The mowing contract is not the win. The property manager is.

A maintenance contract is priced competitively and often close to cost. The work that follows it — irrigation repairs, plantings, drainage, seasonal colour — carries the margin.

Whether an account produces that work depends on the client, and the kind of client varies systematically by how they were won.

A bid won on price from a public tender behaves nothing like an account won through a property manager who already trusted you, even at identical contract value.

Including enhancement revenue in the export is what makes that difference visible, and it frequently reverses a ranking built on contract value alone.

It is one column of difference and it changes the conclusion more often than any other choice on this page.

Commercial landscape accounts renew annually, and an account held for five years is worth several times one lost after the first season.

Measured on the first contract, every source looks similar; measured across renewals they separate sharply, because retention tracks how the relationship started.

The report sums by client across the window and keeps first-year revenue apart from renewals, which gives both the acquisition cost and the retention picture.

It also exposes the case that looks like success and is not: a source producing a strong first year and nothing after it.

Nothing here predicts churn; it reports what the accounts from each source actually billed.

Where snow is sold, it is weather-dependent revenue with its own contract structure, often to the same clients and often at very different margins.

Blended into the annual figure it makes a hard winter look like a marketing success and a mild one like a failure, neither of which is true.

Separating it gives a maintenance ranking that is comparable year over year, and a snow ranking that is honestly about the weather.

Where the export carries a division or service line this is automatic; where it does not, the seasonality of the amounts identifies it quickly.

The point is the same as everywhere else in this catalogue: revenue caused by weather should not be read as evidence about advertising.

Commercial grounds work is bought by people who manage several properties and talk to each other, and one satisfied manager can produce a series of accounts over years.

That channel produces no invoice from any advertising platform, so it sits outside the marketing report entirely while quietly carrying the business.

Recording the referring relationship at the bid stage puts it into the same comparison on the same account value.

Contractors who do this generally find the return on relationship-building far exceeds the return on lead generation, which is a budget conclusion rather than a marketing one.

It also shows which managers are worth the lunch, which is a more actionable output than a channel ranking.