As 2017 draws to a close, I thought it’d be a good idea to look back at the year and what we’ve accomplished with TGC Academy, which was founded to provide business training and skill-building for both experienced and start-up landscape professionals.
It’s hard to believe, but it’s been over a year since we started publishing the TGC Academy blog. My hope was that it would become a timely, easy-to-access resource for landscape business owners because I understand, from first hand experience, that the day-to-day running and growing of a business can be a real struggle at times.
The more you know, the faster you grow.
As an informative and easy-to-read learning resource for landscape professionals, we started off 2017 by sharing our business building experiences in several areas of a landscape business:
- Working with contractors to broaden your company’s capabilities and opportunities to grow while you focus on what you do best.
- Hiring the right people: why it matters and the impact of hiring the wrong ones -- ouch!
- How to create a landscape business team by creating an organizational structure so your business can scale efficiently and effectively.
- Burn out and some simple strategies you can quickly put in place to help you avoid the repeated stresses that can cause it.
- Creating a pricing strategy to develop the right pricing for your services and how to stick to it during negotiations with a prospect, even when they have objections.
- How to maintain a competitive advantage without lowering prices by creating a unique position for your business.
- …and a whole lot more about growth, marketing, delegating, and selecting the best clients.
One of the most fun series of posts was published at the end of the year. They were designed to help those who are considering starting a landscape business to make the right choices early so they succeed.
Here are summaries and links for that series if you missed them earlier, or if you’d like a refresher:
How Much Does it Cost to Start a Landscape Business
When you’re excited about starting a new business it’s easy to overestimate how quickly you can grow it and underestimate what it will actually cost to launch your business and sustain it in the first year or so.
5 Reasons to Not Start a Landscape Business
There are right and wrong reasons for starting a new business. Have you really thought about why you want to have your own landscape company? Your answers may be a good indicator of how good an idea it really is.
The Top 5 Things to Do Before You Start a Landscape Business
Starting a landscape company involves much more than just getting a truck and some equipment. You absolutely must understand how to run a business first and what it takes to actually start, grow, and maintain a successful, profitable landscape business.
5 Crucial Actions When You Start a Successful Landscape Business
The difference between surviving and truly thriving as a landscape business is understanding and spending time on the five crucial business activities that don’t involve getting your hands dirty.
As a partner resource to the free landscape business articles on our TGC Academy blog, the Landscaper’s Freedom Formula online class and the Liberation Coaching Program we launched in 2017 are designed to provide additional, personal assistance to help landscape professionals more effectively improve their operational processes and build more successful landscape businesses.
The three-module course is hosted on an easy-to-access platform that enables busy landscape business owners to learn at their own pace. To go deeper, we added a Learning Expansion and Q&A live session to give participants the opportunity to send in questions and share achievements throughout the year. Participants gain immediate access to all eight of these sessions as well.
As the landscape season ends, why not give yourself a much-deserved gift and sign up for the Landscaper’s Freedom Formula? This simple and straightforward class reviews three basic business practices that will help you get the right mindset, services, and sales strategy in place to propel your business to the next level.
Personalized coaching: building business success one client at a time
One area that seemed to be the biggest stumbling block for my coaching clients this year was staffing. Together we worked on a wide variety of employment issues, including how to find, train, and retain qualified workers in all professional levels.
To that end, we worked to:
- develop creative job ads that promoted new employment opportunities, resulting in several successful hires
- map out training events and create an effective organizational chart to help develop a career ladder that would encourage employees to stay and build a career with the client’s company
- write Job Value Statements to clearly outline roles and responsibilities for each position on their organizational chart to improve understanding and efficiency
With winter providing a little extra down time, now’s the perfect time to take advantage of one on one coaching to support you in refining the business you have an developing a strategic plan for 2018. Plan for hiring, training and promoting staff so that you are sure to have the help you need when the season launches.
“…but wait, there’s more!”
….as those infamous TV infomercials proclaim – and there is! We even ran a survey of landscape business owners this year to learn where landscape professionals are struggling and what they love about the business. Stay tuned to this blog in the New Year when we start posting survey results. I’m excited to see where that information takes us in 2018!
Landscape Business Owners Survival Guide
