Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Welcome to the Grow Show Powered By Steel. On the Grow show, we share ideas, tips, tactics and insights to help you grow your landscaping business. Based on our team's 40 years of experience running a landscaping company and working with other owners and their teams to do the same, new episodes are released weekly on Wednesdays. Here's your host, Marty Grunder.
[00:00:22] Speaker B: Well, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever the case may be. This is Marty Grunder from Grunder Landscaping Company and the Grow Group. Thanks for downloading the Grow Show Powered by Ste Deal. Today we're going to give you some tips on getting things done, as many of you just left our annual meeting, our grow event in Columbus, Ohio, and you have a long list of things you want to get done. So we're going to help you. 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 learning experience. The Grow show is the greatest thing since Kevin Jones from Next Level Golf. I've been taking lessons from Kevin for a couple years now and he's had his hands full with me. I'm a hack, folks. I didn't start playing golf till five years ago and now I'm addicted and I still have a long, long way to go. But slowly but surely, folks, I'm getting better and I'm grateful for Kevin. I hope that this year, 2025, I can consistently shoot in the 80s. I know I can if I play some easier courses. Ha. But I'm doing it the hard way. Kevin Jones is a miracle worker and an all around nice guy. Ah. Dreams of shooting an 85 at NCR's tough south course. Here I come now, onto the Grow show. We just finished GROW 2025, ladies and gentlemen. And man, it was awesome. If I do say so myself, Jason Cromley and his team at hidden creek absolutely 100% knocked it out of the park. And my team, Vince, Emily and Lindsey did an incredible job with everything as well. And I do mean everything. All of the teachers that grow, all the landscape pros, by the way, that did the teaching, they did a great job. Everyone left inspired and full of great ideas and ways they can improve their teams and businesses. However, the problem now is being overwhelmed with ideas and things you want to do and implement that you've learned. So we wanted to help you manage that challenge this week on the Grow Show Powered By Steel. Whether you went to grow or not, you're coming into your busiest time. Of the year. I know. And you can be overwhelmed with projects and things you want to do. Many of you that just left grow have a list of things that you learned and saw that you want to implement. So let's talk about how you can get through that. First of all, let's think about how you want to be perceived as a leader. Do you want to be someone that comes in like a crazy person? Like, what conference did Marty just go to? What is wrong with him? We can't do 29 things here in the next week. Why didn't we do this in the winter when we were slow? Now he wants us to clean the shop and paint the truck. I mean, this is maddening. Be careful, folks. All right? I learned this the hard way. I used to go to an event, I'd come back, I'd grab everybody together. I'd give this terrific speech because I know I'm gifted as a speaker. I'm not gifted a lot of things, but I'm pretty good at speaking. And if you'd been with me a while, you just kind of sat there calmly and you listened to me with my rant. If you were new, you're like, to the new guy, my gosh, this guy's awesome. Does he always talk like he's incredible? And old timers would say, just relax? I saw Marty had another book come in from Amazon. He's reading that. We're going to start this whole process over again next week. There'll be a whole new set of ideas, so don't get too excited. He's got trouble executing. That was old Marty, all right? And I realized what that was. You don't want to be a squirrel, okay, Jumping around from. From idea to idea. You want to be focused. So the first thing I want you to do with everything that you want to be focused on that you want to get done, be realistic and be mindful that your team can only process so much. Okay? So just keep that thought in the back of your mind. The next thing I want you to do is I want you to get organized around your thoughts. March Madness is upon us. Okay, so let's use a tip from one of my mentors, Ed Epley. He shared this with me many years ago. And this is