The Grow Group

In 31 days we'll be in Gaithersburg, Maryland for the 2021 NALP Field Trip: Frank & Marty's Excellent Adventure. This year our host company is Ruppert Landscape, a commercial powerhouse known for the quality of work they do and the scale they do it at. This week, Marty Grunder and Frank Mariani of Mariani Landscape.

Some of you may already know that my wonderful wife Lisa is a kindergarten teacher, and when we got engaged she insisted that she wanted to be able to take spring break trips with her family. As a 25-year-old, running a business before cell phones were prevalent, the thought of taking a week off in March or April gave.

2021 has hopefully been a good year for you. Sales have been strong and demand for our services at an all time high. While there have been challenges with finding team members and supply shortages, we're fortunate that so many clients and potential clients are putting more value on having outdoor living spaces to.

As landscape professionals, we know that our jobs go beyond just doing the usual work outside. We're experts and professionals solving problems clients may not even realize they have. A challenge everyone is having right now is having enough professionals on their team to do the work they already have sold. Hiring.

Last week was an exciting one at Grunder Landscaping Co: Our H-2B workers were finally approved and they arrived for their first day back on Monday. This year it's been difficult to find team members, and we've had to onboard lots of new people, including our returning H-2B workers. When we onboard new team members at.

A couple weeks ago we talked about how Grunder Landscaping Co. is screening potential clients, and this week we wanted to go into more detail about who you should be looking for during your screening process: your ideal client.

We often get so busy that we believe we don't have time to slow down or teach someone else to do a task, but over the years our team has realized that the opposite is actually true. We should always be empowering others in our organization and developing new leaders in the process.

This year is busier than any in recent memory, and our salespeople are fielding calls from new prospects constantly. On top of that we're hearing from landscape pros across the country that scheduling is a challenge with staffing problems, material shortages, and the usual disruptions from the weather. Demand is at an.

An important metric for owners, sales people, and even production team members to understand is the company's costs. Everyone reading this Great Idea understands that if you bid a job for $10,000 and it costs you $20,000 to do the work it's a problem. A less obvious problem we sometimes see is when a company is.

Years ago, Grunder Landscaping Co. frequently had a surplus of plants and materials at their shop waiting to be used on jobs. Materials may or may not have been allocated to a specific job, it was pretty common for the plant procurement team to just buy a few extras when they found great quality or a great price and.