit from knowing their numbers.
We look forward to you joining us this year!
-Greg
A MESSAGE FROM GREG
Owners – You Need This For Your Teams
This will be our 11th year creating a financial benchmark report for the landscape industry. During the last decade of reviewing company numbers and finding the trends, I’ve seen firsthand the power of this information for owners. No other report in our industry can replace the insights you gain here, allowing you to make better decisions and empowering your team to be more successful.
We have worked with hundreds of landscape companies, and we have seen owners with incredible instincts. We’ve also seen that making gut decisions doesn’t scale very well.
We think there’s a better way: using trusted data to train your winners. It gives your employees the tools and the insights to make informed decisions, and in turn, be more successful. We enjoy helping owners get out of the weeds and pass along some of the accountability to their teams – leading to more life margin for owners.
Compared to other manager training, this is one of the most affordable options you can choose! It’s like MBA 101 for those lacking experience in reading financial reports. We walk you through how to use it with your teams and even give you smart filters to make it easier to focus on companies most comparable to your company.
We only build this report one time a year. This is a timely opportunity to get involved.
We look forward to having your company participate in our 11th annual benchmark report this year. Here’s to more profit margin and life margin!
Thank you to our sponsors
Aspire solutions help field service companies of all sizes—from lawn care and landscaping to janitorial and beyond—overcome their day-to-day challenges, operate more efficiently, and free up time to focus on what matters most for their business: profitable growth. Business management software built for landscape, snow & ice removal, and janitorial contractors by industry professionals.
Ewing Outdoor Supply is the largest family-owned supplier of landscape and water management products in the country. Ewing offers commercial and residential landscape and turf products, agronomics and growing materials, hardscape and outdoor living, landscape lighting, irrigation supplies, industry-leading seminars and more to professionals serving the landscaping, sports turf, golf and agricultural industries.
Unlimited Labor Solutions specializes in empowering landscape industry businesses to cultivate a motivated and dedicated workforce that meets your immediate needs and evolves alongside your company’s growth. With a well-established and transparent process for securing company-sponsored US green cards, ULS simplifies the immigration journey, ensuring a talented and inspired workforce is readily available to propel your business forward.
SmartLink technology has emerged as a powerful solution for industry leaders. Leveraging over 75 years of collaboration with the nation’s leading landscape maintenance companies, Weathermatic provides proprietary, cost-effective, and highly efficient technology that automates labor processes, increases profits, and preserves water. SmartLink offers industry leaders the tools they need for sustainable success.
Industry leaders choose Team Engine to transform their workforce strategy from a growth constraint into a competitive advantage. With Team Engine, you can overcome the technology, language and operational challenges unique to the landscaping industry to outcompete and hire the best people first, then drive retention and engagement throughout the employee journey.
Covelso, LLC provides accounting and bookkeeping services to landscape companies using Aspire with QuickBooks. By adding expertise with deep accounting knowledge – and how to make it align with Aspire – Covelso allows you to get the financial information you need to trust and rely on your books, enabling better decision-making.
Invest in Your People
A Financial Report that Doubles as Management Training
As we’ve talked to growing companies in and out of our industry, we see successful companies investing in their people – and treating them like an asset and not like an expense. Compared to other manager training, this is one of the most affordable options you can choose!
We show you how to use the report as a training tool. When you can teach others in your organization how to read the data, your employees become better equipped to make informed decisions, and in turn, be more successful.
Using data to back your conversations with your managers also helps you and your team be more proactive in planning for next year. This level of conversation keeps your people motivated, even in the tough years.
Get out of the weeds and pass along some of the accountability to your teams – and elevate your people in the process.
New for 2024: Smart Filters to make the report even easier to use.
When Apples to Oranges Won’t Cut It
bench•mark
/’ben(t)SHmärk/
1. a standard or point of reference against which things may be compared or assesed.
2. a level of quality that can be used as a standard when comparing other things.
