Technology is your superpower

With the annual Lawn & Landscape Technology Conference taking place this month, it seemed fitting to share an article on tech. Let’s walk through three areas of your business that are imperative to embracing technology: client growth and retention; employee recruitment and retention; and operational efficiency. We can all agree that if you can master these three sectors, the rest of the business will become easier to manage. Technology is influencing the industry like never before, and we are entering a revolution in which there will be clear winners and losers. This article is meant to incite your ability to think strategically, to think about the future and to ask the difficult questions about our capabilities.

Let’s talk about growing your customer base and retaining the clients you already have. In today’s world, your company’s communication, quality of work and employee professionalism make a huge difference in retaining clients and acquiring new ones. However, the tides are changing and technology will soon be a major factor for clients when they make the decision of who to hire for their projects and properties. Now is the time to think, “What areas of friction can we improve upon so the client experience is streamlined?”

Here’s a few examples: mobile payments like Apple Pay; text message communication; GPS sharing of the technician’s location for onsite arrival (similarly to watching your Uber drivers' location); a strong online presence (for some clients such as hotels/resorts, having a large online following can benefit them by driving traffic to their social channels); a company who operates on an ERP software; a client portal where they can access photos of progress or quality checks; electric equipment (especially in residential environments); and of course, how you present your proposals (think AI designed visuals). If you are able to be a market leader in one or more of these areas, you will find your ability to grow will dramatically increase.

Next up is employee recruitment and retention. As you grow, finding and hiring great people is a critical requirement. The better these people are, the easier and more profitable your growth will be. The other part of the equation, and I would argue the more important, is retaining these great employees. Technology is playing more of a role in this process. A common example: You are a middle-market company and just hired an “A-player” from a larger competitor. This person came to your team because they align with your values and like the idea of knowing the owner of the business rather than working for a large corporation. However, as they onboard, they realize you are missing some key technology tools that your larger competitor had.

This doesn’t even include the equipment in the field that’s old and outdated. They soon realize they have to work twice as hard in your company to get the same result they were achieving at the larger company. If the situation is not corrected or improved upon, they may burn out quickly, and you’ll have driven them away quicker than when you hired them.

Lastly, let’s discuss operational efficiency. This is a huge bucket so let’s focus on labor management as this typically ranges between 25-50% of your total P&L cost structure. The question to ponder here is, “What new technologies can help us deliver more services without increasing our costs?”

Some ideas include: digitizing your time-keeping process; digitally communicating to your team how many budgeted hours they have to finish a given task or service; tracking those budgeted hours to actual hours digitally; automating your scheduling and routing of crews utilizing GPS; using autonomous mowers for large lawn areas; and automating the tracking of key performance indicators such as labor efficiency, gross margin, overtime, drive time and so on.

If you are able to master just a few of these areas, it can dramatically increase your capacity so you’re able to add more revenue without adding more cost. As you grow, a key element to focus on should be, “How do we do more with the team we have?”

If you are attending this year’s Technology Conference, I hope to see you at my talk where I’ll be diving into many of these areas and providing tools that will enable you to implement tech faster with higher buy-in from your team.

I will also be sharing my company’s real numbers on how we have increased our gross margin by over 10% points since onboarding a key ERP system. Stay tuned over the next few months as I share with you some of my takeaways from the conference and what disruptive new technology you need to keep an eye out for.

Raise the bar is a monthly column by Justin White, CEO of K&D Landscaping, written to help improve professionalism in the green industry. He can be reached at justin@kndlandscaping.com.