subject: When To Consider Outsourcing Lawn Maintenance [print this page] Before we venture deep into our discussion on when to consider outsourcing lawn maintenance, it is important for us to try and put the term outsourcing' in the right context for the purposes of this discussion. In recent days, the word outsourcing,' has come to bear a negative connotation, especially in the developed western countries as it is seen to be a reference to the trend where western firms export jobs' to cheap eastern locations, thus robbing fellow westerners of work opportunities. In actual fact, what that trend refers to is what would be more precisely referred to as off-shoring.' Off-shoring is part of outsourcing, but it is by no means the only thing that there is to outsourcing. It is but just one element of outsourcing. Outsourcing is wider, and it simply refers to the arrangement where one firm contracts another one to handle a particular operational element on its behalf. In this case, it is quite immaterial whether the other firm so contracted is local or foreign. It is the contracting that constitutes outsourcing. At least, that is the definition of outsourcing we will work with, for the purpose of this discussion.
Having understood what we mean by outsourcing, we can now proceed to explore when one should consider outsourcing their lawn maintenance function. It is clear, from our earlier submission, that outsourcing lawn maintenance would mean contracting another firm to handle the lawn maintenance. So what we are interested in here is trying to understand when it would make sense to consider doing so: getting another firm to handle your lawn maintenance.
As it turns out, there are two situations in which lawn maintenance outsourcing would be considered a rational step. The first is where an accounting analysis shows that it would be better to get another firm to do lawn maintenance for you, than for you to attempt to do the lawn maintenance in-house. In many cases, this often turns out to be the case except in the nations where labor is truly cheap. It is worth keeping in mind that the main cost element in lawn maintenance is the labor element because lawn maintenance, whatever way you choose to go about it, still turns out to be a rather labor intensive activity. The good thing about it, however, is that it doesn't need constant labor: an hour or two per day will usually be adequate for lawn maintenance. This means that keeping a full-time in-house employee to do lawn maintenance may be wasteful, as the employee has to be idle for many hours. There is, of course, the option of contracting a part-timer to do it but we tend to face a situation where getting reliable part-timers becomes a very tall order, as the part-timers have to keep running around for other jobs to make ends meet. This is where the idea of contracting the lawn maintenance business to a firm specializing in that makes sense, as they will usually be able to provide reliable part time workers for the task.
The other situation in which lawn maintenance outsourcing would be considered a rational step is where one wants to tap into the expertise of the firms in that line of business. Thanks to the fact that lawn maintenance is what these firms do day in day out,' they tend to become very good at it in the long run. Subsequently, an accounting analysis may reveal that it is cheaper to do lawn maintenance in-house, but you still opt it to outsource to these firms in order to tap into their expertise.