something you can do to sift through things to come up with your most important priorities. Use bracketology, like they use in March Madness. Go through all your notes. Sit in a quiet place. Write every single thing down that you want to improve in your business. Take your notes from grow. Take your notes from Your leadership team meetings. Take your notes from your peer group meetings. Go through all of them, spread them all out. Get a quiet place, Starbucks, the library, your basement at home. If you can do this at your office at work, do it there. Go to a quiet place where you can spread it all out and write down all the things you want to do, and I mean all of them. And you might want to do a couple meetings to get this done. All right? If you want, you can even ask your team that went to grow with you what they think the company needs to do. Okay? It's perfectly okay if you wish to do this with your leadership team, if you want, but get them all written down. Once you have all those ideas written down, revamp our hr. Come up with a new tagline. Get a vision, mission and core value statement. Clean up the shop. Look at a new website, whatever it is, write them all down. And then I want you to take a bracket like you have here for the NCAA tournaments, okay? And I want you to battle out all the things that you want to do. So you may have write a new handbook, do a new website. Well, you look at those two and you're like, gosh, I mean, the website's more. More exciting, but the handbook's really more important. So I'm going to put the handbook out and then you go through and you sift all those. Okay, we'll talk a little bit more about that here in a minute. But that's just a basic overview of what you do. But before you do the bracket exercise, I want you to go through that whole list with a highlighter. What things on that list are low hanging fruit, things someone can do right away or are easy for someone else to do. Okay, let's say when you were at Hidden Creek, you really liked a sign that they had up that you saw and you snapped a picture of it. You want your logo on it and you want the sign to say the same thing. Maybe there's a sign that says whatever you allow, you encourage, and you really like that message and you want to put it in your bathroom or above the schedule board or on the back door. Whatever it is, just put that on the list. Is that really worth debating or thinking about or taking up time? Just go get the sign made, call your sign maker, send them a picture, tell them, send you a proof. Just have someone get the sign done. Say you went through Hidden Creek and you realized that car shop is a disaster and you want to clean your place off. You want to start in good shape. All right, well, that's probably not worth debating about. All right, folks, just do it. And by all means, the small things that can just get done and create some momentum by doing it, do it. Show people. Don't just tell them that you mean business. Show them change is part mental, but a lot of it is physical. It's what they see. Here at Grunder Landscaping company, we spend a lot of time and money to keep our place clean. We have Mike, our painter, come in several times a year to touch things up or to repaint. We clean our bathrooms myself and Alan, who you met on the grow show or you will meet soon on an episode. Him and I help clean the bathrooms here. We want our place clean. I truly believe that organization and cleanliness is a mindset that transcends itself to other areas of your business. I think that it's pretty easy to understand that if your shop is clean, the expectations are that the job sites are clean. I think there's some teaching that goes. And I think what you got to remember along these lines is something that I talk about all the time, which is this concept that your external customer service will never exceed your internal customer service. If you want your team to treat your clients well, you got to treat them well. If you want them to take care of the job sites, you got to show them at your shop that you want your place taken care of. Like everything we do, there's a reason for it. So I think there's merit in that kind of change like that that we're talking about. You got a chance with all these little things, ladies and gentlemen, the low hanging fruit, if you will, to build some momentum. So go do that. Now back to the bracketology.
