A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that our team had a meeting on the calendar to work through renewals and requoting for 2027. We've had that meeting now, and I want to share how we approach this time of year, because a renewal is one of the biggest opportunities you have and also one of the easiest to waste.

The temptation is to roll last year's contract forward, add a small bump, and move on. But renewal season is really your one clean chance each year to fix the accounts that aren't working. Here are the three questions we ask about every property:

1. Do we want this renewal?

You don't always want to keep an account if it's been causing you problems. Some are too far off our routes, some are more headache than they're worth, and some keep us from doing the kind of work we're proud of. As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, we've decided to let a few accounts go for exactly these reasons. Letting the wrong work go frees up capacity for the right work.

2. Do we need to raise the price, and where?

This is the one I want you to slow down on. A blanket increase across your whole book is the lazy move, and it punishes your good clients to make up for your bad ones. Be systematic instead: review the data property by property and find the accounts where your margin is too tight. Raise prices there. Your healthy accounts may not need a change at all. Making your problem properties profitable helps everyone, including the clients whose price you never touch.

3. What did we miss last year?

Every property teaches you something over a season. Maybe a job ran more hours than we bid, maybe the scope crept, maybe we ate costs we shouldn't have. Renewal is when you capture all of that and adjust your hours and your price to match reality. If you don't, you carry last year's mistake straight into next year.

I've told this story before, but there is one property we maintain where some years the spring clean up was coming in as high as 30% over hours, while in other years we had bid it right. We made this mistake for years before we dug into it. When we did, we found out that the difference between a good year and a bad year for that property was the weather: when the property was wet, the team couldn't use the easier access route and took nearly double the steps to access the backyard instead. We were able to keep our pricing consistent for that client with one simple change: we have a Group Leader check the property to make sure it's dry enough before we send a crew out. 

Get ahead of this.

Commercial budget cycles are already open, and it's smart to start on residential renewals now too, even though they may not close for a while. We want ours out the door before the end of the year, especially because we know we're making changes for some clients. The earlier you communicate a price change or a program change, the better your odds of keeping the client. Nobody likes a surprise in January.

So this week, pull up your client list and sort every account into one of three buckets: keep as-is, keep but reprice, or let go. You don't have to act on all of it today, but you can't make a good renewal decision until you've at least looked.

Whether these conversations land comes down to how you sell them, and that's what we'll dig into during our Landscape Pro's Sales Training on September 28-29. If you want to finish 2026 strong and set up 2027 right, join us online.

Marty Grunder
Founder & CEO
The Grow Group & Grunder Landscaping Co.