Other reports claim to be benchmarks, but use 2020 data. Who wants old apples?
Details
How The Report Works
Step 1: Sign Up
This step is completely risk-free. Sign up to participate in The Herring Group’s 11th Annual Peer Benchmark Report for $347 and receive a 60-day no-risk guarantee. If you don’t receive value greater than the cost, you can ask for a refund in 60-days. All the reward, none of the risk.
STEP 2: Submit Your Data
When you sign up, you will receive simple instructions to upload your income statement and balance sheet directly to a secure server – it takes less than 10 minutes. We’re encouraging all companies to include two years of data so we can do a comparison with the year prior for inflation. This is included in the total price of $347. Please submit all data (12-months ending 9/30/24) no later than November 7, 2024.
Step 3: WAit for the magic
Our team of financial professionals reviews and “codes” the income statement and balance sheets of each company to ensure we get a true “apples to apples” comparison. The report is created so you can sort and compare to companies of similar size and revenue mix as your own.
STEP 4: Join the Webinars
You’ll receive an email invitation for two live webinars led by Greg Herring. The report review will take place in early December, where Greg will take you through the information and trends, teach you how to use the report for your own deeper analysis and answer any questions. The high-performer webinar will be in January 2025.
companies that
participated in 2023
144
total revenue of
2023 companies
$1.9B
Employees
Represented
19K+
Companies with
Net Profit Over 10%
28%
$347 for the Report and Webinar
60-Day No-Risk Guarantee
The History of The Benchmark Report
About Greg & The Report
Greg Herring, the founder and CEO of The Herring Group, has a passion for restoring life margin to business owners and helping people live well. Greg and his team of financial leaders walk alongside landscape business executives, implementing their proprietary system, the Path to 12%, to increase profit margins and provide owners with much-needed life margin, a welcome change.
Greg created the Benchmark Report as a tool for his clients back in 2014 to help them get a more accurate picture of the landscape industry. He found that many reports claiming to be “benchmarks” could easily be skewed by companies naturally reporting their financials differently. He decided to do something about it and created a unique model where each company’s data is “coded” for maximum comparability. His model also shows each company’s data (anonymously, of course) so that participants can find companies most similar to theirs and customize the benchmark report to make it more relevant to their needs. He demonstrates how to get the most out of the report in a live webinar.
Whether your company has revenue of $1 million or $50 million, he believes this report can be a powerful tool to use with your team, and will help put you on an actionable path to real change.
INSPIRING AN INDUSTRY
Better Data Means Better Decisions
We’re always looking for new ways to bring value to the landscape industry. Valuable articles, webinars, ideas. We want the industry as a whole to grow and thrive – and we care about business owners.
As a participant in the 2024 Industry Benchmark Report, you will receive value in three ways:
- Customizable report with anonymous data from each participating company
- Webinar #1 – Learn how to use the report for your own deeper analysis
- Webinar #2 – High-performing companies join us to discuss what makes them successful*
$347 for the Report and Webinar
60-Day No-Risk Guarantee
*If you are having greater than average success in 2024, you could be featured in our high-performer webinar!
People are Talking
“This Benchmark Report is unique. You see each company’s data – revenue mix as well as expenses and net income as a percentage of revenue – and it’s anonymous. I use it each year to see how my company is performing. I love it!”
Nick DiBenedetto, ND Landscape Inc.
Frequently Asked Questions
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What data is measured in the report?
With The Herring Group’s Peer Benchmark Report, we turn each company’s raw data into percentages, allowing you to anonymously compare yourself to companies of all sizes. The data is also filterable, so you can get a clear comparison to companies like yours, in terms of size and revenue mix.
That’s one of the big advantages of our report.
