Minding Your Business: May 2001, Spring Fever

Last month, I explained how landscape contractors who spent the winter working on improving their companies can learn to manage a budget and modify or add systems effectively during this seasonal transition. This month, I’m tackling effective marketing techniques to help contractors sell additional work and recruit and hire new employees.

MARKETING MANIA. Successful companies find time to market and sell their services throughout the year. How many times do you work on letters or mailings when the weather is nice? Probably not very often. These tasks are usually performed when the weather is bad or business slows. As a result, we write letters and call on clients during those cold, rainy days when no one is thinking about their landscape. This is a flawed, inconsistent strategy. If you want your business to operate at full capacity, then marketing must remain an ongoing effort - not just a rainy day activity.

You’ll know this time devoted to marketing was well spent when you are suddenly inundated with sales opportunities. Your phone rings off the hook and you can’t find time to respond to all of leads. This is when many companies decide that they have too much work and discontinue their marketing efforts. However, this is evidence that your efforts are paying off, and if you quit now, you may miss out on some great opportunities. If you are over capacity, raise prices and improve your overhead recovery on each job.

RECRUIT, RECRUIT, RECRUIT. This winter, you probably identified the need to hire new employees to handle your growth. Therefore, you placed ads in your local paper hoping to find qualified candidates.

Occasionally, you will find a diamond in the rough, but more often than not, you end up hiring someone who is not qualified for the job. Then, instead of changing your plans, you try to move forward with your original plan even though you don’t have the most qualified person. In this case, you are setting up yourself and the employee for failure.

In order to hire qualified employees you must make an honest effort to recruit on a regular basis. Finding good employees is not easy, and good landscape companies have realized that recruiting is an ongoing process. The challenge then becomes finding the time to recruit. Too many companies limit their recruiting to the slow winter months, but at this time they usually don't even have a position to offer.

Recruiting involves more than just running a few ads during the winter months. Finding qualified employees requires attending job fairs, local colleges and universities, using recruiting Web sites, and getting involved with industry events throughout the year - not just in the off-season. Managers and owners need to find time during the busy time of the year to recruit and hire new employees.

After setting goals to recruit workers, and sell and market your services, you need to stick with these plans and evaluate them throughout the year. After all, you have invested a tremendous amount of time and effort into these plans, and you cannot afford to throw them all away just because you are too busy.