Create Your Future: Review The Past

The Year in Review

After Thanksgiving, for most northern hemisphere landscape companies, is the time for review. In most areas, there isn’t much snow until January, maintenance work is winding down, as is construction. It’s a great time of year to take stock of what happened during the year. It’s a time for managers to take off their Project Management and Team Management hats and dust off their MBA goggles. Now is the time business owners and managers should begin their annual Business Operations Analysis.

The Plan

All year long you’ve been too busy to slow down and make a plan. If you’re going to improve the way you do things you need to review, project results and make a plan. Revisit the plan periodically, check in with the reality of your plan, adjust and look at your data and metrics for measuring your progress to your goals and against your plan.

What If I Don’t Have a Plan?

If you don’t have a plan, make one. Start with an organizational analysis. Take the four core areas of your business, write them down as headings for the areas you want to analyze.

Now in each of these areas ask yourself.

Do I have the right people, the right processes and the right tools to enable my company to perform at its peak consistently?

Best Practices Standard Operating Procedures SOPs

Are we performing consistently?
How could we be doing better
If you determine you need tools or better technology, do a Cost Benefit Analysis CBA for the desired investments.
Before changing people, look to your processes or procedures. It’s always easier to assist the people you have with systems on how to do things properly than it is to try to hire new people. (Nine times out of ten it’s not your people)
Your managers or the front line people performing the tasks are the best people to ask about your procedures. When you ask be sure to listen carefully. When your people are involved in systems renovation your systems are likely to be more appropriate to the tasks and your people will be invested in the systems working properly.

Organizational Analysis is the First Step to a Plan

Review everything. Take the time to carefully analyze every area or core function of your business. Including the systems or procedures you have in place to monitor core functions. Management functions are easily over looked and sometimes difficult to evaluate as it requires the business owner to self-assess.

Outside help is not required to perform an Organizational Analysis. Sometimes it helps to have a fresh set of eyes. But this is not rocket science. You can do it. The results of the analysis lead logically to the elements of a plan. It all begins with a careful review.

There are a lot of consultants who specialize in helping landscape contractors. Find one that stands behind their work and is Accountable for results.