Temperatures were in the 90s last week in Dayton, Ohio and I found myself simultaneously reminding my team to stay hydrated while working in the heat and talking to my sales team about what we need to be looking for in new snow contracts for the 2026-2027 season. It's funny how that happens.

Is your roll out a morning circus every day?

I've been lucky this month to have a lot of family time on the calendar. All four of my kids, their significant others, and their kids were in town for Father's Day. We had a full house here in Dayton, and my two oldest grandchildren loved playing in the sprinkler and hopping along the stepping stones in the backyard..

A topic that's coming up weekly in our sales meetings right now is our schedule for August and September. We're looking ahead and we know that we need more work sold now to keep our crews busy this fall. Can you relate?

At The Grow Group, the busiest week of the year annually is the week before our annual GROW! conference. Our team primarily works remotely and a few years ago they started doing something that they call "office hours" where they just turn a Teams meeting on in the background while they all work. It helped them knock.

Somewhere between setting up your first ad campaign and watching the budget drain with nothing to show for it, a lot of landscaping business owners decide that social media ads don't work for them.

I frequently remind my team at Grunder Landscaping Co. that we are ALL salespeople. It's driven home by the data we have on why new prospects call us: the number one driver of new business for our company is our reputation. It's referrals, people seeing us work at their neighbor's house, and repeat business from past.

This time of year can be brutal for landscaping companies. The combination of demand on the sales team, busy crew schedules, unpredictable weather, and client questions and needs can have teams running ragged. Just one rainy day can mess up your whole plan for the week - we know how it goes! We're in the trenches.

Transparency has been one of the biggest drivers of our culture at Grunder Landscaping Co. When our team understands how the business works and where they fit in, they show up differently and the results follow. Here's what we've done to make that happen.

Opening a second location for Grunder Landscaping Co. was a huge milestone for our company, and we officially were open for business in Cincinnati, Ohio about a year ago. The work to make this happen started long before that, though, and this week I wanted to share with you the steps we took to open a second location.