Battle them all out, get them all there and get it set up. Now, oftentimes you may get. And what you want to do is you want to get to a final four. And we'll mention this again here in a moment, but you might find in that final four when you go back through and look at the list, maybe the final four was get an HR plan, do a complete cleanup of all the grounds in the shop. Maybe that's more than what you can just do real quick. Maybe there's some flow patterns and things you want to work on. Maybe another one was come up with sales scripts. And the final thing was plan a party to entertain clients at to thank them for their business. When you look at those four, you're like, guy, I mean, I don't know that those are the top four. Go through the other ones and battle it out. Just use it as a comparison. The HR one had a really tough battle early on. It was up against the website. Okay. And the HR one, maybe the website, since it's so prominent, should be one of those Final Fours. The bracketology just kind of helps you sift the things through, and that's what my friend Ed Epley taught me, and I've used that now for almost 20 years, and it's been very helpful. I hope it helps you, too. Once you've gone through all that and you get the final four and you call that out, then I want you to get another final four. I want you to take the final four that you had from the first battles, I want you to look at all the remaining ones and get another final four. That second final four that is battled out, that's going to be your next set of projects. But you don't go do those or touch those until the first final four is battled through. Does that make sense? Save those for when you can access them later. Get to work on your final four. And then what we need to do is we need to do an action plan for each of the final four big bucket items, the big priorities that you came up with. And there's a little series of steps here I want you to go through. There should be an action plan, and the action plan needs to be simple. It shouldn't be 47 steps. I used to do action plans with that many steps. It's overwhelming. It's stupid. It's overcomplicating it. Don't do that. Do exactly what I say here. Number one, what does a win look like for this task? How will we know we've been successful with this task? What is the answer to that question? We will know. We've been successful with putting in an HR process and a new handbook. When we've got everyone signed off on the handbook and the attorney looks at it and says, great job, and everyone signed and it's filed, and I know we're covered. Okay, so what do I got to do? And what are the four steps to getting that handbook done? Write those out, consult an expert, do a draft, put a timeline together, and then unveil it to the team. And then after you do those action plans, who's going to own it? Okay, and now here's a word of caution to owners. There's a tendency here to do two things with this. The owner tries to take on too much. The other problem I see is we give the task to somebody who has time, not necessarily the person who would be the best fit for it. You can't do that. All right, first of all, owners, you can't share everything, all right? You got to give it to who would be the best person for this. If you've got someone on your staff that used to run their own business and they sold their business and joined your company, that would probably be a really good task for them because they're going to understand the nuances of an employee and the ownership and all that. There's probably going to be a really good chance that they would do that. The other thing you got to understand about delegating projects of significance like this with an action plan to other people in your company, it's a chance to develop other leaders. It's to let them stand in the spotlight and you can see what they can do. So let me give you another example. Let's say you went to grow and Emily Lindley's talk on marketing really resonated with you. And you run Aspire, but you're not using the automated features on Aspire for communication. So your win would be that all your clients with an email before your crew is coming now, versus having your team call them or not call them and ticking off clients and having them just see your crew show up, taking that task away from your business sales team so maybe they can focus on sales. The email is tied to your schedule board. So now all you have to do is stay on top of that and it's good. So that's the win. You will know you've been successful when clients start complimenting your good communication and when salespeople hopefully realize and say they love it and now have more time to spend selling. It's an automated task. All right, so the action plan again was, number one, talk to our rep at Aspire here. We're going to get this done and ask them the best way to implement it. There's always people at Aspire that can help you. Number two, we're going to put together a 10 day plan to implement it. It shouldn't take that long, folks. And we're going to start with a test. We're going to get the plan to implement it and we're going to test it out internally. Number three, we're going to roll it out to the sales team. We're going to tell them the why, we're going to tell them why we need to do this. We're going to tell them what's going to happen, we're going to tell them all the good things to do. And then number four, of our action plan. We're going to put notes on the leadership team's calendar to check and see that it's working right. We're going to schedule some fictitious jobs. So I can see we're not just going to set it and forget it. I'm finding that's very true even for us here at Grunder Landscaping as we grow. You can't just set anything to to something and forget it. I have a note on my calendar once a month to send an email into our own company inquiring about hiring us to make sure that thing is working because for whatever reason, once in a while it burps and it doesn't work. And then we have people call and say, well, no one called me back. Now it hasn't happened in a long time, but I don't want it to happen. So I'm not just going to set it and forget it. I'm going to pick someone to chair this action plan. Now, if you've got someone that manages your sales here, then maybe it's them or maybe it's one of your young tech savvy sales pros you're training Again, like I just said, this is an opportunity to get them involved and to see what they can do. It builds their confidence. You can see what they're capable of. You may see if there's other things for them in the future. Are they a potential leader? I know I'm going fast here, but I hope this is showing you how you can get things done. And repeat the outline of this process for each of the four things you want to do. A lot of people tell me, hey, Marty, listening to you on the grow shows like drinking water from a fire hose. I understand. Then Watch it on YouTube. Hit the scroll back button, take your notes out, slow it down and keep going and taking notes and grasp it. I got a lot I want to share and I'm excited about this and I really think this is something that can help you. Now, the other couple things to share here. You don't wander off on another task that you want to do until all of those final four are done. I mentioned that earlier. I got to stress that that's how you get things done, folks. With an intense, intense in T n S e intense, intentional focus. You stay focused on those four. You don't dare go get another one until you get all four of them done. You got going great. You got the first one done, you got the second one done. You got the third one done. Now the fourth from your final four, you're like, I don't really feel like doing that. I'm going to take a peek at the other four. Yeah, I'd really rather work on that. No, don't do that. Get four done, folks. The last thing I want you to do about this with regards to holding you and your team accountable is getting these things done. You got to get these things done. And here's three suggestions for getting these things done. And this is stuff that I've learned from working through things myself, trying to have him become a company that's known for getting things done. Number one, have it front and center. Have it there where you can see it. Number two, share the action plans and the ideas with those that can help you. And number three, reward yourself and the team when it's done. Let's talk about each one of those front and center. Keep a list in front of you. I have my to do list for things like this in front of me at all time on OneNote. I look at it daily and I spend about 60 to 90 minutes on it every Saturday or Sunday going through everything that I'm working on.
