[00:00:01] Speaker A: Welcome to the Grow show brought to you by Marty Grunder's Grow Group, where we specialize in helping landscaping companies to clarify their platform, grow their people, build their processes and realize profits. Everything we teach is grounded in real experience. Our team is actively involved in the day to day operations of Southwest Ohio's Grunder Landscaping Company.
New episodes are released weekly on Wednesdays and are made possible with the support of Bob Yard. Remember to subscribe so you never miss an episode. Now here's your host, Marty Grunder.
[00:00:27] Speaker B: Well, good morning, good afternoon, good evening wherever the case may be. This is Marty Grunder from Grunder Landscaping Co. And the Grow Group. Thanks for downloading the Grow Show. Today we're going to talk about my thoughts on a question sent in by a friend and fellow landscaping pro on the future of the industry. It'll be a great conversation, but first a reminder. You can get the latest edition of the Grow show delivered to your phone, tablet or computer by subscribing wherever you get your podcasts or Watch us on YouTube for an enhanced experience.
The Grow show is the greatest thing since People who let you over in traffic. I've seen a lot of drivers recently who won't let you over and drive very unsafely. To be honest with you, the older I get, the more I say, what are you doing?
Okay? And I've grown to be patient and I let people over and I try to be nice when I drive. I said try if my wife is listening. How about today you and I try.
We all try to drive safely and nicely, especially if your name is on your truck like mine is. I truly believe, folks, on a serious note, what you do and how you do it comes back at you. If you do it wrong, it's going to come back at you wrong. If you do it right, it's going to come back at you right. We do teach our team here at GLC to drive our rolling billboards nicely and I would encourage you to do the same. So here's to kind and polite and to safe drivers. Now onto the Grow Show.
Recently, my pal Caleb Allman, who with his wife Brittany run a very successful landscaping company in central Ohio. You also may know Kayla because he has a very popular podcast called the Kid Contractor that I've been on a few times. We'll put those episodes in the show notes. You can listen to him. Caleb does a great job. Shout out to Caleb. He recently asked me this question. He said, marty, if you had to bet on one skill, technology or business model that will define the next successful landscaping company in five years, what would it be and why? It's something I've been thinking a lot about, Caleb. So just for you. Well, for everyone.
Let's talk about that. I've been doing a lot of reading. I've been on the road working with the owners and leaders of landscaping companies. And of course I'm here running Grinder landscaping company. I've got my entire fortune tied up in this company and I think a lot about trends and, and I wonder, where do we need to be?
And with all the reading, the research, I've spent time on chat GPT talking about this subject with them. Here's what I think. And these all aren't my original ideas. Okay? This is what research. This isn't like. I don't want you to listen to this and think, oh my gosh, Marty is so smart. Look at what he came up with. This is what my research is telling me. This is what my reading is telling me. This is what I see out in the world. It's all these things wrapped together.
And I think that operational intelligence, something we talk a lot about here with our president Seth. He talks a lot about it. He talks about it a lot. I think operational intelligence, operational excellence, that's going to be better equipment, better labor, and even design. That's what I think. The most successful landscaping companies in the next five years will not be defined by mowing, installs, irrigation or even design. I think they're going to be defined by their ability to turn the data that they get, the client relationships, the leadership systems in place. I think they're going to, what you're going to see happen is them using that to leverage a scalable platform. It's not AI by itself. It's not robots, it's not software. I think the winning companies will build what I'm going to call operational intelligence systems. You know, you've probably heard me say good managers make good decisions with good data. I was just working with a company recently, wonderful company, tons of potential, incredible marketplace, but they don't have the data. They need to know what to do more of and more importantly, what to do less of. And I think companies that focus on this concept of operational intelligence systems and that whole mindset, I think that they're going to know more, they're going to communicate faster, they're going to predict better, and they're going to execute more consistently than competitors that don't focus on it. And it gets down to just the data that you have and being able to adjust it. And that thing can Become the moat around your business. Okay, Five years ago, the company's winning. And landscaping, they probably had the best crews. Then it became companies with the best systems. Then it became companies that embrace technology. Like I see my company there. Like we don't have operational excellence and operational intelligence figured out. I think we're getting there okay. But I think the next generation of dominant landscaping companies is going to be something maybe different than what we've seen. And, and here's my bet. Based on my research, my common sense, my Marty thinking, all that, Wham. World according to Marty. I think companies that will win over the next five years, they may not have the nicest trucks, they may not have the most employees or even the best craftsmanship. They'll have that best operational excellence and meaning, they'll know their numbers faster, they'll communicate better, they'll retain clients longer, they'll develop leaders quicker, they'll make decisions before competitors even realize there's a problem because they have this like detection system in their data. That's going to be the next game. I often say, like I alluded to a little bit ago, good managers make good decisions with good information.
