If you want your company to scale you need to invest in creating systems. When you’re the only person who has the knowledge and expertise required to operate your business, you’re limiting your own growth.
Creating systems lets successful business owners delegate responsibility while still maintaining the quality and service customers expect. We see it all the time with owner-operators that are stuck at an inflection point. Usually, they’re stretched so thin because they’re doing everything. Estimating, billing, sales, quality assurance, and more.
Usually, these business owners have tried hiring additional people, only to find that they weren’t capable of operating at the expected standard. So it becomes cheaper and easier to just take the work on themselves.
That’s how you limit growth.
While you need to find and hire the right people, first you need to create systems where they can succeed.
Creating operational systems
Operational systems are made up of people, processes, and culture. All three are vital to sustainable, scalable growth. It’s important to remember that creating these systems isn’t something that happens overnight, and everyone’s systems will be a bit different than yours.
Finding the right people
Almost every landscape company struggles to find and retain quality employees. Landscaping is hard, physical work that is also seasonal. If you’re cutting your workforce during the winter, you’re probably seeing a lot of turnover every year.
This problem is solvable.
First, you need to hire people with an entrepreneurial mindset. These employees want to grow and improve their craft. At Greenius, we tell business owners to hire for attitude and train for skill. Because skills can be taught, but the right attitude is something you’re born with.
Employees with a growth mindset won’t be content to just do things the way they’ve always been done. They’ll use their experience to ask questions and push you to build a better, more efficient system. If your employees don’t have that mindset, everything tends to stay the same.
Record your processes so you can optimize them
Your company probably does quality landscaping work. The ones that don’t tend to not last long.
However, running a profitable landscaping company requires so much more than the ability to do great work. You need to provide excellent customer service, you need to be able to sell work effectively, you need to understand accurate estimating and sound bookkeeping.
And if you’re trying to do all of this yourself with systems that only you know, you’ve probably hit your profitability ceiling – while also working 80-hour weeks.
Think of your company like an orchestra. You’re the conductor. It’s not your job to play every single instrument. You have to delegate tasks to other people. But first, they need to know what to play.
Just like you wouldn’t fault a musician for missing notes if they don’t have sheet music, you can’t really fault employees for missed steps or inefficient work if you haven’t written down how things should be done.
Creating clear checklists, standard operating procedures, and assigning responsibilities give your employees the resources they need to do good, efficient work. It also makes it possible for this knowledge to be widely shared within the company, creating a culture of self-governance and accountability.
In that way, having clear checklists and stepped instructions for your tasks makes it much easier for your employees to follow.
Build the right culture for growth and success.
The only constant in landscaping is change. That’s why it’s so important to develop a positive culture that can withstand changing people, processes, and environments. Change also creates opportunities for real and sustainable growth.
Some employees may be concerned as you start changing the plans and processes that they’re used to. But, if you’ve hired people with an entrepreneurial mindset and maintain clear communications about the benefits and reasoning behind these changes, you’ll likely find that there’s more excitement than fear.
Ensuring that employees understand their role in the company and how they, personally, can drive success helps retention and improves morale. Be sure to solicit suggestions from your crews. They’re the ones working the jobs every day, and they may know ways to improve efficiency, or know where you need to create better equipment training. Taking their feedback also helps give a sense of work ownership. By showing that employees are partners in growth, you’ll help improve employee retention and build culture.
Change and growth go hand-in-hand.
Implementing a set of standard operating procedures is vital to help calm chaos during growth periods. They act as a grounding mechanism you can return to as life gets more hectic and you need to bring on additional employees. Instead of starting from scratch, each new hire comes into a system where everyone knows what is expected and how to complete each task.
And as a business owner, you need those anchor points and employee support to take on the challenges of a growing and changing industry.
LMN gives you the tools you need to analyze and standardize your operating procedures for better profit. Schedule a demo to learn how to take your company to the next level.
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