Team Building System in a Landscaping Company

This week I’m writing about using a Team Building System in a Landscaping Company. A Team Building System is a reliable system for placing your team members in roles best suited to their strengths and building them into a powerfully cohesive and committed team that delivers business results.

I’ve been writing about some of my hero clients and how we achieving significant results. We have 36 Business Coaching Modules, which are areas within your business under the categories of growth, profits, and freedom. When we improve your performance, your business will run better.

Wendell’s Large Landscaping Business

One of my contacts referred me to Wendell, the president of a large landscaping company. At that moment, his business had suffered from an economic turndown in the residential construction industry. Most of his revenues were coming from large track home building contractors. Some of these builders had squeezed his business on pricing and were competing with him.

Operational Changes in Wendell’s Landscaping Business

Since Wendell had some differences with an investor he wanted to take control of the business operations. Furthermore, his employees were not engaged and helping to improve the business. We wanted them to be empowered and involved in planning and decision making. In his personal life, Wendell’s life was also about to change. He wanted to spend plenty of time with his family since his children were nearing college age.

Strategic Plan, Team Deployment, Tactical Marketing, and Sales Training

We started by performing a profit analysis of Wendell’s business. We were able to determine that we needed to put in place several Coaching Modules. These included our Strategic Planning, Team Building System, Team Deployment, Tactical Marketing Plan, and Sales Training. Our main focus was on marketing on high-end residential clients. These clients wanted outdoor rooms.  We also held margins on the lower to mid-size home builders. We determined that the warranty department was providing too many free services. This represented a significant loss and we saw some upsell opportunities.

Team Building System for Wendell’s Landscaping Business

Our plan was to focus on the Team Building System. At that point, employees were not engaged. We wanted more buy-in from the employees so that they could be empowered to provide resolutions to customer problems and care about the machinery they were operating.  So we began to involve all employees in meetings and brainstorming sessions. We developed a vision for the business that offered more benefits and profit sharing for the employees. As we deployed these strategies we saw dramatic improvements in many areas.

The Results for Wendell’ s Landscaping Company

Here’s what Wendell said about our Coaching Process:

Our annual sales have grown from $3.6million to $13million and our profits have grown by 400 percent. Alan helped create a stronger team atmosphere and was able to get great team “buy in.” This was after helping us to make some tough decisions necessary to initiate the turn around. Alan helped us to develop and deploy key marketing and branding strategies, grow our design-build division by 700% and turn our warranty department from an expense to a 30% profit.

 

Congratulations Wendell on your dramatic improvements in using among other things a Team Building System in your landscaping company! You are one of my business heroes and an inspiration to other business owners. You can view another case study of using a break-even plan in a school bus company here.