That's what I see out there. And the reason I think some of these old competitive advantages are dying is traditional competitive advantages are becoming commodities. Equipment advantage, I guess, but I think that's temporary. Like anybody can have the equipment labor advantage. Yeah, yeah, all of you working together, can't argue that. But labor's so unstable. I mean, don't even get me starting about the unreliability of the H2B program and the stress all of us go through every year, whether we're going to get our people or not. Design talent replicable. I'm wondering myself on the design side, like, what is AI going to be able to help us do? That's a discussion for another day.
Marketing. It's easier than ever with AI and content and the ability to analyze it. The barrier to entry, looking like a professional team or a professional operation, that's completely gone, folks. Today, a two million dollar a year company can build a great website overnight. They can automate their social media, they can generate proposals fast with simple software platforms like Jobber and other ones. They can outsource their bookkeeping. They can look like a 20 or 30 million dollars a year company online. So I think the question becomes what actually separates elite operators now? I think it's execution, consistency at scale. And that's where operational intelligence matters because you have to have data. And I think what operation intelligence really means is You've got the ability to see your business clearly and act quickly. You're not waiting for the end of the month. You're looking at things real time.
I think a future winning landscaping company will connect the CRM products that you have with estimating, with production, with job costing, with communication, with equipment. I know recently I was talking with Luke Gribble, my buddy at John Deere. There's all kinds of things in technology with John Deere that reports back to the service department that something needs done. It's given them data, it's analyzing. I mean, the amount of data companies are getting to make their products and service offerings better is mind boggling.
The customer experience, leadership, accountability, recruiting, forecasting. I think all that stuff is going to get into one operating rhythm. And I think there's five signals we can think about here where the elite companies can track this stuff. You know, you get margin drift. Well, with a good system in place, there's no end of the month surprise. You know, which crews are leaking margin probably by the day. Which team leaders are struggling with efficiency, which job types are underpriced. We have some products here where we know because of the GPS on the mower that you took the wrong way around the property, mowing it, and that's not the fastest way to do it.
Stuff like that is just crazy. Same thing with snow removal. The fastest way to go about plowing that lot. There's just a lot of data, client friction. Elite companies are going to track response times, unresolved issues, review sentiment, renewal, risk before a client even leaves. We have a lot of that going on with our product Aspire right now.
What about the third one, Leadership Health? I think future companies can measure meeting cadence. How often are we having a meeting? What's going on there? Accountability completion, which becomes easy to track, crew turnover. Obviously if you're turning over your crew, you got problems. And we know what that is, the communication gaps. I mean, we've got Fireflies, a AI product plugged into all of our meetings that's generating notes. I mean, the amount of data we're getting out of this stuff, it's crazy. Now I don't know how to orchestrate it. All that stuff says working on. But we're getting a lot of information.
And it's not just information to have fun with. It's information that's getting filtered down into manageable bites that you can make decisions with. What about capacity forecasting? I think companies are going to know when they can sell, when they cannot. What hiring needs are coming 90 days ahead. What about number five, owner dependency? I think the biggest companies will actively reduce approvals, bottlenecks and ask the owner moments. We're going to have things right because scalability depends on leadership, distribution. You can't be everywhere at the same time and using all these tools to have people have answers at their fingers. I think there's a lot going on. There's technology that everybody's talking about and it's called AI. And it's not the answer, folks. It's a tool. AI amplifies whatever system already exists.
And I think a disorganized company using AI becomes an even more disorganized company because it's just going faster and you got more crap you're putting on top of the crap you already got. But I do think AI used properly can help with proposal writing, client communication, scheduling, assistant, estimating, support, reporting, training systems, standard operating procedure, creation, sales preparation, recruiting, workflow flows. But the companies that benefit most from the AI, they're already going to have these processes, the standards, the accountability and the clean operational data. So you plug it into something that's already moving strongly and I think you can see what it's going to do. AI is not going to replace landscaping companies, but landscaping companies using operational intelligence, which, which AI is a part of that will absolutely replace companies that don't. And so the business model that I'd bet on, the real big bet that I would bet on would be relationship based reoccurring systems, revenue ecosystems, where we've got revenue inside, maybe a membership, things like that. I think the future winning landscaping company will behave more like a membership organization than a contractor. I think we'll focus on things that large operations like Kroger's do and chain restaurants. The lifetime value of a client, we don't want to lose one. We're going to bend over backwards. What we can do to keep them in the queue because it's a lot easier to go and maintain a client than to go find new one. The reoccurring services, the add ons, the things that we can do, we're doing that right now with lawn care on all of our lawn care accounts. We're trying to upsell mosquito fogging, perimeter, pest control, plant health care, property stewardship, where you're watching out for the best interest of the entire property.
