<font color=blue>INDUSTRY BUZZ</font> Passing the Buck: Let’s Stop Helping Our Opponents Win the Day

During a recent presentation to lawn and landscape professionals, I listed five key actions everyone in our industry should take to defend against the seemingly endless activist attacks on pesticide and fertilizer use at the state and local level.

• Respond positively to every question.
• Project a positive attitude, taking pride in what you do and the benefits of your service.
• Train and prepare everyone in your company to carry positive images to friends, family and the public.
• Don’t retreat from a challenge and always correct false or negative statements about our industry and your business.
• Don’t pass the buck when called upon to defend your business and its practices.

After listing these key actions, one owner operator in the audience pressed me to identify the single most important action to defend her business against a local government being dominated by a supervisor who was also leader of an activist group. Our conversation went something like this:

“I can’t name a single action that will assure success in every situation. It usually takes many people sustaining the five key actions, and more, to win the day. However, looking at it another way, I can tell you how to guarantee failure using the single tactic that almost always results in defeat! As an industry we use this tactic at all political levels, in the press and even in advertising. And while it may work short-term, it always harms all of us in the long term!”

“Are you going to tell us what it is? If it is an activist tactic, how do we defend ourselves?” she asked.

“Activists certainly enjoy the results and must laugh all the way to the bank with their fundraising receipts when we play this card. Unfortunately, no activist group ‘does it to us’– we do it to ourselves! We lose important battles because we continue to ‘pass the buck’.”

How often have you heard professionals attempt to defend the industry by saying “the problems are all caused by homeowners?” Perhaps you have said it.

Who are your customers? Probably the very homeowners being disparaged. Notwithstanding the fact science does not support the argument, how do you think your customers might feel about our industry knowing we have openly and repeatedly disparaged them? How comfortable do you think homeowners and property managers will be in the future if they continue hearing misinformation asserting the products we use are “too dangerous to people and the environment” for them to use – and the message is coming from us!

Are we teaching our own customers they “should not do anything to their lawn?” Aren’t do-it-yourselfers the largest pool of potential customers? I have never met a truly successful salesperson who spoke ill of customers, have you?

The activists delight in our disunity. Look at Canada to see the results of industry’s inability to join together in lasting coalitions to defend the use of lawn and landscape pesticides. We have similar examples in the U.S., especially when it comes to the use of phosphorous fertilizer on lawns. Repeatedly, as local governments discuss “restricting or banning phosphorous fertilizers” the divisions between agriculture and specialty, professional and homeowner, or golf and lawn prevent our industry from fielding effective coalitions to defend the entire industry and present the science and facts behind the issue. We always lose when we continue to do what Winston Churchill called “feeding others to the crocodiles in hopes that we will be eaten last.” When we pass the buck, we give up our strength in numbers, abandon sound science, and lose in the end.

When we defend our industry we must always speak the truth, share our facts, plead our case – and stop there. We must not pass the buck by disparaging another segment of our industry, customers, or allies. When we attack each other and our customers, we do the activists’ work for them. A 1940's song summarizes it well, “Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive -- Eliminate the Negative – Latch on to the Affirmative."*

Enjoy the rest of the season, a long and prosperous career, and pass this great industry on to future generations intact. And let’s stop passing the buck and stick together.

*“AC-CENT-TCHU-ATE THE POSITIVE,” Music by Harold Arlen, lyrics by Johnny Mercer, 1944.

Frank Gasperini is director of state affairs for RISE® (Responsible Industry for a Sound Environment). Contact him at fgasperini@pestfacts.org. RISE is the national trade association representing manufacturers, formulators, distributors andother industry leaders involved with specialty pesticide and fertilizer products.