Growing Innovative Businesses

By: Will Bennett

If you’re in the landscape industry you’re an optimist. No, really. You are! You’re working in some way to improve how we engage with the natural world around us. If that’s true, the quality of our landscapes and our own lives will be a direct result of our ability to work together towards a shared vision of the future. Sadly, my experience of the construction sector is witnessing common issues repeat and reduce our ability to do just that. Untimely communication, unforeseen cost overruns, delays, abortive work, huge waste, and tense relationships. These are avoidable, however my deeper concern is that these issues prevent us from achieving the positive impact we’re all aiming for. Worse, it could be the opposite of what we intended; that we harm the planet as we push for growth and development. In one ‘sustainable’ project, I’ve seen a client’s impatience misinterpreted as an excuse to bury three tonnes of rubble in the void between two basements. Thankfully we caught it before it was buried out of sight, but the mind boggles. So, how do we avoid these problems in future?

I believe that innovation and simplification will drive better collaboration. Here’s some ideas we’ve been trying at WILDEN that you might find helpful too...

Growing pains

The feedback on our first ever ‘Loom’ video was underwhelming. ‘Interesting’, was how it was described by one Contractor. To a British person that means anything between ‘not interesting’ and ‘a terrible waste of time’. So, not a great start then. If you’re new to Loom, it’s a screen recording app which allows us to record our camera and desktop together. The video is stored in a cloud, accessible to anyone with the link. We use it to narrate whilst sharing sketches, PDF files, and feedback on screen. This is great for creating micro-presentations and working asynchronously as a team; we don’t have to ‘hop on a Zoom’ every hour or repeat standardised information. Instead, we record and share when it suits us. Less meetings, more me-tings.

Or maybe not...

We thought that having a short, personalised video is ten times better than playing email tennis. But our innovation wasn’t well received at first. This was a case of right technology, wrong place. The search for innovation continues.

The greatest sources of innovation and inspiration for us have been outside of our discipline. From Rich Webz, a marketing and productivity expert, we’ve learnt to automate our entire sales process and social media content. 90% of our communication is now pre-written; we have scripts for milestones, digital feedback forms, and our weekly schedule is rigorously time-blocked so we’re in control of our highest priority work, rather than putting out fires. To get started, we suggest trying Gmail templates or a software like Dubsado if you want to script a lot of your repeated workflow tasks. You can also try using Acuity or Calendly to give your Clients (or internal staff) options to select meeting times from a calendar which you control. No need for a PA or rescheduling a coffee five times via email.

Never chase an invoice again.

Our payments process has been radically simplified by Stripe. Now all invoices are paid quickly using a card or Apple Pay so we never have to chase Clients for payments. We can even set up payment plans to automate stage payments. This saves us a massive amount of time and energy, avoiding upsetting Client relationships over money. Something that’s all too common for other designers and the service sector generally. What’s stopping us all from moving away from out-dated cheques, PDCs, proformas and the plethora of mind-numbing payment admin? I’ve seen countless hours wasted doing this, yet there’s been dozens of tools that make digital payments safe, fast, and secure for years. They are used across banking, retail, ecommerce, automotive sectors already. Our industry needs to step up! We encourage others to embrace these tools. If you think this would help you, research Xero, PayFort, or Quickbooks to gain more financial freedom. You can retrain your accountant as a personal investor; they’ll need something to do with their extra time, and money!

From Chris Do at The Futur, we discovered Notion. It’s a completely customisable software that we use to track over 30 projects simultaneously. Every Client has their own personal portal too. They can access proposals, payments, design files and loads more. You can also consider Trello, Asana, Monday, Basecamp, Zoho, or Salesforce, depending on your size and preferred workflow. You can integrate these tools with your document control, payments and design apps to help your teams collaborate, remove duplication, and simplify time-consuming tasks.

Why share all of this? Because we know we can use these tools to synchronise and cross-pollinate better with project stakeholders… Could this be the collaboration that we need to help Contractors too? We think so, and we’ve been trialling many of them for a while. But first a few more growing pains…

At first Client’s didn’t use their personalised portal and Contractors felt confused by it. We had concerns about duplicating workload and how to communicate best (please God, no more Whatsapp groups).

It felt at times that every step forward was costing us two steps back in other areas. Communication was meant to be improved, but at times it has been messy. At one villa our Contractor preferred to speak directly to the client than to use site notes on the new portal. With ignorance bliss, they could impress their own ideas without the designer’s guidance. A week later, an artificial grass lawn on a huge slab appeared before we could revisit the site. Clearly troubled by this, our dejection was met with a proud smile - ‘levelling, concrete and turf done in 5 days, pretty good hey?’.

Well, we didn’t ask for concrete nor artificial grass. So, no. Not pretty, not good.

I still think about what I could have done different today. With hindsight, I realise, probably nothing. The misalignment between our values and the Contractor’s ambitions was too big to bridge. This taught us that for all the tools and technology, nothing is more important than being aligned in ambition.

More recently our journey with innovation has been met with an equal ambition by our Contractors and Clients. We track and communicate dozens of projects in a fraction of the time we did before. We’ve learnt from overcomplicating and stripped out most of the complexity that comes with new ideas. Now we’re building the relationships and relentlessly using the systems we’ve created to help our Contractors too.

We’ve learnt that for every leap forward with the technology, there needs to be an equal effort to communicate that ambition, train others, and to take feedback well. That’s where we spend our efforts now. Most important of all, we’ve learnt to focus on solving the big problems in small ways. Don’t try and implement a new way of working overnight. Don’t implement too many tools at once. Instead, demonstrate that one new method makes a part of the job radically simpler. Then double down. Spanks Founder Sara Blakely often quotes “start small, think big, and scale fast” for building brands, but I love that ethos and think it applies to what we all do in our respective business as we innovate together.

At WILDEN we often talk about being in the ‘J’ curve - in this period of painful growth (which often feels more like regression) it feels like our efforts are making things more complex. However, we know it’s an essential part of the process. We slowly remove the obstacles and find a clearer path with every improvement.

Now is the time to resolve as an industry. The pace of change is outrageous, and exciting. It also has never been easier. I feel so strongly that our combined energy to collaborate and innovate, by riding this new pace of change, will help us deliver better projects, much faster. And that’s the answer we all want, isn’t it?

So, it begs the question, how will you rise to the challenge?

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