SURVIVE? OR THRIVE!

Steven Cesare, Ph.D.

A reflective business owner from Virginia called me the other day to talk about several lofty organizational topics including sustainable growth, planning for expansion, and refining a forward-oriented company culture. I firmly believe these conversations are essential to personal, professional, and organizational growth; they represent those rare, albeit invaluable, opportunities which replace the incessant world of tactical monotony, with a sense of open-minded possibility most business owners considered to be extinct.

Put on the Pink Floyd music, encourage your creativity, and get a thought partner.

You don’t even know who Pink Floyd is, do you?

Trust me: It’s sort of like Taylor Swift, only completely different.

Like most esoteric conversations of this sort, it began with wistful concepts involving AI-based employee staffing and training, self-directed work teams, integrated inventory, purchasing, and delivery systems, real-time digital monitoring of job quality, productivity indices, and job costs, well-defined algorithms pinpointing optimal customer selection and satisfaction criteria, and simplified business processes resident on each employee’s IT device, all of which contributing to organizational profit, success, and EBIDTA value.

It’s supposed to be outlandish.

That’s the point.

I can tell you haven’t done this in a long time. Better yet: Have you ever done this before? When?

Gradually, the business owner left the pristine for the practical, reverting to a reality laced with more doubt and resistance, than potential and innovation. Despite his initial foray into joyful intellectual elasticity, he inexorably descended into his comfort zone. Lamentably, this is where 97% of landscapers call “home.” Concrete thinking, present tense, and a gray existence characterized by confined, robotic continuation.

Really? You don’t think so? What were you doing last year at this time?

“My employees are not that smart.” “I can’t afford that cost.” “My Foremen tell me they are too busy.” “My sales team cannot sell that much work.” “My supervisors can’t even get the timesheets done correctly.” “My customers are cheap.” “My margins will never get there.” “My managers resist every new idea I present to them.” “Nobody in my company is willing to make a decision, Steve.” “I can’t take that kind of risk.”

Just when his once-effervescent mental spark was nearly vanquished, quickly approaching helplessness and hopelessness, I asked him if wanted to “survive? or thrive!”

I sensed his willingness despite telephone silence. As a capitalist, I told him point blank: The decision to survive or thrive was his alone. Enlightenment, entrepreneurialism, and effort can eliminate every excuse. I told him to enact the future, not react to the present. I mentioned numerous landscape companies that go through the motions of insipid daily execution, instead of crafting an inspiring plan teeming with challenges overcome by creativity, reward surpassing resistance, and inefficiency interpreted as investment.

He regained momentum, as I told him to “think big, plan small, and act confidently.” Pick two topics from our earlier discussion, generate a series of events linked to the topic, hold the managers accountable to interlocking deadlines, all the while reconfiguring the company culture to embrace adaptive change management, bonus-contingent achievement, and a collective mindset to expect more than settling for less.

Do your thoughts, words, and actions lead your employees to believe you want them to “survive? or thrive!”

Do your thoughts, words, and actions lead your employees to believe you want to “survive? or thrive!”

Convince me: Put on the Pink Floyd music again.

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