Setting a Standard in Performance

How many times have potential clients dismissed your company’s landscape maintenance bids as "entirely too high," when other clients have readily accepted your pricing on comparable projects? And how many times have you had customers besiege your office with calls complaining about your performance on their properties while other customers remain completely satisfied with the same services you’re providing for them?

All customers have unique personalities and budgets, but all customers have similar goals. They want their properties to look good, and they want services at a reasonable price. Very few of them, however, share a common understanding of precisely what is included in grounds care and landscape services.

Does spring clean-up work include bed definition, cultivation, new mulch and pre-emergence herbicide application, or does in only involve leaf and debris clean-up? Does mowing include sidewalk edging on a monthly schedule or after every mowing visit? Are lawn fertilizations three, four, five or six applications? Do flower installations involve soil prep, deadheading and watering or just planting?

These questions can go on endlessly, and unless there are established guidelines spelling out the details of your services in a grounds care program, you will never know what customers expect because they won’t know what to expect either.

SETTING EXPECTATIONS. Performance specifications are simple statements of what will be done, when it will be done and how often it will be done. They provide a level playing field on which "apples to apples" bid comparisons can be submitted and assessed. They also help to increase consistency in job performance and they align results and cost expectations of contractor and customer.

While nearly all property and facility managers have detailed specifications for every major maintenance line item, from asphalt to carpet to roofing, few, if any, have their own company-wide landscape or grounds maintenance guidelines and specifications. Similarly, homeowners don’t prepare bid packages for prospective grounds care contractors.

Contractors need to provide detailed and articulate specifications for each and every service that you offered. Specifications are the blueprint for your business operations. From these specifications by which your company operates, you can develop a brief description of services that will enable you to better communicate with your customers.

Well-written, internally developed standards should be the foundation on which your company’s training, operations and sales efforts rely. These standards provide points of reference for teaching new hires the elements of your business and how you want your business to operate. They also serve as benchmarks against which you can judge and compare the quality and completeness of your employees’ work. After all, how can you be critical of the work your field personnel are doing if you don’t tell them exactly what you expect them to do?

In addition, performance specifications can help refine your cost estimating by establishing definitive parameters for the many variables involved in the bidding process.

Sharing with your customers an abbreviated version of your performance specifications that describe your services will speak volumes about your company. They support the fact that as a professional in the field, you are trained, experienced and knowledgeable in what is largely an unregulated industry. These specifications communicate that you have put forth thought and effort in your business and that you clearly understand the services you offer. Furthermore, spelling out exact plans and sharing this with customers demonstrates a willingness to subject your work to their scrutiny.

Finally, telling a customer what is included in your services often helps justify your pricing by assigning value to these services. And explaining what is included in your services presents the opportunity to negotiate the extent and types of services if what you originally proposed is more than what the customer wanted.

Performance specifications must, of course, reflect varying climates and regional cultural practices throughout the country. In Texas, Bermudagrass is cut 43 times during a season at a 1-inch height, and in Michigan, Kentucky bluegrass is cut 26 times at a 3-inch height. Control measures for white grubs in Indiana will differ from control measures for mole crickets in Florida. Likewise, the timing and application rates for pre-emergence weed control in Ohio will vary from the timing and rates in the transition zones.

Performance specifications in and of themselves won’t double your business overnight or entirely eliminate customer complaints. The operative word is, and always will be, "performance." Once you’ve said what you are going to do, you need to follow through and do those things on time, efficiently and well.

Using performance specifications, however, will enable you to communicate with your customers more efficiently. And by doing so, you are more likely to minimize misunderstandings and misinterpretations about bids or job performance. Furthermore, these standards will enable you to educate your customers why certain practices or services are necessary to properly install and maintain their landscapes. Educated clients are valuable assets.

Adopting performance specifications, scopes of work, grounds management guidelines or landscape standards, by whatever name, will reflect favorably not only your com-pany’s reputation, but on the reputation of the landscape industry as a whole.