Being the best doesn’t happen overnight

Posted on January 26, 2013

Winter time is a great time for reflection in the landscape business. There’s no denying that snow keeps us more than busy but in those lulls between snow events winter is a time for planning and improvement. Last winter my HR Manager and I were having one of our famous inspirational chats about our employees and the potential and growth we see for them. We were commenting on how some of our employees are die-hards. They love everything about us and would do anything for us. They think we are the best place in the world to work. My HR Manager stopped me and said that she’s always been a little bit envious when the list of New Jersey’s Best Places to Work was published because it’s such an honor to make the list and she wished Duke’s could make the list. Of course I said, “Well, why couldn’t we make the list? I know we’re a GREAT place to work!” doing my best Tony the Tiger impression. She then proceeded to tell me the process for application and how they survey all your employees and how they go over your company with a fine tooth comb and how we’re a landscape company and how having seasonal employees would probably be detrimental to our chances. I could see where she was coming from; it did look as though we would likely not meet their requirements for New Jersey’s Best Places to Work but it did give me an idea. If we surveyed all our employees, and asked them to be anonymous and honest, we would have a really good idea of where we stood as company, never mind our place in the running for NJ’s best. So we did; we surveyed them all. As we analyzed all the results, we found out quite a bit about ourselves. We found out things we already knew; that our employees were loyal (99%), would do anything to make sure the job got done(99%), and would help us to succeed(100%). We also found out things that we suspected; insurance benefits are important and in this economy we were going to have to try to come up with more affordable solutions to try to help our employees and their families. But possibly most important, we found out our strengths and weaknesses. Without these, clearly defined for us, how are we to improve? This is just the first step for us as we hope to move towards becoming one of New Jersey’s Best Places to Work. We know that working to the top doesn’t happen overnight but we are certainly committed to the climb.

The Green Industry & Equipment Expo

Posted on November 23, 2012

Every October thousands of landscape company owners and managers descend upon Louisville, Kentucky for the largest green industry expo and conference in the US. The conference is action packed with classes and seminars for companies, as well as serving as an opportunity for some good old-fashioned tire-kicking on all the newest equipment that the expo center holds. With so much going on and so much to see it can really be hard to choose what you would like to see and do. So this year, with the GIE recently behind me, I figured I’d write a little recap of what are the best things to attend during the conference and what to avoid.

Let me first start off saying for those who might be deliberating whether to attend the GIE, it is well worth it! I know that when your business is struggling it may seem frivolous to spend money to attend the conference but truly what you can get out of the GIE can help your business so exponentially that it really is worth it! Some years I’ve brought my whole management staff but in lean years I will bring just one or two employees. And to be quite honest in really lean times, I just go by myself. When the conference is within driving distance we’ve even driven all together in a van. (Note: If the GIE is more than 12 hours driving distance away this can fall under the category of team building ideas that can go bad, fast.) There are always inexpensive hotels near the expo center and the GIE furnishes attendees with shuttle service to most of the local hotels. The GIE has been held in Louisville for around 5 years now, so they’ve thought out all the details to help make the conference an easy experience.

BEST THINGS TO ATTEND?

Hands down the best thing to attend is the Breakfast of Champions. These roundtable group discussions happen every morning of the conference, moderated by an industry expert, a “Champion”, in a particular subject. The champion starts the topic and then lets those seated at the table take the reins. A well-loved favorite of GIE attendees, the lines to get in are long as people hope to catch a seat at their table of choice. The smart conference goer will plan ahead and get there early. Year after year I get the best information from other companies in this friendly informal meeting of the minds. One of the best pieces of advice that I could give to a new attendee is “You do not have to reinvent the wheel.” There are so many landscape companies across the US and the really smart ones attend the GIE. Whatever your company’s problems are, believe me, someone else has experienced the same issues and they can tell you how they solved it at their company. It’s up to you to listen, gain as much information as you can, and then bring back some remedy ideas to your neck of the woods. The cost of admission to the GIE and the Breakfast of Champions is well worth it when you can bring home valuable solutions.

