This Way Out

At Your Service
What is the strangest customer request you ever received?

Lawn & Landscape asked contractors this in a recent survey, and some of the answers were quite interesting. Here are 11 of the best we received.
 
1.  Dig a grave for the family dog that just died.
2.  Come in and change a light bulb for the customer.
3.  Incorporate the paw prints of a deceased cat into a new concrete patio.
4.  Rescue the family’s escaped parrot from a tree.
5.  Match the colors of the perennial beds to the colors of the interior window coverings.
6.  Install an irrigation system without pipe.
7.  Help the customer put furniture together.
8.  Mail their forgotten luggage while they were on vacation.
9.  Bring them toilet paper while they were in the bathroom.
10.  Remove the old mulch before laying the new mulch.
11.  Program their new TV and VCR.

Think you can top this list? If you have a strange customer request you’d like to share, including how you handled the situation, send us a note at nwisniewski@gie.net or 330-523-5382.

Misery Loves Company
When things aren’t going quite right, small business owners overwhelmingly look to their peers for advice. By a 2-to-1 ratio, they favor picking fellow entrepreneurs’ brains first. This is followed by spouses or significant others. Only one in five chose the Internet, and government sources, like the Small Business Administration, didn’t register very high at all.

What Brown Can Do For You?
Want to trim a few miles off of your maintenance routes to save time, money and become more efficient? Steal some ideas from UPS, which has more than 120,000 vehicles on the road worldwide. 
By conducting time studies, the company discovered that avoiding left-hand turns would save time, conserve fuel, reduce emissions and decrease the potential for accidents.
In one year alone, UPS route planning technology that reduced left-hand turns:

• Shaved nearly 30 million miles off already streamlined delivery routes.
• Saved 3 million gallons of fuel.
• Reduced emissions by 32,000 metric tons of CO2 – the equivalent of removing 5,300 passenger cars off of the road for an entire year.

In addition to avoiding left-hand turns, UPS recommends fleets try to achieve better gas mileage by:

• Avoiding turns across traffic, which reduces idling and is safer.
• Scheduling regular vehicle maintenance, making sure tires are property inflated.
• Reducing vehicle weight.
• Encouraging drivers to avoid fast stops at stoplights and maintain speed limits.
• Planning the quickest and most direct routes from job site to job site.