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The simplicity of the goal is powerful: grow maintenance. Two words. Not a paragraph. No video required. Everyone gets it. Everyone plays a part.
We often fall into the trap of overcomplicating our business goals. We devise elaborate strategic plans. We’re proud of our 10-year, five-year, three-year and one-year plans. We layer on “rocks” every quarter. We bury our people in goals. And then we wonder why nobody can breathe. Complexity is our enemy. Simplicity is our friend.
Earlier in my career, my company hired an up-and-coming business coach to work with our leadership team. His name was Gino Wickman (the Entrepreneurial Operating System, EOS, guy). At our off-site meeting in northern Michigan, Wickman led us through an exercise that completely changed my approach to leadership.
During this exercise, my team lovingly informed me that I was making their lives miserable because I had the mistaken belief that my superpower was to make things complex. I over-engineered everything I touched because it fed my ego. They pointed this out to me. Lovingly.
It hurt. But they were right. And then I discovered how freeing it was to not carry that burden around any longer. I was free to leave things alone. Or to put my energy into simplifying things. I quickly discovered that making things simple is much more difficult than making things complicated. This gave me a new challenge: make things simple, elegant and intuitive.
Back to “grow maintenance” … I was recently invited to speak at GROW! 2026. If you’re not familiar, this is the annual conference put on by Marty Grunder with Grunder Landscaping Co. and The Grow Group that attracts more than 1,000 other green industry professionals. This year’s conference took place in Dallas and featured a tour of Complete Landsculpture, an award-winning, full-service landscape company.
If you visit the company’s website, you’ll see a beautiful backyard oasis at what looks like a resort. This is the backyard of one of the owners. In other words, the company is doing quite well. And yet, this company invited more than 1,000 people to visit them in person. They shared with us what was working and what wasn’t. They humbly acknowledged that they had things to work on. And they all shared a common goal for 2026: Grow maintenance. Powerful. Simple. Elegant. Intuitive.
Why grow maintenance? It depends on your perspective. It depends on your role in the company. An owner may wish to drive up the business value for succession planning purposes. A landscape designer may be focused on the long-term success of an installation that they designed.
A maintenance production manager may be motivated by providing more career opportunities for the maintenance team. The Complete Landsculpture team each had their own unique way of explaining the goal.
The idea that a singular goal is powerful is nothing new. In fact, Gary Keller and Jay Papasan wrote a bestselling book on this exact idea, “The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results.”
As we consider our business goals or our succession plans, what is that singular goal? What is the one thing that will make the most impact? Do you know? Does your team know?
I guarantee you that every employee of Complete Landsculpture knows what the company’s goal is. That’s right. Grow maintenance.
Now go forth.
