Revenue per Hour: The Most Overlooked Metric in Landscaping
Why This One Number Can Tell You More About Profit Than Any Other
Most landscapers track total sales, but sales alone do not tell you if you are winning or losing. You can have a record-breaking revenue month and still come up short on profit. The number that actually tells the truth is revenue per hour — how much your business earns for every production hour you work.
Why Revenue per Hour Matters
Every business only has so many production hours each week. Those hours are your inventory. When you fill them with low-profit jobs or inefficient routes, you waste your most valuable resource.
Revenue per hour measures how efficiently you turn your crew’s time into money. It exposes what your “busy” really earns.
What It Reveals
- Underpriced work: Jobs that seem fine on paper but drag down hourly return.
- Inefficient routes: Too much windshield time and not enough production.
- Wasted labor: Crews that take longer than the estimate or lack clear systems.
- Profit leaks: Jobs that look big in revenue but small in margin.
When you track revenue per hour, you start spotting which jobs and services actually make sense — and which ones are quietly draining you.
How to Calculate It
- Take your total revenue for a job, route, or week.
- Divide it by the total billable production hours your crew worked.
- The result is your Revenue per Production Hour (RPH).
Compare that to your break-even hourly rate — the amount you need to cover all labor burden, overhead, and profit. If your RPH is not comfortably above that number, the job is not profitable.
How to Use It
- Drop or reprice the lowest RPH clients.
- Focus your marketing on the most profitable service types.
- Route for density so drive time does not eat production time.
- Reward crews that consistently hit higher RPH with efficiency bonuses.
This is how smart landscapers grow. They do not just add more clients — they make each hour worth more.
Your Next Step
If you are ready to stop chasing revenue and start maximizing profit, learn how to track and raise your Revenue per Hour using real numbers. Inside my Pricing Fix Sprint, I teach landscapers how to calculate their break-even rate, identify profit leaks, and make every job count.
👉 Join the Pricing Fix Sprint here and start making every hour work harder for you.
