Episode Transcript
[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 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 by the support of Aspire, Bob Yard, exmark, Proven Winners and nalp. Remember to subscribe so you never miss an episode. Filling in today from Marty Grunder is Grow Group Vice President Vince Torchia.
[00:00:35] Speaker B: Hi everybody, Vince Torchia here from the Grow Group for another exciting bonus episode of the Grow Show. This week I'm wrapping up our planning for 2027 with how to have a plan before you need a plan as you go into tracking, reviewing and ultimately changing course if your metrics are off track for 2027. So where do we start? If you're listening to this, you need to envision a pyramid, right? And at the top of that pyramid, what we use at Grunder Landscaping Company for check ins as a part of our planning process are quarterly meetings.
So at the top of the pyramid or at the apex of the pyramid is quarterly meetings. Those quarterly meetings are all about what they sound like checking in on progress throughout the year. One thing that I heard from Jim Callai, one of our ace facilitators many years ago was this concept of the past, present, future meeting agenda. Basically Jim's get out of jail free card. If you are ever struggling with man, what do I cover? What am I supposed to say? How am I supposed to relate to my audience? Past, present, future is like a great cheat code. And so it's exactly what we do for our meetings that are quarterly. We take a look at the past. What happened last quarter? What were the good things, what were the bad things? What were the start, stop, keep. If you've heard us talk about that at the Grow event with our Grow hosts, what were the start, stop keeps.
So what happened?
Where are we now right presently? What's going well, what's on track, what's off track?
What corrective measures might we need to put in place now and then? Where are we headed? What's coming up for next quarter? What's coming up for the rest of the year? What yard signs, flags in the air on ramps or off ramps are available to us and what do we do to access them? So that's the first starting point. We've got our beautiful plan together, we've got our budget, we've got this direction that we're going.
Quarterly check ins are our first place to start.
Okay? So now, right as we approach the end of 2026 into 2027, put your quarterly check ins on the calendar.
Map them out. Have that past, present, future agenda as part of your process. That is the way to think about those meetings, right? Past, present and future. So that's number one. As we plan and check in progress for next year, put our quarterly meetings on the calendar.
Now, who attends those quarterly meetings?
In a broad way, it is leadership of the organization.
We have found that you don't need a three day off site, right, to have this conversation.
You can do this if you're organized and do it well in about six hours with a break for lunch and a break for the bathroom and coffee and whatever else you need. But don't get caught up, especially if you're new to this planning process, don't get caught up in saying we have to block off the third week of April in the middle of spring start to do our quarterly planning. No, you can pick the second Thursday of April and block out six hours and get a lot accomplished if you're prepared to do it.
So who attends again, roughly? It's leadership.
The people that have direct control over the departments in your organization.
For smaller companies, that might be one or two people, maybe it's just yourself. And you're going to have a quarterly meeting on your own, by the way, more power to you. That's great. Everybody has to start somewhere.
Maybe it's you and your ops leader. Maybe it's you and your ops leader and a great salesperson because you want conversation to be right, covering three legs on the stool. But it really should be departmental leaders, right? Whether you call it a leadership team or a management team or an executive team, whatever you call it, don't get hung up on that right now. Just think about, I want people in there who have the right intent for the organization. They know the direction that we're trying to go and they have influence over their department to help us hit our goals. So let's start with that.
What we've done at Grindr Landscaping that has really been a benefit to us is that let's say we have six to eight hours scheduled for the day. What we like to do is have our leadership be present for all of that time. But we bring in select members of our organization who are not department leaders. Maybe they hold a lot of influence. Maybe they're up and comers. Maybe they're part of a team that we know we need to focus on for the upcoming quarter. We will bring them in for a section of the meeting and we'll tell them, hey, this is what we covered in the morning, this is what we want to cover with you, and this is what we're going to cover in the afternoon.
That way they are part of the process. They get information, they're able to have their voice be heard or throw up flags. The word I use flags like an NFL game. Throw a flag in there to talk about a topic that maybe leadership has been blind to, or maybe we've just been unaware that it's been going on.
And so from an agenda standpoint, what that might look like is you might have a leadership team meeting from, say, 8 to 11.
