System Statistics

When Steve White and Wade Walden, owners, Second Nature Lawn Care, Nashville, Tenn., started their business, they focused on recording the steps needed to accomplish each task so they could form easy-to-follow systems.

One example is weather statistics. “We started documenting the weather from year to year to pay attention to when we first started seeing crabgrass bloom and relate that to other signs that would pinpoint the onset of crabgrass,” White shares. “For instance, research says that when forsythia starts blooming, crabgrass is also germinating, so we paid attention to forsythia as well as crabgrass so we could get a better handle on when crabgrass will become a problem. Then we use this information to train our technicians.”

This extra time it took to record steps and set-up systems paid off. As White says, “Invariably, 90 percent of the data we collected we ended up using.”