Back to Basics

It is a New Year! With that comes a fresh start. You have twelve whole months to build and achieve your goals, both financial and operational. As exciting as this sounds, we know it can also be daunting. Where do you start? We have you covered. Here are a couple of areas to consider developing your business as you enter the new year. 

Financial Plan

Laying out an annual plan allows you to set a goal, adjust it along the way, and have a constant pulse on how you are performing to it. Ideally, a financial plan will include Revenue and COGS, by division, as well as Indirect Expenses. The plan will be broken down by month, allowing you to update it monthly with a forecast or projection. We help companies like yours build a plan customized to your business structure and goals. Whether you want to massively grow, or need to get caught up financially, we can help you prepare your company for success. 

Standard Operating Procedures (SOP’s)

Most companies, even the smallest ones, have some sort of process for most things they do. What you first need to evaluate is the efficiency of your processes. Next you need to define them in detail. This means having a physical step by step procedure written out for the task. This allows for a couple advantages:

Not only can we help you create SOP’s customized to your company, but we have a library of generic ones already made. This makes the process much quicker as we can customize these generic ones to your needs.

Role Descriptions

Many landscape companies may have labeled roles for their staff, but we often see these roles are not clearly defined. By this we mean, multiple individuals are responsible for the same tasks, or even worse, some tasks are not assigned to any one role. Both situations tend to be followed by unnecessary chaos. We help companies restructure their Organizational Chart to fit their needs, and the best practices of the Green Industry. After doing so, we help guide them in building out role descriptions for each role. By doing so, everyone has a clear picture of what they are responsible for, and what others are accountable for. With this everyone can find confidence in themselves and peace of mind that additional tasks are not being lost.

We have a set of generic role descriptions we provide our clients as a baseline. If you are interested in implementing a better structure to this part of your business, we can provide these to you and work together to build something that is perfect for your Company and goals.

Checklists

No matter the company, everyone in the Green Industry deals with similar events: New Clients and Cancellations. These are both of high importance to be dealt with swiftly and accurately. If not, it can lead to unhappy clients or loss of future business. Creating checklists for such events allows companies like yours to avoid this risk. These checklists should include all the steps taken both at signature and when you receive a cancellation. Each task should be assigned to a role in your company. This creates clarity of all the necessary actions and assigns accountability to individuals. 

Some of you may already have all of these in place – great! However, if you are looking to achieve operational excellence, and you are not already there, you should consider reviewing each of these in depth. Together, these four areas cover a large majority of the “systems” your company has in place. Systems are the support to achieving your goals. Since you have not met your goal, you may need to revise your systems.

While we find massive value in all these items, it might be challenging to implement them all at once. You may be wondering which is most important, or which should be done first. Since every company operates very differently, there is no one answer for everyone. If you are interested in implementing one of these new processes, (or a different one), and do not know where to start, reach out. Together, we can help you achieve your goals.