Happy hump day, LM readers! Here’s this week’s line-up of helpful articles for your reading pleasure.
“Occupational Outlook Handbook: Grounds Maintenance Workers”
BLS.gov
A PLANET tweet tipped me off to the latest figures about landscape industry employment from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The agency says, “Employment of grounds maintenance workers is projected to grow 13 percent from 2012 to 2022, about as fast as the average for all occupations. More workers will be needed to keep up with increasing demand for lawn care and landscaping services from large institutions and individual homeowners. Job prospects should be very good.” Read: Workers will continue to be hard to come by. That said, the site is worth a look to see how your wages stack up to national averages.
#landscape jobs projected to increase by 13% in 2022. http://t.co/FvI38lOMvm
— PLANET (@PLANET2005) January 16, 2014
“Survey: Email Is 40 Times More Effective Than Facebook and Twitter”
Entrepreneur.com
The results of a McKinsey & Co. study outlined in this article are not an invitation to spam your customer and prospect list, but they are an indication of where you may be better served spending your precious marketing time and dollars. Hint: Email is likely more effective for customer acquisition than all social media efforts combined.
“Small Business Optimism Crawls Forward”
NFIB.org
According to the National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB), small business optimism ended the year slightly up from November at 93.9 but below the pre-recession average. Those results aren’t too far off from our assessment of the Green Industry in October’s Industry Pulse report. We shared good news on the housing front here last week; still, it’s less than ideal to read from NFIB that consumer spending, especially on services, has lagged.
