There's a sliding scale on the craziness that can be a morning roll-out at a landscaping company. Is your daily morning dispatch:
- A three-ring circus
- Organized chaos
- Orderly loading and leaving
In my 40 years running Grunder Landscaping Co., we've lived all three kinds of mornings. Sometimes all in the same week. But we've learned and gotten better at what we do year after year, in large part because we've seen the way other companies manage their mornings and we've learned from what they did.
One area where we've made big improvements on reducing the chaos is in the way we manage green goods and our plant yard. As we've grown rapidly in the past few years, the number of plants we're storing and dispatching each day has also grown. Having systems in place that are scalable as we grow has been the key to keeping our plant yard from descending into chaos.
Plant Orders and Delivery
The first key to our organization is to be organized when we're ordering and having plants delivered. One person on our team orders all green goods for the company once jobs are marked as "won" in our software. We order all of our plants through LandscapeHub, who organizes deliveries for us to always be on Wednesdays. This helps us know when to expect them so we can plan accordingly to have the right number of people at the shop for unloading and processing the delivery.
Tagging Plants
The plants in our plant yard are already allocated for a specific job when they're ordered, so once the delivery is unloaded our team gets to work tagging and organizing plants by the job they'll go to. We have labeled rows both outside and in our hoop house and irrigation set up throughout the area to reduce the hand-watering required, and plants are put into groups and then tagged with the last name of the property they'll go to.
Plants grouped together by the property they'll be used on, with white tags labeling the groups.
Clear Communication
Especially during floral pushes, we have extra hands in the plant yard to help in the morning. In the tickets for the day, the Team Leader will have information on where the plants they need are currently housed. One of our team members who manages the plant yard will also be out there overseeing the loading process and helping. Click here to see a video of what this looks like during our summer floral push.
The recipe for avoiding the morning circus lies in planning ahead and having systems in place to support your team. If you're looking to reduce the chaos in your own company, join us this fall at one of our Grunder Landscaping Co. Field Trips. We still have space this week - on September 11-12 - if you want to make a quick trip to Dayton. You'll see our morning roll-out in action and we'll also show you the systems we've built to make the roll-out, and our days, smooth sailing. Come see me!
Marty Grunder
Founder & CEO
The Grow Group & Grunder Landscaping Co.