Over the past 18 months, I have spoken to many landscape company owners who have found that the disruption of the COVID protocols acted as a catalyst for positive change in their businesses. Working remotely became essential, and changes to processes that were previously unexamined or were not a priority before now became opportunities to improve.
I’ve heard dozens of examples of companies streamlining their existing business processes in all sizes of landscape businesses. Here are just two examples:
In the first example, the company’s administrative team had the software to perform their crew member time-tracking online but had continued to run some of the crews using a paper process (to accommodate a few crew leaders who had been with the company for a long time.) The changes to protocol due to COVID “forced the issue” for the crew leaders, eliminated the paper step, and freed up over half the time of a formerly in-office person (now working from home four days a week). The employee was delighted to be freed from low-level paper pushing and was able to help with other higher-priority projects.
In my second example, a larger company found that a remote-working “push” into a new A/R automated tool saved them two office administrative staff members in the accounting department. With those people freed up, other projects could be taken on, and/or those positions could be eliminated, or persons re-trained.
If your company is beyond the early stages of a business when the owner and a few team members are doing everything on an ad hoc basis, this is a valuable lesson. Some of those processes that you set up years ago may be ripe for evaluation and improvement. That may require a better tool to support the better process, but those are becoming much more accessible to all levels of companies these days.
Having your team leaders look at their existing processes to see if there are areas that can or should be improved may result in your company running more efficiently. Ultimately that will drop to your net income, increasing the value of your company now and in future years.
If you’d like to discuss the value of your company and how it compares with others, or if you are thinking about buying, selling, or exiting your business, let’s have a conversation. In addition, we can help you determine your readiness for sale or assist with an existing acquisition.
I can be reached anytime via email: [email protected] or phone at: 224-688-8838.
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