Well folks, we made it. It’s the final month of the year, and we’re ready to look ahead to 2026.
At this time of year, when my kids were young, “The Night Before Christmas” was a popular bedtime story each night. In it, there’s the famous line, “It was the night before Christmas and all through the house; not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.”
I think for many years, this line could’ve applied to our offices at Grunder Landscaping Co. at this time of year, too. As the landscaping season wound down, we would lay off our production crews for the winter, and our sales and administrative teams would wind down their work, too.
Today, that’s different as we keep our crews busy with a combination of winter work like brush removal, hardscaping, equipment maintenance and snow and ice mitigation when storms come through. But these winter months are also the perfect time to work on your business. We set aside winter projects knowing that our team will have more time and brainpower to devote to it.
Here are three things we’re working on this winter.
Refreshing our horticultural training
Our production teams are collaborating to put into writing our horticultural calendar. The goal is to transfer the knowledge of our most experienced horticulturalists into an Excel sheet that the entire team can reference.
We’re also working on adapting the way we train our maintenance teams by getting our most senior team leaders working alongside more crews so that they can train them in 2026. While our weekly team-leader training is valuable, we know we need to invest more in training our team to maintain our quality standard.
Realigning our sales structure
A key benefit of growing our business is it allows our salespeople to specialize rather than having to be a jack-of-all-trades, selling any type of work that comes in. We’ve separated our salespeople into specializations (i.e., maintenance versus design/build), but as the company grows, we’re defining this specialization even more narrowly.
In 2026, each salesperson will focus on one specific division to improve efficiency and streamline communication — commercial maintenance, residential maintenance, design/build and commercial bid-build.
We’re working on implementing this change this winter, which includes transferring some clients between salespeople, and we are collaborating with our sales team to look for other ways we can help them focus more on what they do best.
Creating new design palettes
While we don’t want to stifle creativity among our team, we’ve found that as we’ve grown and there are more people who are designing work, we’re losing some efficiency by not having a consistent plant palette.
This winter, our experienced horticulturalists and installers are working with our designers to refine our palette. We won’t be overly restrictive, but these will become our recommended standards.
The biggest reason we’re doing this? We found that we were specifying varieties of plants that were different but very similar. It made it difficult for our teams to identify plants when needed and was an unnecessary complication for procurement. If we simplify our choices, it makes it easier for our team to manage inventory and replace plants that die.
Ideas on what to focus our time and energy on this winter have come in part from seeing the issues we ran into throughout the growing season and from getting outside of our business. Being around other pros at industry events like GROW! 2026 is a great way to find more projects to do in the slower season.
Will I see you in Dallas on Feb. 10-12 for that event? Check out our agenda and learn more here.
