Commercial landscaping operations audit The contract bills the same every month. The hours don’t. We find where the margin leaks.
Hours per job site nobody watches, renewals priced from habit, invoices that wait out the season. In two weeks, from the job-costing records, we put a monthly dollar figure on each one.
- Fixed fee
- $4,500
- Length
- Two weeks
- Access to records
- Read-only
For commercial landscape companies with $1M+ in revenue.
+1 (202) 600-6027Mon–Fri, 9 a.m.–6 p.m. ET · A real person answers or calls you back the same business day.After hours? Book the call online: one form, no calendar
Sound familiar?
What landscape company owners say about the money they can’t find.
01
Hours per job site nobody watches
Crews log hours, the property bills a flat monthly fee, and comparing the two is nobody’s weekly job. Overruns surface at year-end close.
02
The account the crews carry
One large HOA or commercial property takes far more hours than it pays for, and nobody can say which one until the season is over.
03
Renewals priced from habit
The renewal goes out at last year’s price plus a guess, because nobody has the property’s hours in hand when the client asks about an increase.
04
Numbers that arrive after the season is priced
The P&L shows the month after it closes. By the time a loss is visible, the next season is already priced.
05
Billing that falls apart in season
Spring hits, invoices wait for someone to get to them, and a reminder that gets no answer gets no second one. Collections are nobody’s set job.
06
A market that buys on price
Property managers get praised for cutting budgets, so every renewal is a negotiation. Without margin by property, there is no telling which to defend.
Paraphrased from public owner forum threads and trade-press interviews — not from our clients.
None of this is fixed by bringing in more business. Each leak sits in work already on the books.
Where it stalls
From the first call to the cleared payment: where the money stalls.
- RFP
- Hand-off 01 to Bid
- Hand-off 02 to Contract
- Hand-off 03 to Crew hours
- Hand-off 04 to Invoice
- Hand-off 05 to Paid
- Hand-off 06 to Renewal
- Hand-off 03 · Contract → Crew hours
Hours per property drifting past the bid, with nobody comparing them weekly.
- Hand-off 04 · Crew hours → Invoice
Invoices waiting through spring and summer while the office catches up.
- Hand-off 05 · Invoice → Paid
Reminders with no answer and no second one, with nobody assigned to collect.
- Hand-off 06 · Paid → Renewal
Renewals priced from habit, without the property’s actual hours.
Before any new software
Large companies are spending heavily on AI. Few can show what it returned.
7%
of 2,145 senior leaders at companies with $100M+ in revenue reported having established a return on AI — while planning to spend an average of $188 million each on it.
Source: KPMG Global AI Pulse, Q2 2026
Those are companies with their own IT departments and budgets. A smaller business that buys a tool on a hunch has less room for the same mistake.
Leaders with strong visibility into costs were five times as likely to report a return on AI (15% against 3%). The same release adds that without clear ownership, decisions fragment and impact gets harder to track.
Source: KPMG Global AI Pulse, Q2 2026
Free · two taps · no email
Check one hand-off yourself, right now.
Three questions, from your own records
How many crew-hours did each of the five largest properties take last month, and how does that compare with the hours its monthly fee assumed?
Which renewals went out this year at last year’s price plus a round-number increase, with no count of hours behind them?
How many spring and summer invoices were paid past the terms the contract states, and by how many days?
If an answer takes digging, note where the record lives. That is where the Review starts.
Free self-check · two taps · no email
Hand-off 3 of 6 · Contract → Crew
Choose the answer that sounds like your company.
That was one of six hand-offs where money changes hands, from first inquiry to collected cash. The other five take about three minutes and end in a dated sheet that names where to start.
How it runs
Two weeks, $4,500, one finding you can act on.
Day 0
A 20-minute call
Fit, not yet, or not us. No deck, no payment.
Days 1–14
We read the records
Read-only exports from the systems you already run. Nothing switched off, nothing to install.
Day 14
The findings, in writing
Each leak with a monthly dollar figure, the order to fix them in, and the first fix to start the next morning — the company’s to keep whatever the owner decides.
$2,250 to begin, the balance when the report arrives. The fee does not change with what the Review finds, and the written report is yours to keep.
What we price
Each leak gets a monthly dollar figure.
Crew-hours on each property set against the hours its monthly fee assumed, week by week, where timesheets are coded by crew instead of by property
The accounts that take far more hours than they pay for, ranked property by property before the season closes
Renewals that rolled last year’s price forward instead of pricing the season’s actual hours on that property
Margin by property in the month the work was done, instead of after the next season is already priced
Invoices that waited through spring and summer, and days-to-paid against the terms each contract states
Who runs it
Small on purpose. Senior on purpose.
A team with ten-plus years in strategic consulting and business-process automation. Before Lumina, our people built and ran revenue operations inside a Fortune 500 US financial institution.
Tamara Stepanyan, founder
No client case studies yet — we would rather tell you that than invent one.
Before you call
Questions landscape company owners ask first.
We already run Aspire. It shows budgeted versus actual hours. What would the Review find?
Aspire, LMN and BOSS LM report on what gets entered. The gaps sit in what never does: hours booked to a crew instead of a property, the renewal priced before anyone pulled the season’s hours, the extra done on a “while you’re here” with no ticket. The Review reads the software against the timesheets, crew leader logs, invoices and A/R aging, and prices the gaps between them. If the reports already answer the three questions on this page, the 20-minute call will make that plain. Nothing gets switched off.
Spring and summer are impossible here. When would we even do this?
The Review runs on read-only access: one point of contact, a few hours of the office’s time in the first week, and answers to questions within 48 hours. No crew comes off a route. The best window is the slowest stretch on the company’s own calendar, once a full season of hours and invoices is on file, so the findings are in hand before next year’s renewals are priced.
Our accounts are HOAs and management companies. Does a board member or property manager ever hear from the Review?
No. The Review reads the company’s own records, read-only, and no board member, PM or resident is contacted. Contact details in the customer files stay inside the engagement, under the non-disclosure agreement signed before any access. Each community association’s board spends against a budget it adopts, which is why the fix list sends every extra to the PM as a priced quote for approval instead of adding it to the invoice unannounced.
Margins in this trade are thin. Is $4,500 worth it at our size?
The fee is printed and the same for everyone: $4,500 flat, two weeks, and the written findings stay with the company. The two-tap check on this page and the 20-minute call come first, and both show whether there is anything worth pricing before a dollar is spent.
Our real problem is labor, not paperwork. Crew members are hard to find.
When crew members are hard to find, the hours already paid for matter most. The Review counts where paid crew-hours go: extras with no ticket, drive time between properties that no price accounts for, hours drifting above the bid on a property nobody re-priced. It does not hire, recruit or touch pay. What it hands back is a list of where those hours went, property by property, in monthly dollars, and the order in which to fix it.
Related reading
The next step
Tell us what isn’t getting followed up. We’ll tell you if we can help.
- Send the form beside this. A person reads it, not a bot or a ticket queue. We call you back the same business day.
- 20-minute call: fit, not yet, or not us.
- If it fits: the Revenue Review, $4,500 flat, two weeks.
+1 (202) 600-6027Mon–Fri, 9 a.m.–6 p.m. ET · A real person answers or calls you back the same business day.