Most landscaping companies wait until they're desperate to hire before they think about their sales structure. You realize you need another salesperson when your current team is overwhelmed, when a team member leaves, or you add someone without clarity on what they'll actually be responsible for selling.

For years at Grunder Landscaping Co., we'd hire salespeople and then figure out their responsibilities later. But as we've worked to scale the business, we've learned that approach doesn't work. This year, Rachel Ross (our Director of Talent Growth & Brand) has been working with our sales leadership to plan 2026 staffing well before peak season, and the process has already helped us identify gaps we didn't know existed.

Here's what we're doing differently:

1. We're Assigning Business Based on Our Sales Goal

We start with our annual sales target. For us, that's about 13% growth year over year. Then we work backwards. Instead of saying "we need more salespeople," we're getting specific about what each person is responsible for selling.

Each salesperson gets assigned a "book of business," or their portfolio of accounts and individual revenue target. When you add up everyone's book of business, it equals your overall sales goal. This helps us see exactly where we have capacity and where we need to add people.

The other benefit? It makes compensation planning easier. When you know what each person is responsible for, you can structure their pay and commission fairly.

2. We're Reducing Hat-Wearing on the Sales Team

For the longest time, we had salespeople juggling multiple service lines across different types of clients. Someone might be selling commercial maintenance and residential design-build all at once. They were good at it, but it created problems.

Clients would end up with two different contacts for different services on the same property. Our sales team couldn't develop deep expertise because they were spread too thin. Calculating commissions on projects involving multiple people became messy.

So we're clarifying roles. We're being intentional about which salesperson focuses on what, so our team can go deeper in their lane. As Rachel told me: "If you don't know where your focus is, then you're not really going to be focused on anything at all."

Today each salesperson specializes in one of four areas: commercial maintenance, residential maintenance, residential design-build, and commercial bid-build. Each salesperson isn't perfectly siloed at this point and may have some properties outside of their specialization that they manage, but we know that as we grow this structure will be more sustainable. 

3. We're Planning Crew Capacity at the Same Time

On the production side, we're taking a similar approach. We project we'll need two additional mow teams and two additional LandKeeping teams for 2026. That's a total of 12 new team members. But we're not just hiring 12 people. We're promoting from within to lead those new teams, which means we'll also need to backfill the positions those leaders are leaving.

The key is that we're thinking about this now, not in March when we're already behind. We base our production staffing on the demand our sales projections will create. Right now, we're being selective, only bringing on people with specific skills we'll need immediately.

We're also looking for people to join our team now, when we know many other landscaping companies in our area are laying off team members for the winter or not guaranteeing winter hours. We can attract great people with experience to our team with year-round work and snow incentives, and then we're hopefully able to start the spring fully staffed. 

Get Ahead of Your Hiring Needs

The difference between companies that scramble to hire and companies that build strong teams is planning. When you map out your structure before you need it, you can be strategic about who you bring on, what they'll be responsible for, and how their role fits into your growth plan.

If you'd like to see how we've structured our teams and learn more about how we approach staffing and sales planning, join us at our GLC Field Trip this December. You'll tour our facility, meet our team, and get a behind-the-scenes look at how we operate. This is the last date for this year and there are limited seats still available, register this week  before it's sold out! 

We'll talk to you next week.

Marty Grunder
Founder & CEO
The Grow Group & Grunder Landscaping Co.