Maybe there's members of your sales team or your ops team or your admin team specific to that quarter and what you're really focused on. Maybe they're going to come in at 11 and we're going to have an hour with them again to have a conversation about the future of the business, to recap past, present and future. Maybe we all eat lunch together, we do a quick recap, make sure we get their takeaways, because if they're part of the meeting, they have to be part of the meeting. So we're going to get their takeaways or what's on their mind.
And then maybe they go back to the office at 1130 and then leadership team wraps up on its own from 1:30 to 3:00'. Clock.
So again, leadership is there the whole time. But maybe we're bringing in select people right, as part of that midday change to incorporate them in conversations, give them a taste of what leadership talks about, and again, involve people in the organization in a way that is easy for them to access and helps broaden the conversation. So that's again, if you're looking and thinking about how we plan and how we track progress, think about those quarterly meetings as the top.
Because from the top, everything needs to cascade down.
So we set our budget, we have our goals. We've now scheduled our quarterly meetings for next year. We need to figure out when else are we going to talk about these topics and how else do we track progress?
So again, if you're envisioning a triangle cascading down, we're getting closer and closer right on the bottom of the triangle. The next is monthly updates.
So at Brenner Landscaping Co. As part of what happened during COVID for us, we felt like we were communicating okay. We felt like there was so Much to communicate, though, about COVID protocols and conversations with clients and local municipalities, et cetera, et cetera. Hard to believe that's almost seven years ago.
We instituted a monthly all team meeting purely for updates, purely so the team felt communicated with. Everybody heard the same thing at the same time from a messaging standpoint.
And we realized, wow, this is really effective for communicating. Other companies have done versions of this. It was almost like a state of the union of the company. And that's exactly what it morphed into for us. So now it's called the grow meeting. And we have a monthly meeting where we talk about progress towards our goals with our entire team.
Everybody hears it, Everybody's clocked in.
Everybody hears the same message at the same time. How are we doing on our revenue goals? How are we doing on our hiring? How are we doing on our future planning? How are we doing on the metrics that matter to us as an organization? Everybody gets to hear it, which is great.
So again, if you're thinking about it, we've set our targets, we've set our goals. We have these quarterly meetings to really dig into them, talk about past, present, future, what's good, what's bad, how do we make an effect change.
The team gets an update on that on a monthly basis.
One mistake that we made originally was we only had one or two people talking during that monthly meeting.
It did not register the same. So now we have a rotation of our department leaders and of people in our organization who present and everybody then identifies. Oh, this isn't just senior leadership. This is other people that I work with that I get to hear from on a monthly basis.
So now we've got our monthly checkpoint on progress towards our goals.
That again, rolls out of our quarterly checkpoints. So we've got quarterly, we've got monthly, naturally, following. What about weekly? Right. As we're moving down our triangle here on a weekly basis, we basically use meetings to keep progress going and whether we're on track or off track for our goals. So every Monday we have a leadership team meeting.
10 to 11:30, every Monday, 90 minutes. It's a way for the leadership team to have open dialogue, open conversation, think about our goals, track progress towards them. And the real benefit of that is that that meeting is on a Monday.
Now, the leadership team, the leaders of other departments take the information that we discuss on Mondays and they bring it to their departments.
Easy example.
Monday, leadership team, Tuesday, sales meeting.
We take the information that's a part of the leadership team meeting. We filter out what the sales Team needs to know or be aware of as a result of that, that gets brought into their sales meeting.
So you have a Wednesday operations meeting, same thing. These were the four or five topics that came out of the leadership meeting that week. Those need to be brought into the operations meeting on Wednesday or Thursday.
So weekly for us is a great cadence. A lot of other leadership teams don't necessarily meet every week. We have found that for whatever reason, that's our best way to communicate. So you have to find the rhythm that works for you. Weekly works for us. We just have that space. We don't lose it. We don't reschedule it. It just works. But we have now gone from quarterly goals to monthly updates to weekly conversations and tracking.
We've gone down the triangle and as you can guess, those things go right back up the triangle as well. If we are constantly talking about something in our weekly meeting, man, we probably need to give an update on that as part of our monthly Grow meeting. And if we keep talking about it, man, that better ended up in one of our quarterly meetings because it must be a topic that we need to address or discuss.