Here are just a few things that we measure:
- Revenue growth
- Revenue mix
- Enhancements as a % of maintenance
- Net profit margin (net profit divided by revenue)
- EBITDA margin (EBITDA is used to value landscape companies in a sale process)
- Gross margin
- Repairs and maintenance as a percentage of revenue
- Fuel as a percentage of revenue
- Overhead as a percentage of revenue
- Days in Accounts Receivable
- Debt to Equity Ratio
Does my company need to be a certain size to benefit from participating in the report?
Companies with revenue of $1 million to $100 million will benefit from the Benchmark Report. One of the best things about the report is that the data can be filtered so that you can get clear comparisons with companies like yours (both in terms of size and revenue mix). Over the years, we have seen highly profitable companies of all sizes.
Why does The Herring Group charge for The Benchmark Report?
Some people are surprised that our report costs money to participate ($347 this year). At The Herring Group, we give away a lot of valuable information to help business owners increase their profit margin and life margin. Why? Because we value the industry and private business owners.
So why don’t we give away the Benchmark Report? Two reasons. First, we only want people who are serious about motivating their teams to improve performance to participate. Second, we spend dozens of hours reviewing and “coding” each company’s financial statements to make the data comparable between companies. Those two reasons make it a far more valuable product than any other benchmark report.
Do I need to be on Aspire in order to participate in the Benchmark Report?
No. The Benchmark Report only uses data from your accounting software (e.g. QuickBooks). We provide detailed instructions on how to generate these reports. It will take less than 10 minutes.
I want to purchase the report, but my team is still working on closing out the last month. Do I need to submit my financials immediately?
No. You can purchase the report now and you will have time to submit your financials. We ask that all data (12-months ending 9/30/24) be submitted no later than November 7, 2024. We can also use data for the 12 months ended August 31, 2024 if September 2024 data is not available.
We encourage all companies to include two years of data so we can do a comparison with the year prior. This is included in the price of $347.
How will the report be delivered to me?
A link to a secure folder with your copy of the report will be provided to you by email on the day the report is released. You will get copies of the report as a PDF and as an Excel file, as well as a video recording of our two webinar presentations.
On the day of the report release, you will also receive your company’s identifying Company Number via email. Only the purchaser will have access to your company’s identifying Company Number. Your Company Number acts as a secure key, maintaining the anonymity of your data. It is up to the purchaser if they would like to share with others in their company.
I am unable to attend the post-report webinars. Are they recorded?
The first post-report webinar is where Greg will explain how to use the report and point out some interesting findings from the year’s report. The second webinar will be a panel discussion with owners from high-performing companies. We encourage you to attend live so you can participate in the Q&A, however, both webinars are recorded and will be available for you and your team to view after the live event.
I am currently a Herring Group client. Do I need to purchase the report?
All current Path to 12% clients of The Herring Group will receive the Benchmark Report and an invitation to the webinars as a part of our ongoing services. You do not need to register to participate.
Can you buy the report without participating?
No, the report is only available to participants. We work diligently to make sure each participating company’s numbers are comparable to the other companies. If you are in the landscape industry but not a business owner, sponsorship opportunities may be available. Contact us at [email protected].
How secure are my numbers? Do you share them with anyone?
Your data is uploaded into a secure Dropbox folder. Dropbox uses Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)/Transport Layer Security (TSL) to protect data in transit between Dropbox apps and their servers.
From there, your company’s dollars are converted to a % of revenue. Your company is assigned an ID number, called your Company Number, and your percentages are displayed in a single column in Excel, labeled only by the Company Number. Your specific Company Number will be emailed only to the purchaser’s email address on file when signing up.
We take this approach to make the data more comparable and to make it easier for people to participate. Participants and sponsors will see the report with anonymous data, only. We use overall statistics to help inform the industry.
Secure Your Spot
It’s all good. You can upload your financial documents (12-months ending 9/30) later.
$347 for the Report and Webinar
60-Day No-Risk Guarantee
HAVE A Question?
Do you have Questions not found in the FAQs?
ask them here.
Filling out this form does not sign you up for the report.