How much should landscaping and trades businesses pay themselves?
Feast in June, famine in January, and gear that breaks in between. The math below uses GreenLine Yards, the demo crew inside Counsel.
GreenLine Yards, a landscaping crew, runs a 42% margin and clears a median $5,200 a month after every cost. Its worst honest month is $2,400. With $31,500 in the bank against $5,700 of monthly burn, it holds 5.5 months of runway.
The safe draw sits at or below the $5,200 median, with a written answer for how a $2,400 month gets bridged. A draw set above the median here would quietly spend the runway one month at a time.
Median of the last 6 to 8 months of profit as the ceiling; worst honest month as the floor; cash runway as the referee. The full method, including how to compute it by hand in ten minutes, is in the main pay-yourself guide, and the calculator sorts your months for you.
What is specific to landscaping and trades businesses
Your median only means something computed across the whole season cycle: a June median is a fantasy in January. Trades businesses should hold a bigger cash cushion than the four-month default, because your equipment can convert a good month into a bad one with a single hydraulic failure.
Connect Square, Stripe, Shopify, Etsy, QuickBooks, or your bank. Every answer carries a receipt: the method, the sample size, and the confidence. When the math is not conclusive, it says so.
Get Counsel on the App Store Try the web demoCounsel's rule, applied to its own content: every figure above is computed, sourced from our demo businesses or your own inputs, never invented. This is cash math, not tax or legal advice. Written and maintained by the founder.