You need to keep the priorities front and center with you and your team. You can't let a day go by without glancing at what are your most important things to do. Your leadership team should see them. In your leadership team meetings, we spoke about what we're working on with sales communications above. If that's something you want to do, that should be front and center. In the sales meetings, what gets focused on gets improved. And this is where a lot of leaders get lost, quite frankly. They put together a plan, but they don't look at the plan. They don't monitor progress. There's no timelines. They just say, oh, we're going to get this done. But it's wandering aimlessly in outer space. And they just keep talk, talk, talk, talk, talking about it. There's nothing getting done. So keep it real and alive, folks. Front and center. Okay, let me give you a personal example about front and center. Carbs, breads, cookies, Cheez, its, Goldfish, D Doritos, Cheetos Carbs and sugar, lint chocolate candy bars. Lint, dark chocolate ice cream donuts. Those are sugar carbs. And sugar are bad for my diet. So my wife and I don't have them around. And what I can't see, I don't think about. And I'm not tempted about. All right, what's around me is my aura ring that I have on my finger here that shows my steps. And the app on my Phone the Discord app. The conversation I'm having with my health coaches at Brother to Brother Fitness, Brett and Chris, that I have to log in what I've eaten and my steps, my workouts, all that has a consular reminder of what I need to do. It's front and center. Same thing, folks. From a business perspective. On my onenote, that has all my projects for the next two months I'm working on. It has all my projects for Grunder Landscaping. It has all my projects for the grow group. It has all the projects for myself and my family. All right, they're front and center, folks. What you can see motivates you and influences you in everything. If you come to Grunder for one of our field trips, we have two offices now, one in Dayton, one in Cincinnati. Both offices look remarkably similar. Okay. The office I have in Cincinnati I share with Seth because it's rare that him and I are there together. It looks just like the Grunder office that we have in Dayton. It's extremely organized. There isn't a bunch of clutter. It's all focused on getting things done. Okay. And I just think that's so important. What. What is around you on a daily basis will influence you. The same thing goes with the people you spend time with. You spend time with malcontent people that complain, that watch Fox News all day or read the New York Times all day, that that's not who you want to be around. Okay? I'm not trying to get political on you. Make up your own mind. Get around positive forward thinking people. Put positive forward thinking reminders in your life and all around you. Number two, here, after front and center, share it with those who can help you. The best way to communicate it, like we talked about there in front and center, do that. Get it in front of. But there's other ways. Are you in one of our peer groups? One of our ACE peer groups? Do you have an accountability partner in our peer group? Are you talking to them? If you're not in a peer group, do you have another risk taking peer that you go to lunch with? Do you have a mentor? So I've hired Mark to coach me. He knows all the big things we're working on. And when we meet in person once a month, we go over them. It's very helpful to share what you are doing. Not only that mentor or that accountability partner or the member in your ACE peer group can provide insight and shortcuts, but it can also push you in a nice way, of course, in a good way to get things done. I've lost £20 in the last six months. There is no way in the world I would have done this if my wife and brother, the brother fitness, Brett and Chris, big shout out to them that I hired them. If they hadn't been pushing me or my wife not buying the Cheetos, even when I told her to, saying, no. We're not getting that. Not having every kind of bread and stuff around there. It's made a difference, folks. I have people that know what I'm trying to do. I have long been guilty or I have long been smart. I don't know what you want to say to share my goals with others. I think sometimes I probably turn people off, that I'm so open and vulnerable with the things that I'm working on. I am an open book for