Ohio Nursery & Landscape Association The Buckeye May/June 2018 By Marty Grunder What a spring—or, more accurately, what spring? The weather in Ohio has not been kind to our industry this year, with snow continuing to fall even in April. It’s safe to say we are all behind on our schedules, leaving us scrambling to make.

In my work as a consultant to hundreds of landscape pros over the years, I have listened to the issue of accountability come up again and again. How, other business owners ask me, can they hold their teams to the tasks they’re assigned and the results they need to deliver? How should they address underperformance? How.

We are all in search of ways to save time, myself included, and there’s no shortage of tips and tricks business owners have come up with for freeing up more hours in the week. I am always open to trying new approaches—you can’t grow if you won’t change—but I’ve also found that when it comes to screening prospects, you.

Everywhere you go and everywhere you look these days, you see people transfixed by their cell phones. You go to pay for new running shoes and you have to wait for the young woman at the register to finish texting before she’ll ring you up. You’re sitting in a restaurant wondering why your order is taking so long and.

Lawn & Landscape April 2018 By Marty Grunder Happy spring! I hope this month finds you getting outside a lot, for work and play. We had a long, cold winter in Ohio, and nothing feels better now than some time in the sun. Nearly everyone in our industry is crazy-busy right now, and most of us have recently brought new.

Happy April! Where I live in Ohio, it’s felt like spring has taken forever and a day to get here. It’s finally starting to warm up and the sun is at last peeking out, which means successful landscaping companies are about to get very busy. This is obviously great for business, but it can also be very taxing on our.

Where I live, there are two grocery stores in town that are intently focused on a higher-end clientele: Whole Foods, the national chain recently acquired by Amazon, and Dorothy Lane Market (DLM), a locally owned and operated grocery that’s now celebrating its 70th year. I find these two businesses particularly.

Ohio Nursery & Landscape Association The Buckeye March/April 2018 By Marty Grunder With spring afoot, everyone in our industry is about to get incredibly busy. The days will be packed from morning to night, and you will very likely feel as if you can't think or see straight. You will get stressed out, your team will.

With spring nearly sprung and our industry’s busy season about to get underway, I know many of you are struggling with finding good workers. I would love to be able to tell you—and me!—that there’s a simple silver bullet to solve this problem. But the truth is it takes hard work to find hard workers. But there are.

This week I had the privilege—and the fun—of speaking to the students in an entrepreneurship class at one of our local high schools. These young people were polite, attentive, and ambitious. Their knowledge was impressive and their questions were incisive. It was neat to see. I make a concerted effort to speak to kids.