Atlantic-Oase held its professional conference last week in Cleveland, Ohio. The event brought pond and water feature professionals from across the country to the Cleveland area for three days of education, tours and business development.
The event kicked off with tours of Atlantic-Oase’s headquarters in Aurora, Ohio, on Oct. 25 and a day of education on Oct. 26.
Atlantic-Oase also took attendees to downtown Cleveland for an evening at Music Box Supper Club following the education sessions.
Business growth
The event’s education sessions kicked off with a keynote from Marty Grunder, CEO of Grunder Landscaping Co. and The Grow Group and a columnist for Landscape Management magazine.
Grunder talked about the mistakes he made in his nearly 40 years with Grunder Landscaping Co., and how attendees can grow their businesses.
Grunder said it may seem like a positive thing to have a good company, but a good company can cause ownership and leadership to be complacent and not strive for greatness.
“When you’re good, you’re comfortable – good is the enemy of great,” he said. “We can almost talk ourselves into not pursuing greatness, because we’re so thankful for what we have.”
Grunder encouraged attendees to adopt three mindsets: structure follows vision, controls work better than controlling and people drive culture and culture eats everything.
“If you don’t get intentional about where you’re going, you’re going to be wandering around aimlessly,” he said. “A year from now, what are the things that have to happen for me to consider the previous year a success?”
Grunder said he and the GLC team are very intentional with hires, looking for team members who fit the company culture. Grunder shared his philosophy on how he and the Grunder Landscaping Co. help team members grow and expand responsibilities: give them a significant project and see what they do with it.
“The best reason to grow a company is you have so many good people … if you don’t grow the company, they will leave,” Grunder said a mentor of his once told him.
Know your numbers
Grunder also led a session on what numbers business owners need to monitor. Grunder said the first plateau a business owner will experience is at $1 million. This typically happens, Grunder said, with an owner who is involved in almost every aspect of the business.
“What gets that contractor to $2 million or $3 million is their ability to say no to opportunities that are really just distractions,” he said. “Entrepreneurs are really good at saying yes. We say yes because yes brings us joy.”
He encouraged attendees to know what to say yes to and what to say no to. He said understanding what a business does better than anyone else and what an ideal client looks like will help get a business on the right path.
Grunder said after implementing Aspire at GLC, his company learned a lot about what profit centers were most profitable.
“We thought we weren’t making money cutting grass,” he said, noting after implementing Aspire, the leadership team discovered it was the most profitable department.
He encouraged attendees to think about implementing business management software. Even small businesses can benefit from the data this software can generate, he said.
“You need to have something aggregating your data,” he said. “You can only improve what you measure.”
Other education sessions
The day continued with interactive sessions on advanced water feature design techniques, Atlantic-Oase’s clear water pond system, the benefit of plants, lake therapy, accounting and more.
Atlantic-Oase also debuted new products during one education session. While these products won’t officially launch until early next year, the products include new fountain basins, new basalt kits, a new more efficient pump, variable speed controllers, ionizers and more.
Thorsten Muck, CEO of Atlantic-Oase, said the new pump is the “Biggest innovation in the last 10 years.”
