How We Do It: April 2001, Establishing & Managing On-Site Crews at Sousa’s Landscape

Now, 20 years later, I am president of Sousa’s Landscape Management, which maintains these large resorts and hotels with on-site crews, and we have been managing the maintenance of the Elbow Beach Resort with only four full-time employees for the past four years.

To do this, we first place a high quality, hard working, hands-on site manager with a horticulture degree on the site and surround him with a good team. Then, we supply that team with the best and most up-to-date equipment, including a dump truck, a riding mower, a walk-behind mower, trimmers, edgers, blowers, a pole saw, a sprayer and miscellaneous hand tools.

Also helpful is when clients designate a portion of their sites for storerooms, workshops or small nursery areas. For instance, we convinced Elbow Beach to permit us to do this, and we fixed up the area at our cost. Having an area on our client’s site assists us in reducing overhead costs as all personnel report directly to the site, which eliminates morning and evening road time. They can then communicate with the main office by two-way radio and reduce possible damage to equipment that normally would have to be towed back and forth.

We generally rotate the team members on our on-site maintenance crews every three months so they do not become complacent. However, the team leader remains the same because clients like dealing with a familiar face.

We have weekly scheduled walkabouts with clients to maintain open communication lines and sell additional services. Getting clients outside of their offices is worth the two hours each week because they get to see what we do, and being on the site makes offering suggestions and describing what we’d like to do next easier.

Other keys are requiring all on-site personnel to wear uniforms and emblazoning trucks with our company logo. Clients like this because our on-site staff is easily recognizable.

Additionally, we perform the following on-site maintenance tasks to ensure success:

• Know our clients and establish trust. We do what we say we are going to do and finish projects by the promised time. If there are problems that may prevent a team from doing this, the production manager is notified and other arrangements are made to finish the job.



• Know our properties so we can identify trouble spots. We try to point out insects, diseases, off-color plants and turfgrasses as soon as possible.



• Set daily, weekly and long-term goals. An example of a daily goal is telling laborers that you expect all the property’s mowing and edging to be done on a certain day. A weekly goal may be to have Phase One’s bedlines edged by the end of the week. Long-term goals include planning winter pruning or leaf removal in the summer or doing tasks in the winter that will alleviate some of the work that needs to be done in spring, such as pruning.



• Work with the weather. For instance, mowing, edging and blowing may not need to be done every week, especially during a drought, so we use this opportunity to do time-consuming tasks, such as pruning trees or edging bedlines.



• Focus on self-reliance. Our team managers and crews use support departments only when necessary. They do all the pruning and apply all chemicals themselves, if and when possible. Only specialized, whole property, turf weed and tree applications are done by support departments.