Want to Build a Great Company? Find Great Employees.
We all recognize why sports teams win championships or why athletes become great – yet so often in the landscape business we wonder what is missing from making our companies highly successful. This success is a combination of things – the work life balance for the owner and the employees, financial success for everybody involved, happy customers, and hopefully a happier planet.
Hopefully you agree that the answer to running a successful company involves people – choosing the right people to help you build a successful company is without a doubt the secret to your success in the landscape industry. You could have the best equipment, great contacts, and loads of working capital and still not find success without the right people on your team. This sounds easier than it is! It takes a system – a repeatable system that can be followed every day of the year so that the company is able to continuously expand its capabilities and increase the operating efficiencies to ensure healthy profits. The key to long term company success therefore lies within the recruiting system implemented by a company.
Yes – there are many other important integral systems that will be required to operate a highly successful company, but make no mistake, without the right people on the team as the foundation of the company all of the efforts in marketing and operations will be fruitless. If your company is not as successful today as you would hope – step back and look closely at the team you have assembled. The toughest decisions involve people – you cannot be opposed to some turnover to get things right….often I hear contractors boasting about their nearly perfect record on employee turnover only to then see underpaid company officers and the profits lingering down in the 1 – 5% profit range. Often the largest problem in a company is simply ignoring that you may need to go through the added effort of upgrading staff continuously throughout the life cycle of the company. Great managers and field people will be much greater if they work in a company that is constantly recruiting, they have greater need to perform well, and also have more room to grow. Great people in a stagnant company will almost certainly become complacent and fall into the “average” class within a few short years. People need challenge and opportunity to become great – and they need to be able to keep score. The Landscape Management Network systems (www.landscapemanagementnetwork.com) provide the tools to keep score – your Superstars will embrace the LMN program and your company will begin to attract more Superstars.
What is a Superstar employee? This is a big question with a simple answer….Superstars are employees who wish to earn above average incomes for asserting themselves far beyond the level of a typical employee. Superstars are entrepreneurs who happen to work in your company. They see that the more work they are able to complete efficiently – the more they are able to earn. These people do not need to be managed on any level. Superstars are handed a project and a timeline – and they get it done!
Superstars in your landscape business will do for your company what sports heroes do for their respective teams. They provide the foundation from which to build your company. They allow you to focus on growing the business in other areas like marketing, networking, and creating other major improvements to enhance the efficiencies in all aspects of the company. If you have a Superstar you can count on the work being completed safely, effectively, efficiently, while earning an above average profit. You need to provide the Superstar with great projects, a great team, the best equipment, and a project implementation process that works. Superstars can be paid extremely well, just like sports heroes – they go where the money is, and they stay where they are most respected and needed. Make it your business to find Superstars and then surround them with all of these things to ensure they can perform!
The Landscape Management Network membership allows business owners to tap into the systems and processes needed to build a great team. Using the systems library members are able to set out on a continuous improvement mission with a roadmap. By following the LMN systems businesses will find themselves improving in ways that they may not have thought possible. Finding great people, budgeting for a planned and sustainable profit, Estimating every project using a proven estimating system that delivers the profit planned in the budgeting process, and project management tools that have been used by industry leaders for decades.
Landscape Management Network has developed a turn key management process for the green industry…..get started today. www.landscapemanagementnetwork.com.
