For program directors

Sessions about the numbers, not the mindset.

Three talks built for owners in the $1.5M to $6M range. Each one is operational, each one sends people home with a worksheet they can put against their own figures, and none of them is a motivational hour.

Any of the three runs at 60, 75 or 90 minutes, and I am glad to shape a topic around whatever gap you are trying to fill instead.

The $2M Wall

Why your revenue grew and your profit didn’t.

What actually happens to a landscape P&L between $1M and $3M: which costs step up before revenue catches them, why the owner’s own capacity becomes the binding constraint, and how to tell a pricing problem from a production problem. Attendees leave with a one-page overhead recovery worksheet.

• Calculate a true overhead recovery rate and compare it to the markup in use today
• Name the four costs that scale ahead of revenue in a growing company
• Recognise the three points where an owner-run company breaks

What Your Job Costing Isn’t Telling You

A working session. Bring a real job.

Most companies that say they do job costing are doing job tracking. Attendees bring a recent job and we rebuild its cost line by line — burdened labor, equipment time, non-billable hours, margin by division — until the number tells the truth.

• Build a labor burden multiplier from their own payroll
• Put equipment and vehicle cost onto a job instead of into overhead
• Read margin by division and see which division is carrying the others

Getting Off the Estimating Desk

Building the second seat.

Every owner who has tried to hire their way off the estimating desk has a story about the manager who did not work out. The problem is usually not the hire. This session covers which seat to fill first, how to document an estimating process so someone else can run it, and what a realistic 90-day handoff looks like.

Bio

Drew McGrail has spent thirty years in the landscape and nursery business, the last twenty running industry-leading landscape architecture firms in St. Louis and Boulder. As General Manager of the St. Louis firm he took revenue from $2.5M to over $8M and finished with 40 direct reports across design, construction and maintenance, carrying sales management, recruiting and HR alongside operations. Earlier, as VP of Operations for a design-build firm in Boulder, Colorado, he watched a company climb through the same ceiling. He owns and operates McGrail Landscape and runs BaseCourse, which works with landscape company owners on overhead recovery, job costing and pricing.

What I need

Check a date