While most everyone in the industry feels the crunch of the slow economy, Donna Vignocchi, vice president, ILT Vignocchi, Wauconda, Ill., appreciates the break.
"After experiencing such rapid growth over the past three years, the economic lull has happened at a very opportune time because it has allowed us to assess our systems and structure in terms of keeping our team environment and regaining focus," she explained.
During this break, the company's communications issues have been addressed and new policies and procedures have been put in place as a result of the analysis, Vignocchi said. Part of her analysis included designing and implementing customized software that has transformed ILT Vignocchi into a paperless company.
"My father has always had this philosophy that it should be easy enough to assign a procedure all the way from the initial call to the final walk through to turning over the client to the maintenance or irrigation department," she explained. "This software has some really neat functions. Not only will it provide us with archived historical data for each of our clients, it also provides us with the ability to track customer concerns and to streamline our order entry process."
Because this software allows the company to operate completely through the computer system, the use of paper has been eliminated.
While Donna utilizes this slowdown in the economy to reassess the company's structure and systems, her father Harry Vignocchi, president, focuses on beefing up sales leads and working more efficient as a company in the wake of the sluggish market.
"We need to be more efficient," he declared. "We need to be able to produce a more competitive product in a market that is going to have a lot more competition than it has in the past. We will have to keep creating our economic niche and providing for the community."
Whatever turn the economy takes next, it doesn't seem that ILT Vignocchi will be adversely affected. "Our backlog of work looks better for 2002 than it did for 2001," Donna said. "And we usually have quite a bit."
The elder Vignocchi added: "We're a design/build firm, so we get to see design work prior to construction, and right now we're doing quite well."
To read about how other companies are handling the lagging economy, read Lawn & Landscape's State of the Industry report, found in the October 2001 issue.
