Scheduling Lawn Service

This section pertains more to lawn mowing than anything, as lawn mowing is the most routine service.

My customers are currently all on weekly bi-weekly lawn mowing schedules. I used to offer ten day schedules as I had some customer requests, however, it made the scheduling too complicated. So now I only offer these two options.

To keep track of what lawns we mow when, first I create “routes.” I group my customers in a list in the most efficient order I can in terms of towns. I then break down this list into smaller lists of manageable daily workloads.

By manageable daily workloads, I mean around 20 average sized ($25-$40) lawns in a day.

I also try to mow in the better, higher paying areas later in the week, as most people prefer their lawns freshly mowed for the weekends.

For example, on Mondays I may mow 15 lawns in a driving loop in Crappytown, while on Fridays I may mow 14 lawns arranged in efficiently ordered route in Nicetown.

For many reasons this schedule can get messed up due to weather or other factors.

Here is an example detailing how I handle these situations:

Say it rains on Thursday and we have 20 lawns scheduled. We will mow Thursday's lawns on Friday and push the Friday route back to Saturday (if we feel like working) or Monday if we don't want to.

The following week, we will use our discretion (depending on rain, speed of growth, customer needs, etc) to decide if we want to mow the Thursday lawns that Thursday, or push them back until the following Thursday.