Running a successful garden center requires ingenuity and constant vigilance. Steep competition and rising prices can lead to thin profit margins, which can make it hard to remain profitable. You need resources to help control costs to remain in business.
Labor costs are likely to be one of your biggest expenses, but with a strategic approach to efficiency you can keep these costs down to improve your profitability. Here are some tips to help you keep labor costs down and productivity up.
Manage Your Staff
One of the most important aspects of an efficient labor management strategy is ensuring you always have each person doing the job that is the best use of their time. Each employee will have a unique set of skills and strengths, and when you’re able to empower each employee to do the work they’re best at, you’ll find that your operations run more smoothly and effectively.
This applies to every level of your team. Managers have specialized responsibilities that require their experience and expertise. When they’re able to delegate tasks that don’t require their expertise, it will free up their time to focus on the important duties associated with running the business. Then, the rest of the daily responsibilities can be divided amongst your team in a manner that allows each employee to focus on the tasks that align with their specific strengths and aptitudes.
Automate Routine Operations
There are many aspects of a garden center’s operations that can be automated and taking advantage of this will make your labor strategy more efficient. Implement automation within your business’ specific irrigation practices, whether it’s ebb and flow benches, drip lines or misting systems, to make this aspect of your operations run more smoothly. The right automation technology will even be able to help you account for ways these tasks vary from room to room based on plant species.
In addition, finding tools that will provide automation for managing your inventory, purchasing and accounts receivable can significantly streamline your operations, allowing your employees to focus on the tasks that require human oversight.
Invest in Employees
Your employees play a critical role in the success of your business and the more knowledgeable they are about the garden center industry, the more effectively they’ll be able to do their jobs. Investing in your employees by providing robust training opportunities can lead to major efficiencies in the future.
For example, every job that you train an employee to do is one less thing that your managers have to do, freeing them up to do more mission critical tasks. Cross-training employees also makes it easier to fill gaps in the schedule and keeps your garden center functioning when someone calls out sick. Investing in employee retention can also save you money: it’s cheaper to retain an employee you like than to hire a new one.
Have an Effective Time and Attendance System
You can only track efficiency and progress within your labor system if you’re tracking your employees’ hours. Using a time clock program with robust features can help you manage your labor efficiency more effectively.
For example, it can be helpful to have a time clock that lets employees not just log their hours but attach them to specific jobs and departments so you can see where employees are spending their time. This will allow you to target inefficiencies and make adjustments that will empower your employees to allocate their time each shift in ways that streamline your operations.
Use Customizable, Multifunctional Tools
One way to improve efficiency is to make sure that the tools you use to run your garden center actually save time. Whatever tools you use should have a customizable interface that you and your employees can easily master. Customizable tools are good because they make it easy to find the functions you use most.
It also makes sense to try to combine as many functions as possible into a single system. That way, your employees don’t have to learn many different systems, minimizing training time. For example, once people understand how to use the time clock, having inventory on the same system makes it easier to train them on doing inventory.
Using your garden center POS system as the backbone for your operations makes a lot of sense. You need a POS system to handle transactions, and it intersects automatically with inventory and accounts receivable. Every employee that handles transactions will learn the system, making it easier for you to train them on additional functions, so that cross-training employees becomes much easier.
Analyze Costs and Benefits
Ideally, your systems should give you the ability to run reports that let you analyze all aspects of your business, including your labor. Once you identify inefficiencies, make changes to improve your operations.
Outsource as Necessary
Sometimes identifying inefficiencies can lead to the conclusion that your garden center isn’t good at doing certain things. In that case, it makes more sense to outsource those functions than to keep them in-house.
Accounting is often an easy decision. Hiring a trusted professional to handle accounting is a great way to place an important task in the hands of someone with the proper training to ensure it’s completed properly. However, if you’d prefer to keep accounting in-house, Mariner Business Solutions can help. Our garden center POS system provides integrations into accounting software for any Windows application. We can easily integrate with QuickBooks or just about any other Windows-based accounting software you use.
Human resources can also be a good aspect of your business to outsource. This is especially true if you run a large garden center or a multi-store operation.
Get a Powerful POS System for Your Garden Center
Are you struggling with labor inefficiencies at your garden center? A well-designed garden center POS system can help you discover ways to improve your efficiency and profitability.
At Mariner Business Solutions, our GreenPoint retail garden center solution is built around NCR’s powerful inventory engine and Counterpoint POS software to give you all the tools you need to efficiently manage labor and inventory at your garden center.
Our garden center POS system software offers robust customization features that will help improve your labor efficiency. Our system can reword names on buttons, labels and reports so that it’s more digestible for individuals that aren’t used to looking at computer screen code every day. You can also customize certain security codes so that specific users get only the buttons they need without having to navigate through extraneous buttons that aren’t relevant to their job responsibilities. Our GreenPoint POS system also has a help button that connects you to the Counterpoint help website, making it easy for your employees to troubleshoot items they have questions about.
In addition, Mariner’s GreenPoint garden center POS system allows you to generate a lot of custom reports, but even the preset reports are very impressive. We have preset reports for:
- Purchasing/ordering
- Mins/maxes with margins
- Merchandise analysis reports
- Sales reports by item, customer, employee, category and pay code
- Distribution reports
- And many more
Our system also has an analytic dashboard that allows your management team to see what’s happening in a snapshot view from their cellphone or tablet, making this information easy to digest.
Working with Mariner Business Solutions offers additional benefits, thanks to our Personal Advantage Plus™ Approach. You’ll enjoy:
- Consultation to discover your garden center’s needs and goals
- Customized recommendations to help you get the specific configuration that will benefit your garden center
- A system that adapts to your workflow and operations, not one that requires you to change
- Human support staff when you have a problem and need help
- On-site response when necessary to resolve issues
- Reliable systems that maximize uptime
- Detailed and customized reporting
- A system that grows and changes with your needs
Want to see for yourself what really sets our solutions apart? Request a demo today and find out how we can help you grow your business.
