Landscaping often involves a lot of professional problem solving: when we find something unexpected on a jobsite, a piece of equipment breaks down midday, or a client calls us with an issue they'd like our help solving.

Happy Fourth of July!

Our team was at SIMA's Snow & Ice Symposium in Pittsburgh, PA this week to meet fellow snow and ice professionals, teach a couple of sessions, and learn best practices that can improve Grunder Landscaping Co.

This week's Great Idea comes courtesy of one of our Grunder Landscaping Co. Group Leaders - Gaston. As one of our Group Leaders, he manages our production crews, plans schedules, trains team members on new skills, and looks for ways to optimize efficiency. He started on our team working on a crew and has first-hand.

Our team was in Birmingham, AL this week for our Field Trip at Landscape Workshop in partnership with NALP. What a great event: I have pages and pages of notes I brought home with me that I'll be sharing with my team at Grunder Landscaping Co.

Operational systems make or break landscaping companies. You can have pretty marketing materials, an expert sales team, even talented horticulturalists out in the field: you can't scale up successfully without operational systems in place to guide your team as they complete the work.

As we prepare for the Field Trip at Landscape Workshop we'll host in partnership with NALP on June 11-12, we've been working with their team on what they'll be sharing during our company tour.

In my recent interview with J.T. Price, CEO of Landscape Workshop, on The Grow Show, he shared so much great information about managing and leading teams and the intentionality they've put behind their company culture at Landscape Workshop. You can listen to all that he has to say here, but he made one point in.

Later this week Chris Psencik, Emily Lindley, and I will host our Virtual Sales Bootcamp 2.0. While we're online, we'll cover sales management, marketing strategies and plans, strategies to close more sales, how to handle objections we're seeing frequently. As we've been preparing, we've been talking with our ACE Peer.

Landscaping teams across the country are having to work harder this year to hit their sales goals. It's a theme we're seeing play out in our ACE Peer Group Members' companies, as well as at Grunder Landscaping Co. (GLC).