the most part. I try to be an open book here on the grow show Powered by Steel because I want you to know that, yeah, we're doing well, okay? But one of the reasons we're doing well is we learn from our mistakes. And I have screwed up more things than all of you listening to this episode or watching this episode on YouTube have done in your life, all right? But I learn. I pick myself up and I get up and I get better. I do not want to be one of those guys or gals that only talks about things. I want to get things done. I'm almost 57 years old, folks. My life is more than half over, sadly. All right, I'm not looking for sympathy, but I want to get things done. Like when I turn 70 and I'm a grandpa now. I have two granddaughters. I know what I want to be remembered for. I know I want to be the guy that others want to be around. I want to be the guy that they say, yeah, Marty's been here over 50 years, but he's an amazing employee. He knows how to run all the technology. He still goes on sales calls and helps us. No way do we want him retiring. We want him around. Like, I know what I want to do. I've got a very clear vision, a clarity of purpose there. And it seems like, folks, the more I say things and they go out into the world and come back into my ears, the more I get done. Like when I say things out loud to others, like, I might go to a lunch and I might talk about what I'm working on there. Just work with me here. The words kind of go out into space. The other person hears them. We have a dialogue. It comes back in my ears, and it Gets in my microprocessor, my brain, and I start thinking things. And then at the end of the day, maybe when I sit down and I say, you know, I was talking to Doug about how I want to grow Grunder Landscaping, and I was really intense there about the sales side guy, I wonder if I come across like that to our team, that it's not really going to scare Doug because he's a friend, but maybe I need to tone this down a little bit. It's so helpful to talk the things through. It just. I don't know what it does. It's. Seth said that we should start to change the name of our company to say It Out Loud Consulting. Because oftentimes when you say it out loud, it either validates it or it shows you that you're nuts, what you're thinking about. And I think that's very true. I pretty much, ladies and gentlemen, have help in all areas of my life. I got a golf coach for my hobby. I got a money manager that my wife Lisa and I work with. I got a coach that's helping me get more things done. I have my wonderful wife Lisa at home. I have Seth here at Grunder Landscaping. I help him, he helps me. There's a ying and yang that goes on. I got a terrific relationship with my partner at the grow group, Vince. I got a couple of really close friends. I want to give a shout out to Todd, who's undoubtedly listening and watching to this. He's one of my closest friends. We have for years, ever since we were in high school, shared things about everything that we do. He had a lawn mowing business in high school, and he would tell me he mowed 13 yards, so I would go out the next day and try to mow 14 yards. There was a lot of good competition that helped each other. And Todd helps me to this day.
So helpful that he listens to me and he helps me see things that aren't often as bad as I think they are. Same thing with my coaches, with my wife, with Seth, or with Vince. You're going to go crazy if you don't talk about some of this stuff, folks. And then I have a host of mentors who have done what I'm trying to do. I talk to them a lot. Share what you want to do with the people that can help you. All right? But I want to caution you, there's a fine line. I'm a confident man. I don't need to run everything by someone before I do it. I don't paralyze Myself to that point, I work on something and when I get hung up or the little bit of doubt comes, that's when I talk. Or I may not even be asking questions. I may say, I just want to give you an update on where I am. I know I need to do things, all right? I don't go to them before I take any action. That's not what I'm saying. Take your action, but share what you are doing with others. Get help as needed. Like I said, say it out loud, see if that doesn't help you. And then the final thing I want to talk to you about, having it front and center. And then secondly, sharing it with others to get some help is this concept of rewarding yourself as you go along.
