Your company is successful because you, the owner, play the role of financial leader. You determine the labor cost. You set pricing. You set the sales budget. You review the income statement and balance sheet.  You monitor estimated to actual performance. Here are two questions to consider:   

• Did you start a landscape business so that you could become a financial leader? 
• Is being a financial leader the most profitable way to spend your time? 

Because we are a team of accomplished financial leaders, we bring simplicity to complex reporting and lay out the numbers in impartial, factual reports to help you make more strategic business decisions. Our CFO-level lens allows us to make numbers relevant, interesting and actionable to business owners, executives and operational managers.  As financial leaders, we prepare and review the right data at the right time with the right people in the right format. 

Financial leadership makes the owner’s life better and gives the company a competitive advantage. 

We like to measure your success in terms of profit margin and life margin. Margin is simply the excess. Net profit margin is the excess of revenue over expenses, and life margin is the excess of time and energy available for YOU, the owner. 

While the Path to 12% works with any software, results occur faster with a landscape industry ERP system like Aspire, LMN or BOSS LM.  The Herring Group knows both systems and relies on the data in those systems to produce accurate and actionable reports which facilitate accountability throughout the landscape company. 

With Aspire, The Herring Group also offers data warehouse options where we create and email key dashboards and reports to managers and executives on a scheduled basis. Custom development is also an option. 

The Herring Group fills the gaps in strategic financial leadership. We hire experienced CFO-level talent and equip them with our proprietary process. We supplement the existing team, not replace it. Because of our work with dozens of landscape companies, often we accelerate the progress your team would make on its own. And because we also do some of the work, we take some pressure off of your existing team.

Conversely, you do not need to already have a financial leader in your organization – many times it’s the owner who makes these decisions. We simply take the initiative on strategic financial matters, which allows the owner to focus on other projects. Greater life margin starts almost as soon as we begin, as the owner sees he or she can trust us to provide financial leadership.

No. We find this is one area where people get stuck, so our first order of business is typically helping you align your numbers so that your data in your system – whether that’s Aspire, LMN, Boss LM or another software – and the data in your accounting software (e.g. QuickBooks) agree and reflect financial reality. We help you trust your own data so you can make better decisions moving forward.

You do not need to “pre-clean” before we begin our partnership.