What To Focus On In The Off-Season (Part 2)

Focus on getting your sold jobs & schedule ready and set

The reason this point popped into my head when I thought about “what to do in the off-season” is a lot of people are upgrading their systems this time of year and may be using software for the very first time. Or they may be trying to use the one they have better and more efficiently.

And what I saw happen in the past is, they’d buy the system, and only enter jobs that they sold from here on out. And left the jobs they had already sold in their old systems and never brought them into the new system and schedule. And then complain that it wasn’t useful for them. 🤦‍♂️ 

Baffling to me. But it happens.

So, this is a reminder that whatever system you choose to use, it’s only as good and effective as you use it. 

Leverage it.

So, what to do: Get all of your jobs into the system, and then get them all on the schedule. That’s step one. As you get them on the schedule, just remember to leave room for rain delays, upsell add-ons to jobs, etc.

Once you’ve done that, then I’d recommend going back and making sure each job has good notes, photos, all the material lists are accurate so the crew can depend on the system. So they can rely on it as a “source of truth” so they don’t have to call you to find out what posy to plant. Reduce phone tag. Leverage the power of the system to make life easy for your crews. (And yourself by default)

If you already have all your jobs and schedules set for the year

If you are already using a software system, then this is likely already in place and ready to roll for you. You may think you don’t need to focus on this one. But even so, I would still recommend that you have a team meeting like I described in the last article, and ask for input on how you could make your job planning, operations, and scheduling work better for your team.

It could be something as simple as the crew would like to see “before” photos in each job, and so you go back through your phone, find the photos, and upload them to your jobs so the crew can see them in their Digital Job Folder.

Or I’ll tell you a story of another one I remember we did a change on when I was at Tussey.

When the sales/designer at Tussey would sell one of our water feature kits, they would place an order at our supplier for all the parts and pieces. The supplier had record of all the kits we sold, so it was easy for them to just select the kit, and print out a PDF of the entire order. The supplier would give the designer/sales guy the PDF of the order sheet, and they would just upload that entire PDF into the job. Then in the items list of the workarea in SynkedUP they would just have one line that said “Pond parts from supplier, $——”

It was easy for the salesperson.