In my opinion, there’s never a better way to grow your landscaping company or move your company forward than to go and see a successful landscaping company in action and then do a little R&D — rob and duplicate.
One of the biggest ways I’ve improved my own business is by observing other companies and then taking the new ideas I gather from their operation home to implement with our team at Grunder Landscaping Co. It shortens the time it takes us to reach our next goal because we’re learning from what has and hasn’t worked for other companies without having to test and wait to see if the ideas work. We get to start with an idea already proven by another company.
Ideas we’ve taken from other companies include:
1. Taylor Milliken of Milosi’s dumpsters
We took this idea away from Grow! 2022. It sounds silly, but it has saved us a ton of time and money. We got a bigger roll-off dumpster at our facility instead of having smaller bins that we emptied more often. This one is one of those small solutions to a little drip in our business over time that makes us more efficient and profitable. The little drips add up.
2. Scheduling
We’ve changed how we do this over time. We now do it all digitally using Aspire. Every iteration of our work scheduling process has been heavily influenced by what we’ve seen other companies doing. The process we use today is all in Aspire, but we use Trello to help our crews know what trucks and equipment to take with them daily — an idea we got from another attendee at one of our events.
3. Eliminating the limiting beliefs
I often thought the size of my market was limiting our growth potential, but seeing people in other markets helped me realize that we could do what they were doing and grow the business as a result.
Chase Mullin, our Grow! 2021 tour host and president of Mullin, often talks about having this experience when he came to tour Grunder Landscaping Co. in Dayton. At the time, his company was two pickup trucks he ran out of his driveway. Today, his company is larger than ours. The tours are as much about inspiration as they are anything else.
Join us in 2024
We started hosting the Grow! Annual Conference so landscape professionals could learn in this same way I found most helpful for my business. Each year, we select our location based on the company we want everyone to tour as part of the event.
We carefully select our tour host based on several factors, and for 2024 we’re excited to show everyone the operational powerhouse that is RJ Lawn & Landscape. They do so many things well and operate so efficiently. Every company in America could learn something from touring their operation. We’re so excited to introduce our attendees to owners (and husband-and-wife duo) Ryan and Annette McCarthy and the RJ team on Feb. 6-8, 2024, at Grow! 2024.
Early-bird pricing ends on Nov. 1. Register today to save $200 per ticket on your registration. The price goes up on Nov. 2. No exceptions! I hope to see you in Des Moines!
