We’ll Keep You Sharp
Recently I asked two of my mentors, Frank Mariani of Mariani Landscape in Chicago and Mike Bogan, CEO of LandCare in San Diego and our host for the 2019 NALP Field Trip, what motivates them to continue to grow their enormously successful companies. Here’s what they shared with me:
Many of us who are owners or managers teach our teams to stand out from the competition by always doing a little more for our clients—taking their trash cans in, picking up their newspaper, saying hello, please, and thank you. But how many of us regularly and reliably apply this same approach internally? How many of us look for and remember to practice small acts of appreciation for our team members?
With June coming to a close and the Fourth of July holiday this Thursday, it’s a good time to take a step back and look at what jobs and prospects you have in your pipeline. At Grunder Landscaping Co., our sales team continues to proactively seek new work, and I am doing everything I can to get in front of as many people as will let me. How do we do this?
In my 35 years of running Grunder Landscaping and another 20 or so running a green-industry consultancy, I have toured more landscaping companies than I can count. And yet I never, ever tire of it. Why? Because, in my experience, it is the single fastest way you can learn ways to make your own business better.
As most of you know, I am a firm believer in the old adage that people do business with people they know, like, and trust. It seems obvious that this is true, but how many of us really keep this top of mind as we try to win at sales and grow our businesses? This week I dropped by one company that sure does and learned about the low-cost, high-dividend event they hold every month to drive client engagement:
On Friday, June 7, ambitious landscape professionals from all across the country gathered in Cincinnati for a one-day sales bootcamp led by Marty. One issue that came up again and again was the gap that sometimes grows between a sales team, with its single-minded focus on getting work, and the production team, who then have to actually deliver on what the former promised. When the two teams don’t approach their work as a partnership, you have a recipe for disaster.
With the ongoing labor challenge in our industry, nearly all of us are in a continual state of flux, losing team members and adding new ones. Many of our new hires do not have a lot of experience in landscaping, and sometimes it turns out that those that do have it learned bad or insufficient practices at another company that now have to be unlearned. This makes having a deliberate and . effective training program critical.
If your crews are heading out in the morning and stopping at McDonald’s or elsewhere to load up on breakfast or snacks before going to their job sites, you’re losing valuable time and money. We used to have this same problem at Grunder Landscaping, until w came up with a way to solve it that benefitted everyone.
