Happy April! Where I live in Ohio, it’s felt like spring has taken forever and a day to get here. It’s finally starting to warm up and the sun is at last peeking out, which means successful landscaping companies are about to get very busy. This is obviously great for business, but it can also be very taxing on our.

Where I live, there are two grocery stores in town that are intently focused on a higher-end clientele: Whole Foods, the national chain recently acquired by Amazon, and Dorothy Lane Market (DLM), a locally owned and operated grocery that’s now celebrating its 70th year. I find these two businesses particularly.

Ohio Nursery & Landscape Association The Buckeye March/April 2018 By Marty Grunder With spring afoot, everyone in our industry is about to get incredibly busy. The days will be packed from morning to night, and you will very likely feel as if you can't think or see straight. You will get stressed out, your team will.

With spring nearly sprung and our industry’s busy season about to get underway, I know many of you are struggling with finding good workers. I would love to be able to tell you—and me!—that there’s a simple silver bullet to solve this problem. But the truth is it takes hard work to find hard workers. But there are.

This week I had the privilege—and the fun—of speaking to the students in an entrepreneurship class at one of our local high schools. These young people were polite, attentive, and ambitious. Their knowledge was impressive and their questions were incisive. It was neat to see. I make a concerted effort to speak to kids.

Lawn & Landscape March 2018 Sales Call By Marty Grunder It may be hard to believe after the long, cold winter many of us have had, but spring is about to spring. And when it does, landscape pros will go from calm to chaos as we’re launched into what my friend and mentor Mike Rorie calls the 100 Days of Hell. Like.

As many of you know, we just wrapped up our GROW! 2018 Annual Conference on Wednesday in Tampa, where we were joined by hundreds of landscape pros from all across the country who want to get bigger and better. We talked a lot about leadership over the three days we were together, both because it’s critical to running.

Lawn & Landscape February 2018 Sales Call By Marty Grunder Recently, one of our most successful Marty Grunder! Inc. clients asked me what actions the CEO of a landscaping company should take on a daily, weekly, monthly and annual basis. The head of a $5-million operation, this client is always looking for ways to.

With GROW! 2018 just one week away, I’ve been spending time preparing for the keynote session, when I’ll lead a free-ranging discussion with Clay Mathile and his son, Mike. Clay purchased the Iams pet food company for $1.2M in 1982 and 17 years later sold it to Procter & Gamble for $2.3B; he was the only shareholder..

Think forward to December 2018: Where do you want your business to be? What do you need to put in place now to get there? Here Marty shares what he’s learned about the power of strategic planning from mentor Clay Mathile, former CEO and owner of the Iams pet food company, and what the team at Grunder Landscaping is.