Landscaping Rollup Model
Operating Businesses Financial Model (Free Excel Download)
Model landscaping operations through contracts, project revenue, crew utilization, seasonality, labor, equipment, materials, maintenance routes, and cash conversion.
professionals from Deloitte
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About this model
This model is built for a landscaping company serving residential or commercial customers. It brings recurring maintenance contracts together with enhancement work, design and build projects, and seasonal services such as snow management.
Use it to test branch growth, contract retention, pricing, and crew capacity. The model shows how those choices affect revenue, profit, cash flow, and the value of the business.
What every model includes
Live formulas, no hardcoded values
Outputs are driven by live formulas, so the workbook updates from its assumptions instead of relying on hardcoded results.
All assumptions in one tab
Inputs are clearly marked in the Assumptions tab and separated from calculations, making it clear what to change and what to leave intact.
Statements always balancing
For integrated-statement models, the balance sheet, cash flow, and supporting schedules tie through properly.
Distinct schedules for clarity
Debt, working capital, taxes, and cash flow can get messy quickly. We group calculations in clear schedules, not across disconnected tabs.
No hidden macros or external links
There are no unexplained external workbook links or macros to undermine auditability or portability.
Changes flow through the model
Update a key driver and see the impact carry through the forecast, financing, and return outputs. We never use hardcoded numbers in formulas.
What's inside the Landscaping Rollup Model
- Branch inputs: Year-1 branches, new branches per year, engagements per branch, crew FTE per branch, average engagement value
- Utilisation: Year-1 crew utilisation with an annual ramp and a practical ceiling
- Service mix: grounds maintenance, enhancement, design-and-build and irrigation-and-lighting shares, per-tier value indices and net margins
- Ancillary: snow accounts per branch and seasonal fee, materials and supply markup per engagement, price escalation
- Cost structure: crew and office comp and wage with benefits and wage growth; facilities and fleet, sales and marketing, technology and SG&A as % of gross profit; depreciation (% of revenue); tax
- Capital and working capital: maintenance capex %, branch build-out cost per branch, NWC % of revenue growth, base-year revenue
- Valuation: WACC, terminal growth, net debt, shares outstanding
- Operations sheet: branch roll-forward, utilisation ramp, engagements per branch, total engagements, staff headcount, engagements per crew FTE
Landscaping Rollup Model: How the Financial Model Captures Branch Growth and Contracts
This landscaping financial model provides a seven-year operating forecast and unlevered DCF for a multi-branch commercial and residential landscaping platform. It rolls forward maintenance contracts, cross-sells enhancement, design-build and irrigation work, and costs crew hours explicitly, so you can test how branch expansion, retention and pricing affect revenue, profit and cash flow.
Branch growth and the maintenance contract base
The model rolls the branch estate forward at a steady de novo and tuck-in pace. Two branch measures matter beyond year-end reporting.
- Average branches count mid-year openings for half a year, so per-branch fixed costs such as yard, office admin and plough rigs run off that measure; a ramping branch therefore carries full fixed overhead against a part-year book. Effective branches further weight new openings by a first-year ramp, and it is this vintage-adjusted count that drives account wins, the snow book and the route-capacity ceiling.
- The maintenance contract base itself rolls forward through renewals, attrition and new wins, capped by route capacity. Portfolio book fill is an output of that roll-forward, so adding branches can temporarily dilute fill before the annual cohort shrinks relative to the larger base.
Cross-selling service tiers and pricing normalisation
Grounds maintenance engagements represent the average account base. Enhancement jobs, design-build projects and irrigation jobs are modelled as attach rates on that base, each growing at an annual cross-sell rate.
- The realised revenue mix is therefore an output of the attach rates rather than a fixed assumption, and the four service shares reconcile to 100 percent. Ticket values are the blended engagement value scaled by a per-tier value index.
- Because the indices average slightly above one on the year-one book, the model normalises them by a reference blend index derived from the year-one value-weighted mix. That normalisation ties the realised year-one blended engagement value back to the average engagement value input, while later mix drift still moves the realised ticket.
Crew capacity, utilisation and the loaded hourly cost
Required man-hours are built from account visits, enhancement jobs, install projects, irrigation jobs and in-house snow pushes. Those hours are converted into field-crew FTEs using paid hours per FTE and a billable-utilisation block that separates the mow season from off-season hours.
- Headcount is solved from work booked rather than pinned to a fixed number per branch, so volume growth must be staffed and paid for. The loaded crew rate applies overtime share, overtime premium and benefits to the base wage.
- Field-crew labour is a direct cost above the gross-profit line. Seasonality enters through annual proxies rather than a monthly calendar: the year-round crew retained on lower-billable off-season hours, plus the overtime load, create the shoulder idle hours that make the snow book economically necessary rather than opportunistic.
Cost stack, cash flow and valuation mechanics
Direct cost comprises tier materials, field-crew labour and three snow cost lines: de-icing material, subcontracted ploughing and equipment standby. Gross profit is struck after all of these.
- Overhead is not geared to gross profit; office and branch admin, facilities and yard, and fleet and vehicles run off average branches or crew trucks, while only sales and marketing, technology and corporate SG&A are percentages of revenue.
- The unlevered free-cash-flow bridge adds back depreciation, deducts fleet replacement and branch build-out capex and the working-capital change, and separately discloses the peak seasonal working-capital swing that a mow-season business funds. Net debt rolls forward on a cash sweep, while the DCF capitalises a normalised terminal cash flow into enterprise value, equity value and value per share.
Formatted to IB standards
Named theme colors repaint the whole workbook in one click, on top of an investment-banking structure with clear input, output, and cross-sheet reference styling - brand-ready, institutional-grade, and fully auditable.
Created by ex-finance professionals
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Frequently asked
What is a landscaping financial model?+
A landscaping financial model captures the seven-year operating economics and intrinsic value of a multi-branch commercial and residential landscaping platform that runs recurring grounds-maintenance contracts alongside seasonal enhancement, high-ticket design and build installation, irrigation and lighting work, counter-seasonal snow and ice contracts and a materials and supply markup. It rolls a branch count forward, converts a crew-utilisation ramp into total client engagements, prices engagements across a four-tier service mix at a blended average value and value index, runs the crew-heavy cost stack to EBITDA, and discounts an unlevered free-cash-flow stream to enterprise value, equity value, and value per share.
How is landscaping revenue built?+
Revenue is driven by the branch estate and its utilisation: total engagements equal closing branches times engagements per branch times a crew-utilisation factor that ramps to a ceiling, and service revenue splits those engagements across a grounds maintenance, enhancement, design-and-build and irrigation-and-lighting mix, each priced at a blended average annual engagement value times a per-tier value index. Branch-driven snow and ice contracts and engagement-driven materials and supply markup layer on to total revenue.
Why does the EBITDA margin expand over the forecast?+
Field-crew and office labour scales with the branch footprint, but revenue per branch climbs as the crew-utilisation ramp lifts engagement throughput toward its ceiling. Because labour is broadly fixed to the branch count while utilisation compounds, EBITDA margin expands across the horizon even at a flat menu price, the operating-leverage story at the heart of every landscaping roll-up.
Why an unlevered DCF instead of an EBITDA multiple?+
A landscaping platform still builds out and equips each branch with a capital-intensive service-truck and mower fleet, tools and inventory, so EBITDA overstates cash. The model bridges to unlevered free cash flow, NOPAT plus depreciation, less maintenance and build-out capex, less the change in working capital, and discounts it at a WACC, then adds a Gordon-growth terminal value. The implied EV/EBITDA falls out as a sanity check rather than as the valuation input.
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