From Survey Figure to Hiring Decision: A Mowing Contractor Test

What does Aspire's 2026 survey actually tell a mowing contractor?

Aspire's 2026 Commercial Landscape Industry Report is a vendor reported survey. Aspire Software, a ServiceTitan company, published it in October 2025, and Thrive Analytics ran the poll of 1,015 commercial landscape contractors with fieldwork from May 2 to May 23, 2025. Those dates and that count come from published summaries, because the full report sits behind a download form.

The loudest themes are labor shortages and economic pressure. Aspire's guide places labor beside rising costs and economic uncertainty rather than ranking it alone. According to a summary of the report, contractors answered that pressure by focusing on client retention and operational efficiency more than by adding services.

For a mowing contractor, that is a direction, not a headcount. It tells you what peers say they are prioritizing. It does not tell you how many seats your crew is short, or whether a particular route is worth taking on.

How much weight should a vendor survey carry?

Aspire sells software to contractors, so the report serves a vendor's interest in the market it sells into. That does not make the findings wrong. It does mean the question wording and the choice of themes deserve a second look before anyone writes a budget line from them.

Respondents also report about themselves. A contractor answering a labor question may recall the hardest hiring month of the year rather than the average one. The summaries we reviewed gave no breakdown by company size or region, and those splits matter a great deal when a six person crew and a regional firm running many trucks face the same headline.

Service Robot Co. is a vendor too, selling integration and robot leasing. Weigh our figures, and anyone else's, by the same standard.

Which survey figures should stay out of your board deck?

Several numbers circulate around this report, and most of them could not be traced to the source. The search did not turn up the report's labor shortage percentages, so this article does not state one. Three other claims are also left out.

• An outlook split attributed to the National Association of Landscape Professionals. One summary credits it to NALP, but no NALP page confirming it was found.
• Growth and margin priorities. One aggregator page reports them, no other page carries them, and they were not checked against Aspire's report.
• An Ontario labor deficit figure. It comes from a separate Landscape Ontario survey, not from Aspire, and must not be attributed to Aspire.

How do you test a survey claim against your hiring log?

Start by rewriting the claim as something you can count. Labor is tight is not testable. Open crew seats that stayed open past your normal fill window is.

Then pull the log for the same window, using the same definitions. Most contractors need four fields: the date a seat opened, the date a qualified person started, any offer that was declined, and any route trimmed or turned down because no one was free to run it.

If the log shows open seats costing routes, the survey's labor theme is now backed by your local evidence. If it shows steady staffing and renewals lost for other reasons, you have just avoided a hire you did not need. Either result is useful, and only one of them is a survey finding.

• Match the window. Use the same calendar months the survey covered, or your peak season, and say which one you chose.
• Count seats, not applicants. A busy job board says little about how many roles stayed open.
• Tie routes to crew. Note each lawn you declined or slowed because a seat was empty, along with the crew hours it would have taken.
• Set the pass line before you look. Decide in advance which result would support the survey and which would contradict it.

Does the evidence point to a hire, a lease, or a tighter route map?

Once the test is run, the choice usually narrows to three paths: add a crew member, tighten routes and renewals, or add a robot for the repeatable passes. Each answers a separate failure in the log.

A labor shortage appears as declined work. A margin problem appears as overtime and drive time that never reaches an invoice. A retention problem appears as renewals that did not come back. Matching the fix to the failure matters more than matching it to the headline.

The survey's emphasis on client retention and efficiency points the same way. Holding contracts with the crew you have is often the cheaper thing to test first.

Where do robot mowers fit in that test?

A robot mower works best on repeatable turf with clear boundaries. It can take some passes, so crew hours move toward trimming, edging and cleanup, which still need people. It needs supervision and does not suit every lawn, so run each site through the test rather than assuming a fit.

Service Robot Co. is an OEM neutral integrator. We pick robots across manufacturers based on the site, lease them through financing on a three year lease, and deploy, integrate, train and service each unit under RoboCare, our service program, backed by regional service engineers in every state we service. Our offer is one fixed lease payment quoted after a site assessment, so the cost is set before the robot arrives.

Take a robot proposal through the same log test. Ask how many passes it would cover on your actual routes, and how many crew hours those passes would free, rather than accepting a general hours claim.

How should leaders record the decision?

Record the survey as context, the log as evidence, and the decision rule as the commitment. A leadership team that can see all three can revisit the call when the log changes, instead of defending a headline it no longer believes.

Set a review date. Labor conditions move, so schedule a fresh look once the season's log is full. Aspire's on demand webinar, Beyond the Data: Insights from the 2026 Landscape Industry Report, offers Aspire's commentary on the report, and the full report should be read for breakdowns before anyone quotes a figure from it.