EDITORIAL: Ringing in a New Year

Happy New Year. With the New Year we debut a newly designed magazine. Our design and editorial team worked together to bring you a cleaner look that more effectively conveys the depth of content that monthly keeps you on top of events, trends and opportunities in the professional lawn and landscape marketplace.

Don’t worry. We’re still providing you with the same top-notch business management articles you rely on to run your businesses efficiently and profitably. In fact, we’ve expanded the breadth of this coverage by providing you with more innovative ideas to grow your residential and commercial businesses along with governmental and HOA properties.
 
We’ve organized Lawn & Landscape’s various sections with this in mind. In this issue, you’ll find input from our readers in our letters to the editor page. We’re always eager to receive input from our 80,000 subscribers. Don’t hesitate to send in your thoughts and opinions. We’ll print as many of them as we can in future issues. Next, you’ll find industry news, events and trends. We highlight stories and key statistics that impact your business and accurately reflect the ever-changing nature of the landscape industry.
 
Our feature section follows the news and leads off with the issue’s cover story, easily the most identifiable characteristic of our magazine. This is anything but a cookie-cutter industry and it’s our goal to profile companies of all revenue sizes, varying service niches and across all geographic regions including seasonal vs. year-round operations.
 
We profile those companies who have created a successful template for their landscape business. We don’t highlight only the “big” companies; rather it’s our goal to provide proven, real-world successful business strategies that you can incorporate into your businesses. 
 
We’ve also included a section in the back of the magazine to serve as a business tool kit. Within this section, you’ll receive expertise from industry veterans and exclusive Lawn & Landscape columnists Marty Grunder, Jim Huston and  Bill Arman. These contributors have all worked the service side of the business and bring real-life experience with regard to sales and marketing, business operations and labor – the lifeblood of our industry. Along with our popular “How We Do It” and “Business Opportunities” sections, we’ll include a monthly “Took Kit” page that features an essential tool to make your business better.
 
It’s certainly a lot of content to include in print. There’s never room for it all, so to get the full picture, you need to log on to www.lawnandlandscape.com to receive all of our issue extras, business forms, MSDS labels and to enjoy a dialogue with your peers on our message boards.
 
We’re excited about 2008 and the continued growth of the lawn and landscape industry. Please share with me your thoughts about our new look or any subject you’re interested in reading about at ccode@gie.net. Make it a great year.