So we view that as going up and down the pyramid of communication from quarterly to monthly to weekly.
And finally, on a daily basis, we show our numbers that matter to our team. We're on an earned revenue system. So every day when we earn revenue, our numbers update.
So every day when revenue is earned, we are showing progress to our team, showing progress towards goals and again showing them real time where we are on track or off track based on the goals that we've set.
It's on a public dashboard in the middle of our shop. It's on the Aspire system that we run every day. Whether you speak English as a first language or not, you can see how we're trending towards our goals. And again, it's just public information. We found no reason not to be transparent about that.
So that is how we continue these plannings that we do and how the team can continue to view them and see them.
[00:11:43] Speaker A: Okay. Okay. You listened to the Grow show, so you already know that my team and I have information that can help team take your business to the next level. The next step. Join us at GROW 2027 in Savannah, Georgia in February. Tickets are on sale now, but the price goes up by $200 per person on November 1st. So save your seat and save yourself some money by visiting growgroupinc.com I'll see you there.
[00:12:07] Speaker B: So the big question that we get. Great. I've got My quarterly meeting scheduled. I've got my State of the Union scheduled. I've got my weekly leadership team meeting or department meeting scheduled.
What do we do when we're off track?
We realize we're going to miss something. We realize something's not going right. What do we do about it? Well, the first thing you have to do is acknowledge it and be transparent with the team. Because if you're seeing it, the team is seeing it and there's no reason to sugarcoat it. Not that anybody would, but we just have to say, hey, we're off on our target for this month. We had our goal, we broke it down by the month, we broke it down by the quarter, and now we're off.
What we have to determine is, number one, what is the easiest track for us to get back towards that goal?
Is it more opportunities for sales? Are we short a salesperson? Like, what is the real reason that we are not hitting it again? Open, honest, transparent conversation. That's number one. Number two, what is the realistic way for us to get back on track?
So what is the goal and why are we missing it? Number two, what is the most realistic way we can get back on track?
And just having an open, honest conversation with the team? For us at Grundr, if we're within about 10% of where we need to be, we like to have the conversation. But we don't have a huge in depth process or huge in depth conversation about it. We like to note it, hey, we're about 10% off. Maybe we're 10% high on a budget number for cost. Maybe we're 10% off on a sales budget for where we should be. We like to flag that.
But we really would like everyone to get back to what they should be doing from an activity standpoint to go hit that goal. And my joke is I'd rather just have salespeople work on sales for an hour than call another hour long meeting to talk about the fact that we're 10% off. So you have to call it out. You have to be realistic. You have to show the team that we need to get back on track.
But do not confuse the conversation about being off track as getting us back on. It's all about activities no matter what. Again, the operating team needs to be operating, the sales team needs to be selling. Anything we're doing that's taking them out of those rhythms may cause us to dismiss our goal further and further.
And then again, if we're stuck, that's why we have the team. So we bring it up in our State of the Union. We bring it up in our quarterly conversations to ensure that we have the right inputs and the right awareness about what we need to change.
So if I'm you thinking about next year, let's get our quarterly meeting scheduled. Just follow the old tried and true past, present, future.
What is our ability to communicate what comes out of that with our team? Broadly right, the whole team, Monthly State of the Unions.
What is our weekly mechanism to look at the KPIs that we've set, the goals that we have, where we're off track and on track and how do we cascade that into the right departments and then when we're off track, acknowledge it, get a plan to get back on track and if we're really stuck, involve more members of our team and go take action.
I hope you've enjoyed these bonus episodes about planning and hitting our goals for 2027. I'm looking forward to seeing all of you at Grow in Savannah in February of 2027, where we'll be two months into our year and looking forward to seeing how progress is being made across all the companies there. As always, if we can do anything for you at the Grow Group, please don't hesitate to reach out growgroupinc.com and look forward to seeing you soon.
[00:15:36] Speaker A: Thanks for listening to the Grow show and a special thanks to Aspire, Bobyard, Exmark, Proven Winners and NALP for making this episode possible. We'll talk to you next week.