WHAT TO AVOID

Classes that aren’t directly tied to your company’s needs or focus should be avoided. Sure, a motivational class about sales could be beneficial to everyone but if your company’s problems lie with how to mechanize your snow operations, you’re likely going to go home feeling like you didn’t get anything out of the educational sessions. Another GIE pitfall is going to classes together with your managers. Once you get registered and have the schedule of all sessions, you and your team should huddle up and decide on a strategy. (There’s even an app for that! You can have the entire schedule of events uploaded right to your smartphone!) Splitting up and having each team member go to separate classes often is the best plan. Sometimes particular speakers warrant your whole team hearing the same message but for the most part you want the most bang for your buck. Have everyone take great notes. PLANET does a wonderful job of planning the educational sessions and all the presentations are available after the conference via download. (Another great tip: PLANET records all their sessions for your managers who can’t attend. You can purchase them a copy!)

Whether you are bringing several of your managers or making the trip solo, the GIE often provides an opportunity to look at your company’s big picture. Often fellow attendees prove to be the resource for me and it’s why I make the trip year after year—over 20 years and counting.

Categories: All That Is Green, Business Practices, Landscape Management

Dedication

Posted on October 26, 2012

The following is taken from Duke’s Landscape Management’s Fall 2012 Newsletter. I wanted to share my thoughts and excitement about training and my commitment to my employees. To read the full newsletter and see past newsletters, please visit http://www.DukesLM.com.

Every good company has a mission statement. It’s usually the first thing that aspiring entrepreneurs construct as the vision of their company. Too often it gets placed in a company handbook or attached to a business plan and then is forgotten about and never seen again. Every summer, we at Duke’s like to dust off our mission statement and make sure it’s true and relevant to our company. We like to do this in the form of a company retreat. A kind of misnomer, our retreats are anything but a relaxing get away. We meet off-site for a weekend as a way to tackle large company wide initiatives that often are placed on the sidelines during our busy season. Just this past July all of our managers sat down at a table and looked at our mission statement

[To be a professional landscape management resource who proactively provides value to our clients, both internal and external, while enhancing the overall quality of the environment through employee training, innovation, industry knowledge and our diverse service line. We will develop an honest and trusted relationship with our clients and foster an empowering atmosphere to our employees]

and said to ourselves, “Hey, that’s not half bad! That still encompasses everything that we want for our clients and our employees.” And then not a half-second later we all looked at each other and said “…but it’s kind of long.” With a chuckle we agreed that while every word in our mission statement rings true for what we want for our company we realized that the message or the heart of it might get lost. So we asked ourselves what was connected to every step of our company’s success and the resounding answer was clear: our employees. Our employees, who are out on our clients’ properties every day, ensuring that they are green, groomed, and gorgeous are the most important asset that we have.

So it is with great pride that I tell you of our company’s decision to rededicate ourselves to our employees. We want the very best employees; we want smart, professional problem-solvers who can assist our clients and their properties. For this to happen we realize it cannot be left up to chance. Great employees are good employees who have been invested in, coached, and nurtured. We have taken on a commitment to add a leadership training series for our foremen and managers to our already robust company-wide safety training program. We have re-engineered our on-boarding program to ensure that every employee is getting one-on-one training for the first 3 months with us. This provides a solid standard base of skills and knowledge for every employee that sets them on the right path to being an educated professional out on our clients’ properties. All in all, I believe that investing in our employees is investing in our clients and the future of our company. Valued educated employees who enjoy their jobs inevitably show those skills where it matters most to us, our clients’ properties.

Categories: Business Practices

People People

Posted on September 28, 2012

About 20 years ago I attended a business conference and as part of the seminar they made us all take a personality test. To be honest it felt a little hokey and a bit like going to a fortune teller. I didn’t believe that this test was going to truly be able to pin down what kind of person I was but in the interest of the conference and curiosity, I took it. After we took the test, the presenter went into depth about all the different personality types and what it meant to be each type. I was completely floored at how accurate my score was. I definitely fit the mold for my personality type. It was as though he were reading personality traits for Eric Cross and not just a generic description. I was, and still am for that matter, a type A personality; interested in getting things done, taking action, and sometimes, not spending too much time considering people’s feelings as I do so. This test showed me that I might need to balance my management team back home. While Duke’s needed my type A personality to get us sales and close deals, I definitely needed people who had finesse with matters of conflict and personalities as well. I needed “people people.” 20 years later, a lot of growth and lessons learned I now employ two human resource professionals; a human resource manager to plan and execute development plans for my whole company and an HR generalist who recruits and hires non-stop. About 10 years ago, I hired my current HR manager and with her expertise the level of professionalism and camaraderie really blossomed at Duke’s. Then, between the continued growth planned for the next 3 years and our dedication to developing quality employees I knew we needed to hire another team member. I could have easily added another admin to help with the workload but it just made more sense to hire a full time HR Generalist with expertise in recruiting. Mindy came on board this year and can I just say, wow! Recruiting is always a challenge, especially where we are in tightly populated New Jersey but with a trained and experienced recruiter finding talented people is no longer a struggle. Mindy says, “My approach is to focus on the individual being hired vs. the position being filled. It may be a slower, more focused process, but, in the end, Duke’s hires and retains the best person to fit our values and culture. By continually recruiting, we cultivate a larger pool of motivated, talented, and qualified candidates to choose from as positions open up.” I have learned that having a well-balanced team, with some strong type A’s and some “people people,” can help bring success to any company.

