By Jill Odom of the National Association of Landscape Professionals

If you offer recurring services like lawn care and landscape maintenance, your company has the opportunity to improve your cash flow by implementing monthly installment payment plans. Rather than only invoicing customers after completing a service, this payment model allows you to spread bills out across the 12 months of the year.

“It helps in routing,” says Brad Leahy, vice president of Blades of Green, based in Edgewater, Maryland. “It helps in scheduling. It helps in marketing. It helps the cash flow. It helps upsell. It helps in almost every area of the business.”

After implementing monthly billing, Blades of Green’s profitability went up by 28% over the course of three years.

Why Switch?

Leahy says they started offering this payment option around 2015 at the request of some of their customers who didn’t want to receive multiple bills for various services.

While this practice is common in the pest control industry, Leahy says it took them three years to figure out the logistics and ensure it was profitable for them.

By 2019, more than half of Blades of Green’s clients had switched to this monthly installment payment plan. Now, 65% of their billing is run through installments. Another 25% are on autopay where their credit card is charged immediately after a service. Another 5% prepay for the entire year, and the remaining 5% are commercial accounts.

“The number one thing for us, and our biggest reason to do this, was that most of our customers have more than one program,” Leahy says. “So, what would happen is we would come out to your house twice in one day, twice in one week, a couple times in a month, and you would have a $500 bill, and customers would be like, ‘This is too much.’”

Instead, with monthly installments, the customer can pay a fixed amount every month, and they don’t have to worry about costs fluctuating or multiple invoices. Leahy says this option is far more appealing to customers.

“It’s better marketing when you can put what I call the lowest common denominator,” Leahy says. “So instead of $100 a service, it’s $32 a month. You can put that on your marketing, and that generates more leads in the beginning.”

Leahy says it has also improved their scheduling by decreasing their skip rates. Instead of losing out on revenue when a client decides they’re going to skip a month, they have been able to strengthen their overall lawn care, reducing service calls down the road.

“The skip services went from 3% of all revenue to half a percent,” Leahy says. “That’s a lot of money if you’re big. 2.5% gained on the work you were already doing. You’re not selling more. It’s the most profitable thing you can do, to do the work you were already signed up to do.”

This payment method is also convenient for Blades of Green customers because they have so many repeat services. The company offers three different tiered bundles that allow them to upsell with ease.
“It’s easier to bundle, to add on services when you say it’s $10 more,” Leahy says.

Leahy notes with the bundled services, their crews can also complete multiple jobs in one visit, enabling them to save on travel, labor, equipment and trucks.

He adds this payment model was the best thing ever for providing predictable cash flow during their slower months. In the past, they would send out prepay letters in January, which he viewed as basically cancellation letters where clients would see how much they were spending and decide they didn’t need the service.

“In 2015-16, we were losing 28% of all revenue to cancels,” Leahy says. “In about three or four years later, we were canceling at 21 and a half percent revenue.”

He notes this improvement wasn’t solely because of their installment billing, but it did empower Blades of Green to shorten their layoff period and focus on training their technicians for two weeks before the season starts.

“It really opens up your business to do new things,” Leahy says. “It’s consistent cash flow, and now you’re not afraid of ‘Can I send the guys to the conference in the winter?’ Yeah, I got money. It helps your best people, because you can really help train them and immerse them in the industry.”

Transitioning to Monthly Installments

Leahy says the first step is to go paperless.

“Do not do this if you’re sending out invoices every month,” Leahy says. “You’re just creating 12 times the paperwork if you send out six invoices a year. Now you’ve got to send out 12.”

The timing of when you make this change is important. Leahy says in November or after their last service, they let customers know they were switching to paperless.

Now, Blades of Green sends out an after-service email that lets the customer know what work the technician did that day.

Leahy acknowledges that there is a transition period for getting your customer base on monthly billing, especially if you are accustomed to getting 30% prepay at the beginning of the year.

“You got to really manage your cash and understand you don’t want to just cut off your prepay,” Leahy says. “If I had 30% prepay, I go after the other 70% first and then come back and reduce the prepaid discount.”

Blades of Green offered a 5% discount to their customers who signed up for the monthly billing and eventually removed the discount for prepaying for the full year. Leahy says they utilized a line of credit for a few years to ease the transition from counting on prepay funds.

“10% of revenue in prepay was the most we ever got,” Leahy says. “Now I’m getting 65% of my revenue on a monthly prepay.”

Leahy advises if you’re going to use monthly billing to bundle services, you need to invest in training your team to execute the work well. Make sure your people and trucks are set up for success.

The key is promoting this change and getting your entire team bought in. Explain the reasons you’re changing to monthly billing and the benefits as every department will be affected.

“The entire company needs to be on board because it helps everybody, but it will change responsibilities somewhat mainly when people cancel,” Leahy says.

Leahy says it is critical to convince your sales team to sell this payment option.

“Your sales team has to be well-trained and motivated to sell it that way, because they’ll fall back real easy too, and it’s based on how you pay commission,” Leahy says.

Blades of Green only pays commission based on when the service is completed, not when money is collected.

“You definitely want to look at how your commission works, and if this is going to be a problem,” Leahy says. “We just did promotions and contests on who can sell the most of this billing type.”

Challenges to Be Aware Of

Leahy stresses that while this payment model sounds basically like a subscription, you shouldn’t refer to it as that with customers, as each state has different legal ramifications for true subscriptions’ renewal and cancellation policies.

When a customer cancels, Blades of Green will balance the account at the time, so any money that is owed is collected. Leahy says this is the biggest challenge they face with this payment model.

“All our bad reviews are on this,” Leahy says. “Because they forgot. It was five years ago, three years ago, a year ago, or the husband signed up and the wife is canceling. It’s some sort of communication breakdown where they forgot they signed up for this, and they call in and go, ‘We’re moving, had a great service. Love you guys.’ And when we say you owe us $350, it changes to, ‘What? You guys suck. I hate your service.’”

Blades of Green addresses these negative reviews by calmly informing the individual they agreed to the payment method.

Leahy says not only do they have signed paperwork, they also have recordings where the salesperson went over the payment process and received the customer’s verbal agreement, obligating them to pay the money that is owed.

“Our bad debts we’ve never collected are still less than what it used to be,” Leahy says.

On the flipside, the customers who receive money back when they cancel are delighted. Whether the client gets a refund or owes the company money all depends on when they cancel their service.

Leahy recommends zeroing out accounts by the end of the year so these balances never get too high. Additionally, using a rolling 12-month plan can get complicated on the accounting side.

“It gets weird when I did the work, but I didn’t collect the money,” Leahy says. “So, is that a bad debt I can now take off my taxes? But what is it next year?”

Leahy says while monthly billing isn’t something you can change to at the flip of a switch, it is a worthwhile billing option that can help decrease cancellations.