A few more take-away tips from the three firms featured in the Top 100 section:
Health Promoters: No. 62 Countryside Industries, Wauconda, Ill.
• Be a doctor’s appointment-friendly company. “Anything you do has to be painless,” President Bob Adelizzi says. “Make it so they can take off for appointments and it doesn’t count toward PTO. We’ve always found that what’s really valuable to employees is their time.”
• Partner with health-care providers to provide flu shots for employees or offer to reimburse employees who get them. Countryside spent $640 in November to provide flu shots for employees and their family members, too, virtually eliminating absenteeism due to the flu this past winter.
Earth-Friendly Cost Cutting: No. 38 Nanak’s Landscaping, Longwood, Fla.
• Start at the top. Because business as usual in the landscape industry dictates that managers and supervisors drive trucks, a cultural shift needs to take place when making a change to high-mileage vehicles. Nanak’s President Sampuran Khalsa drove a hybrid Prius for six months before he asked employees to do the same. Employees more easily accepted their new, nontraditional vehicles because the leadership was coming from the top down.
• Do the job right the first time. At three to one, Nanak’s has a better account manager to crew ratio than the industry standard of five to one. Khalsa believes this is one of the reasons for the company’s profitability and average 15 percent annual growth over the last 20 years. Though spending more to employ more mid-level managers seems counterintuitive to cutting costs, Khalsa says it’s not. “When you’re growing a company it’s a common mistake to overload your talented people with too much work – then they get frazzled and are unable to perform at the top level,” he says. “Because we give our account managers less work to manage, they’re able to spend more time with customers, avert problems before they occur and give crews more attention, which helps them bring quality up and stay on budget.” This is a strategy that could work for any size landscape company, Khalsa says. “Getting it done right the first time is the lowest cost solution.”
Tops in Technology: No. 33 AAA Landscape: Tucson and Phoenix, Ariz.
• Do your research. “See if the application will really work for you as a company,” AAA co-founder Bob Underwood says. “And if you’re a small company, make sure it will have an immediate return. If not, make sure you’re making enough money to cover it.” In the early days, labor-reducing equipment investments (i.e., a skid-steer with attachments) are probably the best investments for a direct return, he says, and then reconsiders: “For a maintenance company that has five or six trucks – GPS in their fleet probably wouldn’t be a bad investment. Miles is time, time is labor, and savings on those are what add up to dollars back in the pocket.”
• Share information. “Groups like state associations or PLANET give you the opportunity to share information with others in the industry, even with competitors. Never be afraid to do that,” Bob Underwood says. Richard Underwood adds: “The best education you can ever get is sitting around in the bars at events like the GIE show, just talking to the older guys.”
To view the entire Top 100 list:
http://www.lawnandlandscape.com/files/pdf/June07_Top100.pdf