PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE

If a picture is worth a thousand words, what would your offseason snapshot look like? Granted, each team’s successes or failures can be situational and trend back and forth year to year. I feel it's important to step back and look at the thousand-foot view of your company immediately if you haven’t already. You need to see if the patterns of behavior in your workplace are matching up to your priorities because the adjustment is exponentially harder when the fertilizer hits the fan. Regardless, if you are the owner, general manager, admin staff, department head, senior foreman, or the first-year green front-line laborer, you and only you have the opportunity to decide what winning looks like. It’s really easy to “stay busy” on production March-December.

The data is clearly net positive on any skilled laborer job right now, so it is mission-critical for you to position yourself carefully because the work will not always be so abundant. I’m 38 years old, and even as a millennial worker, I can look back to '08 when I finished college to realize the supply/demand curve is under constant flux. At Designscape, we have the tenured data to know what makes us money but we also continue to look at our weak points and adjust our efforts to ensure the overarching goal aligns with our core values. Our core values read like this:

We Create, Do, Pursue, and Lead.

We create beautiful landscapes by utilizing sustainable practices implemented at the highest level of skill and quality.

We do what we say we are going to do. When we fail, we make it right every time without exception.

We pursue measurable profit, never sacrificing quality or safety so we can continue to always be a great place to work for great people.

We lead with love. We genuinely care and consistently invest in people.

These four values continue to serve as the framework for how we define success. The means by which we achieve our goals can change depending on the political and financial climate, but the target's bullseye stays true north. I tend to keep my vantage point very local when it comes to work, but at least in our area the trend continues to increase in demand for service and decrease in the supply of quality labor and readily available materials. If you are in this boat, you need to know how many billable hours your team can produce and make sure you are charging enough to offset your efforts. To be bold in saying something that we might all whisper to each other - if you haven’t raised your prices recently, please at least think about it. Professional landscaping service providers are definitely a scarcity, so if you have the skills, you need to make it worth your while to not just keep fuel in your truck but to be sheltering profit for a new one!

A huge experience gain for me professionally has been spending time at the GNLAC brainstorming with similar companies and organizations from the region: Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, New York, and Ontario. A friend from New York spoke in front of the group on this topic of skilled labor and posed the question, “When you go to any special event, doesn’t the guest of honor almost always ask for your opinion on something horticulture-related?” In most countries, gardeners, masons, carpenters, and all skilled tradesmen/tradeswomen are respected because their great, great-grand-something or other honed their craft to the point their family name became synonymous with their trade.

Looking back to my own lineage, my great grandfather grafted a fruit tree that had multiple varieties all on the same tree! Don’t you think that is worth the time to respectfully pay for a skill if you don’t have it yourself? Even on base level mowing services, don’t you want to separate yourself by knowing your regionally hardy turf grasses, their strengths and weaknesses, and have the knowhow to custom tailor your programs to the individual’s needs?

We at Designscape are for sure a small business, and because our ship is not the Titanic, it allows us to more easily adjust the sails as the winds of opportunity blow. Regardless of your tenure and team size, really knowing your success strategy will afford your brain some peace in a month when your voicemail box is full, your favorite customer leaves you, or your best team member quits. No one wants to plan for the worst, but every year some form of disaster will try to steal your joy, so commit now to progress in a way that ensures you are making sustainable gains.

The season is upon us… let’s make some real gains this year! Cheers, Gabriel

P.S. If you have not established your own core values and would like some help, shoot me or Rick an email. As mentioned in the last letter, a great part of this association’s benefits is the knowledge resource. Someone has gone through a situation similar to yours and seen the results. Why not ask for help and learn from others' mistakes to springboard your own decision-making skills?