Categories: Business Practices, Landscape Management

The “Magical” Management Retreat

Posted on August 15, 2012

Every year we hold a management retreat to work on strategic planning and team building. Whenever I say this to people I always feel like I have to follow it up with a disclaimer sentence so they don’t get the wrong idea. “We don’t hold hands and sing KumBaYa or anything. We work on big picture stuff.” I think it’s funny that some people view management retreats as either a luxury that is too expensive or a touchy feely new age event that has no room in their bottom-line focused organization. Both of these views are common misconceptions. In reality, management retreats are an amazing way to fast track and implement change in your organization. More so than anything it’s a great way to build team camaraderie and to get buy-in for any projects you might want to start. Sound like a magic bullet? Let me tell you a story and you can decide for yourself. Picture it: Duke’s Landscape Mgmt, early spring following a non-existent snow season. Our HR Manager is on maternity leave. Our new HR Generalist is new to the industry and doing her best to hire for the spring rush. We’ve decided to not participate in the volatile H2B program this year, so we have a big influx of new guys ; talented guys but new nonetheless. Spring is upon us early due to the weather. Some managers are pulling their weight while others are not. Money is tight, hours are long, and tempers seem to be incredibly short. Do you see the picture I’m painting here? It looks like a disaster, doesn’t it? It sure felt like a disaster to me. I kept asking myself, “Why is this so hard?” I’ve seen and been a part of other teams that pulled together in the face of greater adversity than ours and yet my team is having so much trouble. After a bit of introspection I realized that everything that was happening was pretty normal for our industry but how we were dealing with each other was the true problem. My managers were working as individuals and what seemed like some little personality conflicts had snowballed into downright discord and ineffectiveness. My HR manager and I sat down and set our minds to changing that all. We planned a management retreat. This would be an opportunity for us to get out of our normal day-to-day routines and the comfort of those routines and really tackle, head-on, all the problems we were having. We chose a leadership program that suited our needs perfectly and set a plan out for a weekend. (We chose The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni. Read it if you get a chance. It’s a really great book for learning how to build teams.) Management retreats don’t have to be a huge investment in money. If it is within your budget and you can afford a facilitator or if the topic is beyond the spectrum of what your team’s abilities are, I encourage you to hire a professional. There are a ton of talented people out there who can work with your team and your budget to help you accomplish your retreat goals. While it’s amazing to hire a facilitator to come in and lead your team through a retreat sometimes it’s just not feasible. As it happens, my HR Manager has extensive experience in management training and could easily facilitate ours, so we averted a cost there. Over the course of 2 activity filled days we very carefully learned about ourselves, how we interact with each other, how we want to interact with each other, and set a plan as to how we would accomplish that. It was a bit out of everyone’s comfort zone initially but over the course of the weekend, through guided brainstorming and goal setting, we were finally all on the same page. Sprinkle in some much needed bonding time over dinner and cocktails and finally we had the makings of a team. It wasn’t as though someone had waved a magic wand over my team and suddenly everyone was happy and holding hands but something had definitely changed. The retreat had planted a small seed. People who had worked together for years had learned more about each other than they had ever known. New people to the team finally felt accepted and felt they could share their ideas. People had decided on how they wanted to be treated and committed to treating everyone that way. We had walked into the retreat as individuals and walked out a team. Now, don’t get me wrong, it took a lot of planning, the retreat itself was jam packed with work, and the follow-up meetings post-retreat are still taking place but it was all worth it. “Disasters” may come along but now we are a team that can effectively work together to overcome them. I have the beginnings of a great team and am appreciative for the jump-start our retreat provided.

