Your Team Has Great Ideas-Ask & Listen!

Great Ideas

As contractors, we use the winter time to think, analyze, plan, and come up with great ideas to improve our landscape companies.

When the pressure of the season is off, it gives room for our subconscious brain to coast along, and once in a while, a real gold nugget of an idea pops up, and we implement and improve!

1% improvement every day man!

But what I want you to consider today is: You as the owner are not the only one gifted with the ability to come up with great ideas.

In fact, when it comes up to the answer “How can we make our day-to-day process better?” your team and crew likely will have observations, perspectives, ideas, and suggestions that never crossed your mind!

When I worked at Tussey Landscaping, each winter we’d hold a team meeting with everyone present. The focus was asking and answering questions like:

• What did not go well last year?
• What did go well last year?
• What is one thing we could do to be more efficient?
• What is one thing we could do to improve our client experience?
• What is one thing we could do to improve our communication?
• What is one thing we could do to make your lives easier?

The ideas that came out of those meetings were gold.

And it’s funny, sometimes the new guy was the one with the best suggestion!

More examples

I’ll give you one example of a change Tussey Landscaping made from one of those types of meetings.

Our landscape supply yard was just up the road for a few minutes. Being it was so conveniently located, we’d often swing in there on the way to the job site to pick things up, drop off returns, etc.

But…

Yep, you guessed it.

Every time we did that we’d have multiple people in the truck, payroll ticking.

Every time we did that it robbed us of precious on-site time, producing billable work.

So, we discussed it with the supply yard and made an arrangement.

If our crew needed something the next day, as long as we called it in by mid-afternoon, they’d pull the order and run it down to our shop for us, so the crew could get it and head straight out to the job site without stopping anywhere the next morning.

If a crew brought back some returns, they’d neatly shrink-wrap the pallet, place a tag with the job name and number on it, and place it in our designated “Returns” area at the shop yard.

Every few weeks one of the landscape supply folks would come down and pick it all up in one batch. Or one of our guys would run it all up at once on a rainy day.

This saved so many lost and unbillable man-hours throughout the season.

The season before we did this, as the foreman, I was at that landscape supply place multiple times a week.

The next season after we implemented this, I could count on one hand how many times I was at the landscape supply place all year!

It made such a difference. As the crew, we were laser-focused on maximizing our on-site time and minimizing our logistical off-site time.

Maybe your landscape supply yard won’t give you that level of service, I don’t know.

Hint, there’s a way to get great service… I know they did not do this service for all the contractors they served.

But, if you genuinely try to be a good customer, easy to work with, and don’t do things that make their life difficult like placing orders last minute, not paying bills on time, etc, then it’s amazing what companies will do to serve your needs!

But back to my main point.

Ask your team for their ideas!

Ask your team for their ideas!

Hold a team meeting, bring in coffee and snacks, or just order lunch.

And hold a discussion focused on how the company can improve.

I bet you’ll be surprised at the great ideas that’ll come up that you’d never thought of!

If you’re a one-man show and don’t have a team yet, ask your spouse! They watch you work your tail off every day.

Ask your customers, and your vendors, what you can do to improve the way you work with them.

I’ll leave you with one suggestion that’ll make your crew’s life a lot easier.

Get them the info they need to do the job well.

So they aren’t forced to blow up your phone asking for info.

SynkedUP mobile app can help

The SynkedUP mobile app has a digital job folder with all the info they need to do the job at their fingertips. Gives them no excuse to blow up your phone. 🙂

It shows material lists, equipment, photos, notes, client name, job address, and live progress bar of how many hours they’ve logged on the job so far vs how many hours you had estimated.

It’s awesome. I could tell stories all day of how that simple tool helped our crew at Tussey Landscaping operate so much more efficiently.

If you wanna check it out, get on a call with one of our awesome team members here at SynkedUP. They’ll hop on a Zoom and show it to you so you can decide whether it’s something that would help you or not.

Get on a call here.

Hit reply (or comment) and tell me a story of one thing that you improved in your business that made a big difference for you. I’d love to hear. The more we can learn and share these ideas, the better off we’ll all be!

Cheers

Weston Zimmerman