Proactive, not reactive communication. We just spent a lot of time talking about that in our recently done virtual landscape sales pro training that we did and then advisory positions like we're, we're here to help you. We're your consultant, we're your coach, not transactions. Okay? So I think of, instead of like, call us when you need something, it becomes we manage your entire outdoor experience year round. We clean the gutters where your concierge. We're the guy you can count on for everything.
And I think when you think about things like that, and with all this operational excellence, that stuff becomes easier. We already are seeing it with some of our subcontractors that aren't very good at sales. They don't like sales, but they're good at the service. And we're offering them as menu offerings for services. And I think when you look at that, that changes the retention discussion, that changes referrals, pricing, power, and most of all, it probably changes predictability in your revenue and your business.
And I think that the best companies in five years won't just maintain landscapes, they'll manage trust. And I come down to that because that is so interesting.
25 years ago, we hired a marketing research company to interview 18 of our clients. They brought three groups, six in each one in an evening. They spent two hours with them. They fed them, and they asked them a bunch of questions. What do you like about Grunder Landscaping company? What don't you like when you think of Grunder? What do you think? What's the reason you do business with Grunder? And we all expected to hear about our great service, our quality, our creativity, our horticultural knowledge. That's not what we heard. What we heard was they do business with us because they trust us. And if you look at what operational excellence is, and all of these tools running behind that, they enable you to spend more time with your team, which is important. They enable you to spend more time with your clients, which is important. And, and this is a little off center, but they also enable an employee to spend more time with their family because they're not doing things manually. There's this machine behind them that's generating data, that's processing things, that makes it easier. And when you don't have turnover and when you have all these things working and you're consistent, you can scale, but you also build trust, which is what our clients said 25 years ago.
So in some ways, folks, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
So as we wrap this up here, if I owned a landscape company today and wanted to prepare for the next five years, or if I were just starting one, here's what I'd focus on. I'd clean up your data. If you don't have job costing, that's Real time. You got to get a product in your company that enables you to do that because otherwise you're waiting till the end of the month, the end of the quarter, or God forbid, the end of the year to make changes. You got to have CRM discipline, all right? Client relation management discipline. You've got to be taking the data in, you've got to recording them. Email addresses and cell phone numbers that can be texted to have a lot of equity in your business. Are those clean? Are you doing those? Estimating consistency? Are you using products like Element or Aspire, which I think are the two best ones to help you with your estimating consistency and eliminate mistakes and enable other people to bid work for you. How is your reporting? Is it accurate? Are you using it? This is something you've heard for years, folks, but garbage in, garbage out, okay? So clean up your data. Number one, build more middle leadership. I don't think because of some of these products that we're using and AI and this whole concept of operational excellence, I think the company that can scale the fastest is going to be able to make decisions quickly. And you need middle management, but I don't know if you need management above that. Like we're just seeing there's a lot of data and a lot of things that can happen. And again, if you have technology leveraged inside your business, there's less time your managers are spending pushing paper and they can maybe be responsible for 10 crews instead of 7 crews. Standardizing communication with clients, with the crews, with managers, with sales, with operations. Communication is operational efficiency, folks, reducing owner dependency. If I were you, I'd be looking at how many decisions require you, what problems wait for you, how many relationships exist only because of you. How is the business scaling if your products work well, if somebody can call your company, get an answer, they're getting an automated message that says they're coming out. They're getting a message that says they just left and here's what they did. Think about the time that can free your team up to do that. And then lastly, think of lifetime value, not one off projects. Look at this whole thing, folks. Caleb, I thank you for the question. It made me think a lot. It's making me organize my thoughts, use data. Spend some more time researching some of the things I just mentioned in the last 15 minutes or so. We don't have this figured out at Grunder Landscaping company folks. We don't. But it's something we're looking at, it's something we're striving for. And, and I don't think the next dominant landscaping company will look radically different from the outside. They're still going to have trucks, crews, designers, salespeople, problems, everything. But internally, I think they're going to operate completely differently. They'll be faster, more connected, more proactive, more predictable. They'll be creating an environment that a young person will want to work in. And I think the biggest shift of all is they won't think of themselves as landscaping companies.
I think they'll think of themselves as leadership organizations that happen to deliver landscaping. That's the future I'd bet on. Speaking of good bets, a great bet that you can make to improve your company is to come spend a day and a quarter, day and a half with us here at Grunder Landscaping Company at one of our field trips. They're coming up in the month of June, August, September, October.
[00:17:37] Speaker A: Join Marty and the Grow Group team at Grunder Landscaping Company. This year we host GLC Field Trip events at our living laboratory, Grunder Landscaping Company where we show you how we operate and how you can too. This event features small groups so you get the one on one attention you need and features a full 27 hours on site at GLC where we dive deep into everything from operations to sales to administration.
Find more information and sign
[email protected] and do it quickly. These events sell out every year.
