Business Strategies 2002: Building a Sturdy Business

Leave no stone unturned when honing a solid business plan.

That was the message of green industry veteran and now consultant Ken Hochkeppel at Lawn & Landscape’s Business Strategies 2002 conference, held Nov. 1-2 at the Marriott Downtown in Cleveland.

Hochkeppel, with 28 years in the industry including nearly two decades at Ruppert Landscape Co., opened by invoking the wisdom of baseball great Yogi Bera, whose maxim, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll wind up somewhere else,” is a fair, if dubious, estimation of the philosophy underlying a sound business strategy. A comprehensive and foresighted guideline to navigate an unsure future, the business plan – both the vision and the formal document – is one of the single most important undertakings of a successful entrepreneur, Hochkeppel suggested.

The business planning process entails four steps:

·        Applying an enterprise analysis, a critical evaluation of operational procedures: financial performance; business process effectiveness; human resource management; company culture; and PR, marketing and sales policies.

·        Applying a SWOT analysis, a look at strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats both inside and outside the firm.

·        Planning strategic initiatives, prioritized and scheduled over time and focused on addressing specific factors raised in the SWOT analysis.

·        Compiling the strategic plan, where all research and initiatives come together in earnest. At this stage, a company also adopts its vision statement (an “impassioned executive summary,” as Hochkeppel summed it up) and a solid five-year plan, which would chart the formative stages of a business plan’s long-term execution.

The specific terms of a business plan will vary from company to company, based on factors including size, working capital and personnel, Hochkeppel explained. However, any solid strategy, he continued, generally addresses the same common enterprise objectives – bolstering profits, forging innovation, establishing growth and increasing productivity or the quality of products and services being chief among them.

Hochkeppel advised the convention of about 120 green industry business owners and operators to assign the responsibility of crafting a strong business strategy to a dedicated team. The process, which should be expected to take two to four months, he estimated, should be comprehensive, focusing on any and all workings of the company necessary to help it “move from ‘good’ to ‘great.’”

Moreover, it should be projective.

“Business owners (frequently) tell me ‘the things that affected our companies in the past are not the things that are affecting us today’,” Hochkeppel passed on. With that, a company’s long-term evolution – its growing complexities, its taking on of more financial and personnel risks – must be considered in a sound business strategy.

This is vital, Hochkeppel suggested.

“Sustaining and growing a company,” he reminded, “is much harder than starting (one)."

The author is Associate Editor of Lawn & Landscape magazine and can be reached at ewilson@lawnandlandscape.com.