Celebrate the success. Admittedly, I'm not real good at this. Okay. And Vince and I have been on the Grow show in a prior episode telling you how neither one of us is very good at this, at celebrating. And that's not always a good thing, folks. It's really not good for your team. You know, they put all their effort into it and you didn't tell them. Thank you. So I am trying to celebrate more and to be more appreciative. Years ago, I would reward myself for just about everything. And. And I've gotten away from that. I probably got way too carried away, but I'm getting back into it a little bit. Let me share with you a couple ways I do that when I'm at work working on things. I'll say, okay, I'm going to go to Dorothy Lane Market and I'm going to get an awesome lunch made there and eat it by myself and listen to my pal Dan Horde's podcast on the Bengals. And folks, I mean, like, a really good lunch. This market is incredible. They'll cook up anything you want. A real nice piece of tilapia or chicken or salmon, some asparagus, and then my favorite black cherry Waterloo that I have in my Grow group cup right here. And I'm going to go over there for an hour, going to get an awesome cooked lunch served to me, and I'm going to listen to a podcast and I'm going to relax. But I am not going over there until I'm done with this particular task. Maybe it's recording an episode of the Grow show. Maybe it's writing an email that the sales team's going to use to generate some work. And sometimes it might mean that I'm not eating till 1:30. I remember one time a couple of weeks ago, I didn't go eat lunch till 2:15 because I couldn't get it done. I was starving, but I didn't leave until it got done. That really helps push you folks. This sounds sort of silly, but there was a Cincinnati Bengals sweatshirt that I really wanted. I'll wear it here. I got a surprise guest coming up that has a Bengals tie. I'll wear it to that. And I wanted to get it. I saw it on the Bengals website, but I said I'm not going to get that for myself until I get all those scripts rewritten that we need for Grunder Landscaping. I spent probably eight hours writing scripts for them, and when they were done, I ordered the $125 sweatshirt. I know that sounds silly and trite, but I did and it works. Folks, there's other ways to do this too, with your team. Foundationally, we want to reinforce the behaviors we want present in our organizations. So you just got something done. Reward the team. Maybe it's lunch. Tickets to a game, a cookout, a handwritten note with a gift card. Drinks for you and your leadership team around the corner. Tickets to Grow. Right? You get the idea. Not everything should be rewarded, but the things that we all worked hard on to get done should. Your job as a leader is to show the way to keep the team engaged and to keep pushing and leading them to new heights. We're not robots, folks. We're people. And good people want to be pushed, but they also have a human side to them and they want to feel appreciated. Think about the high school football game. A winning touchdown is scored. There's no cash payouts for scoring that maybe that's coming. I'm so disenfranchised with sports right now, other than the Bengals and the Reds. But I digress. It's about the accomplishment and the sense of satisfaction, the cheering and the embracing of one another. The high fives, all the nice things that are said and written about the team and the players and what they did. We get it done, we celebrate, and it's on to the next one. All right, well, I gave a lot to you there here today. I hope it helped you. I'm really excited about your 2025. Those of you that came to grow, you got a great opportunity to get better. And I've hoped I've helped you today on the Grow show, Powered by Steel. I also hope that you are signed up for GROW 2026 , and you're going to rock it in 2025. If you get things done and stay focused. Use all these tips to help you get things done. And by all means, if we can help you, let us know by sending us an email at GrowGrow Group Inc. Com. Well, that's going to do it for this week's edition of the Grow Show. Powered by Steel, folks. If you haven't done so already, subscribe to the Grow show and if you can, give it a rating or share a comment that helps more success minded professionals find us. And if you really want to help us share this episode with your team, take your phone out right now and text it to them. Thanks for joining us on the Grow Show. We'll see you next week.
[00:27:51] Speaker A: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Grow Show. Be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode and head to growgroupinc.com for more information and resources to grow your landscaping business. A special thanks to the folks at Steele whose support makes this podcast possible and whose reliable handheld power equipment makes our jobs easier daily. We'll talk to you next week.
