Over the last several years, I have spent extensive time talking with landscape industry leaders, networking at conferences and attending educational events. I have discovered there is one metric that every highly profitable company tracks, and that’s labor hour variance. Payroll, and direct production payroll, is the number one expense on most of our P&Ls, (with the exception of some subcontractor-heavy companies). Labor variance is critical; it’s going to tell you how well you’re doing or how poorly you’re operating.