How to Prioritize Your Time as a Lawn Care Business Owner

When I started Anthony’s Lawn Care & Landscaping out of a minivan back in 2011, my calendar was simple: mow, edge, blow, drive to the next yard, repeat. I was the salesman, the crew, the bookkeeper, and the guy answering the phone with grass clippings still on my shirt. If you run a lawn care company, you know exactly what that feels like. The hard truth I had to learn is that lawn care business owner time management isn’t about cramming more into your day. It’s about being ruthless with what actually deserves your hours. Today I run four businesses with 70 employees serving 145 cities, and I’m no longer in the field every day. Not because I got lucky, but because I changed how I spent my time.

Ask me to describe myself in two words and I’ll tell you: “Business builder.” That shift, from being the best mower to building the thing that mows, is the whole game. Let me walk you through how I think about it.

Working On vs. In Your Business

You’ve probably heard the phrase, but it’s worth being honest about what it means in our trade. Working in your business is the production work: you’re on the mower, you’re loading the trailer, you’re physically doing the service the customer pays for. Working on your business is the building work: hiring and training operators, setting the standards your crews follow, building the culture, and chasing the big relationships that change your trajectory.

Here’s the trap. Production work feels productive because you can see the cut grass at the end of the day. Building work is slower and quieter, and a lot of it doesn’t pay off for weeks or months. So most owners default to the mower because it’s familiar and it feels good. But if you’re the only one who can do the building work and you spend all day doing the mowing work, your business can never get bigger than your own two hands. The phrase I keep coming back to is “working on vs in your business” — and the goal is to deliberately move more of your week from the second to the first.

Find the Few Things Only You Can Do

Not all tasks are equal, and the sooner you accept that, the faster you grow. There’s a short list of things that only the owner can really do well:

• Vision — deciding where the company is going and what it’s going to be known for.
• Key hires — choosing the operators and leaders you’ll trust to run crews without you.
• Culture — setting the standard for how your team treats customers, equipment, and each other.
• Big relationships — the property managers, commercial accounts, and partners who can change your year with one conversation.

Almost everything else, someone else on your team can be trained to do, often better than you because it’s the one thing they focus on. When I’m planning my week, I try to protect time for that short list first and let the rest fill in around it. If a task doesn’t need my specific judgment, experience, or relationships, that’s my signal it belongs to someone else.

A simple test you can run this week

Write down everything you did last week, hour by hour. Then put one of three letters next to each item: D for things only you can do (vision, key hires, culture, big relationships), T for things a trained team member could do, and A for back-office admin that a virtual assistant could handle. Total it up. Most owners are shocked at how little of their week is actually spent on “D” work. That gap is your opportunity.

Use the 80/20 Principle to Focus

One of the biggest mentors in my thinking is Perry Marshall, who’s well known for the 80/20 principle. The idea is that roughly 80% of your results come from about 20% of your activities and customers. In a lawn care business, that plays out everywhere. A handful of your accounts probably drive most of your profit. A few referral sources probably send most of your best customers. A couple of services likely carry the bulk of your margin.

So instead of treating every task and every customer the same, I ask: what’s the 20% that’s driving the results, and am I giving it the attention it deserves? Then I do the harder thing, which is to stop over-investing in the 80% that drains time for little return. That might mean firing the chronically unhappy customer who eats your whole week, or dropping the service line that’s more headache than profit. Saying no there frees you up to pour into the 20% that actually compounds.

Delegate the Mowing and the Admin

I’ll be direct: the only way I got out of the field by choice was by building teams, training operators, and handing the work off in a way I could trust. I didn’t just disappear and hope. I trained people to my standard, gave them the systems to follow, and then let them own it.

The mowing and field work goes to crews you’ve trained. The back-office work — scheduling, invoicing follow-up, data entry, inbox triage — is exactly the kind of thing I hand to virtual assistants. Those two moves together are what freed me to lead instead of just labor. You can learn more about how my landscaping company operates at Bloomington Landscape.

If delegating scares you, start small. Pick one recurring task you do every week that doesn’t require your judgment, write down exactly how you do it, and hand it off. Watch it for a few cycles, fix what breaks, then move to the next one. Delegation is a skill that gets stronger every time you use it.

Batch Your Work and Protect Focused Time

Even after you delegate, the building work still needs space to happen, and it won’t happen if your day is a thousand interruptions. The fix is batching: group similar tasks together instead of scattering them. Do all your hiring calls in one block. Review numbers at one set time. Handle approvals in a single sweep rather than reacting to your phone all day.

Then guard a block of focused time each week for the “D” work — the vision, the planning, the key relationships — like it’s your most important appointment, because it is. When that time is on the calendar and protected, the building work finally gets done instead of getting squeezed out by whatever’s loudest.

Learn to Say No

None of this works if you say yes to everything. Every yes to a low-value task is a no to the few things that actually move your business. Learning to say no — to the wrong customer, the wrong job, the distraction dressed up as an opportunity — is one of the most important skills an owner ever develops. It’s not rude; it’s leadership. Protecting your time is how you protect the company’s future.

Your One-Week Game Plan

1. Track every hour you work for one week and label each task D, T, or A.
2. Identify your “D” work — the few things only you can do — and put a protected block on next week’s calendar for it.
3. Pick one “T” task to hand to a crew member and one “A” task to hand to a virtual assistant. Write the steps down before you delegate.
4. Find your 20% — the accounts and activities driving most of your results — and decide what 80% you’ll say no to.
5. Batch your recurring work into set blocks instead of all-day reacting.

That’s the same progression that took me from a minivan in 2011 to four businesses today. It didn’t happen because I worked more hours. It happened because I got intentional about which hours mattered and built a team to carry the rest.

If you want help thinking through how to make this shift in your own business, I offer a free coaching session where we can talk it through together. You can grab a time on my coaching page — I’d genuinely love to help you spend your time on the work that builds something lasting.