Categories: Business Practices

Bossing Yourself Around

Posted on July 24, 2012

As the president of a small business, I sometimes feel like the sheriff of an old western town. Some days are great; my whole town loves me. The constituents think I have great ideas. They want to be a part of my posse and uphold the law when I’m not around. There was even talk of a parade in my honor! (As humble sheriff, I declined.) Then there are days when I just don’t feel the love. It’s lonely being sheriff. Everyone blames me for the town’s faults. They get mad at me when I have to make tough decisions for the betterment of the town like fining people or making people get out of Dodge or in my case, Dukesville. All in all, being the boss has its ups and downs but truly what’s consistent is that it’s tough. In the past when I had a tough decision to make that I couldn’t bring to my managers, I would ask my wife’s opinion on things. She’s smart and a great judge of character but often she couldn’t help me when it came to landscape decisions. When she got sick of me, I’d ask my friends for advice. Sometimes friends who were fellow landscape company owners were a great source of advice but I often found that their companies were too different than mine and I couldn’t follow down their path. Their ideas wouldn’t work for my company. This was a defining moment for me. Where could I find the help I needed? Enter Bill Cox. I had known Bill for a long time through PLANET and he was having the same exact problems. He, too, was having difficulties being the boss and needed some good constructive feedback. He told me about a peer group that he was joining where the companies were of similar size and design but far enough apart where they weren’t competitors. This seemed exactly like what I needed and now 8 years later, I know it was one of the best business decisions I made. The peer group consists of 6 companies from all around the country and we meet in person each quarter for about 2-3 days. In conference, the group spends a portion of that time on each company. They go over my financials, my business plan, even my employees, all with a fine tooth comb. Suddenly the sheriff of his own town had a town council to listen to! Every time we meet they try to figure out what’s working for me and what’s not. Sometimes they tell me the stuff that I’ve known in the back of my head for a while but when it’s out in front of the whole peer group and away from the confines of my office in New Jersey, it seems a lot clearer. The best part is once they stop grilling me and my portion is over, I get to help them with their companies. It is such a great feeling to have people in a similar situation be able to give and take valuable business advice. And not just any advice; good educated advice that is specific our companies! That, in fact, is priceless.

Thanks to my friend Bill Cox of Lawn Management Company, Inc. Houston TX (www.lmcinc.biz )

Categories: Business Practices, Landscape Management

Taking the Plunge

Posted on June 13, 2012

Taking the plunge: The first in a series of 5 about growing your company

Recently, I’ve been thinking about swimming. Maybe it’s all those inspiring London Olympics commercials I’ve been seeing or maybe it’s the fact that my daughter used her jedi mind tricks on me and convinced me to run a triathlon with her this month but I’ve been thinking about swimming a lot lately. Being in business for the past 35 years I’ve always believed in the adage “Slow and steady wins the race.” I’ve seen friends’ businesses take off from 1 million to 10 million in what seems like overnight and never longed for that amount of stress and headaches. In the past few years with the state of the economy being so fragile it seemed like I was content to just “tread water” and stay at a constant. I really didn’t want to take on anything too big or in my opinion, too risky that could damage my company. So I just stayed in the same place; staying afloat and fine tuning the accounts, equipment, and staff that I had on board already. Then last year, things changed for me. “Slow and steady” didn’t seem to be working any more. For the first time ever, I held a very frank and open company meeting. I stood in front of every single one of my employees and laid out how our company was doing and it wasn’t very pretty. Sure, we were maintaining our size but we weren’t wowing our customers, we weren’t getting new properties, we weren’t getting new talent through the door. We were not treading water, we were getting stagnant. From the front of the room, I stared into the faces of my employees and realized that this had to change. That moment was the first domino in a series of events that would put us on the path to growth. That first domino has pushed us to evolve on how we bid, how we hire, who we hire, how we do just about everything. (These are all topics that will be covered in the rest of this series! Stay tuned!) So while it seems that I took a running leap cannonball straight into the deep end, I believe wholeheartedly that we are becoming a better company right at this very moment because of it.

Crucial Business Question: How will growth affect my company? How will we have to change?

Categories: Business Practices