Scale Up Your Landscaping Company Without Losing What Makes You Special
From the outside looking in, it's clear to us that Russell Landscape does two things really, really well: they operate efficiently to make scaling possible, and they maintain relationships with their team and clients.
The personal touch required to maintain relationships often puts that at a juxtaposition with scaling up and being efficient, but Russell Landscape proves that doesn't need to be the case. As we discussed last week, their leader Teddy Russell believes in maintaining tension in the business, and the team's strategy for managing both efficiency and relationships is one of the ways that mentality manifests.
Operating Efficiently
Training their team well is a key part of their strategy for operating efficiently. To do it, they use tactics like "Equipment Rodeos" and hands-on in-the-field training to make sure their team is equipped to do their work and to do it well.
They'll cover the training they do and how it helps their team be both efficient and maintain quality of work during our tour of their facility on June 6-7.
Maintaining Relationships
Investing in their team has paid dividends in the relationships that their team, in turn, has with their clients.
Relationships have been key to the company's growth and expansion. A tactical way that they make sure to manage relationships with their maintenance clients is their focus on Key Accounts. For these accounts, the Account Managers must visit the customer monthly, with other leadership team members attending this meeting regularly too. A site audit is created during this meeting to capture any changes or issues found, and it's a great way for their team to strengthen their relationship with clients and ensure they're staying on top of small issues before they become larger ones. It can also be an opportunity to look for enhancements.
We do similar things at Grunder Landscaping Co. and regularly train our team, too - last week, we covered installing cobble streams, and this coming week I'll lead a soft skills workshop. Our sales and production teams are also building relationships with clients, and we're doing site audits in Aspire to monitor quality. As we focus on growth ourselves, it's clear to me that we'll only be successful if we have the right systems in place to both operate efficiently and manage relationships at scale.
Many companies do these things (and do them well!), but every company does this a little differently, and I'm excited to see for myself how Russell Landscape does it. There will no doubt be things I learn from touring their facility that I take back to implement with my own team so we can grow and get better too. Will you be joining us there this summer?
I'll talk to you next Sunday!
Marty Grunder
President & CEO
The Grow Group & Grunder Landscaping Co.