Wouldn’t you like to do work faster, better and cheaper? Wouldn’t that be a great way to improve the value of your business?
Of course. It’s also a way to hire fewer but higher-level employees empowered with tools that help them do their work in a more effective way. Those empowered employees will probably stay with your company longer. And your customers and prospects will benefit from your better service, better design and better communication allowing you to delight them without adding enormous additional fees.
Of course, all of this is possible for landscape companies who are using technology for better results. Technology can be a powerful economic driver for a successful company with much less risk these days. In the 90s, you might have had to hire your own programmers and never gotten a satisfactory outcome. Now there is a complete menu of opportunities to improve your business. In fact, we are rapidly approaching the time when it is expected that companies of a certain size are using a minimum number of these tools. Think about how much the landscaping industry has evolved over the past 10 years because of technology applied to the businesses.
Landscaping companies now approach spending on hardware, software and services as investments that will enable a fundamentally transformed business. As I work with companies that are preparing for sale to understand how they’ve applied technology to their business, it’s amazing to see all the opp0rtunities that are available and how fast they evolve. Here are a few:
- Fleet management
- GPS tracking
- Property measurements
- Water management technologies
- Autonomous mowers
- Battery-powered mowers
- Field management software
- Accounting and financial systems
- Prospecting applications
- Operations and administration tools
- invoicing
- payment processing
- workflow management
- customer service
- scheduling
- inventory management
- human resource information systems
- payroll systems
- hiring/recruiting automation
- training and development applications
- Landscape design software
- 3-D modeling
- Purchasing/sourcing software for plants/equipment/etc.
- Website development and tools
- Graphics software packages
- Office suites for word processing, spreadsheets, databases, presentations, etc.
- Social media tools
- Sales automation systems
- Contact management software
- Face-to-face meeting software (Zoom and others)
- And more…
It’s true that industries are fundamentally and organizationally transformed with the application of these kinds of tools. It’s frequently the case that to adopt a best practice tool, a business process is transformed. (Is anyone still using paper timecards? Most have transformed to digital via phone reporting). The technology supports the business process. Depending on the size of your business, it may be considered a basic infrastructure element that a buyer wants to see. If you are preparing your company for sale, I recommend you and your team include a review of opportunities to improve via technology to see where you might want to make an investment.
If you’d like to discuss how to optimize your company’s positioning and strengths as you prepare your company for sale or evaluate an opportunity to buy, feel free to give us a call. Keep in mind it is never too early to begin your thinking about options for exiting your business. Strategic moves and planning over several years give you the best options. You can reach me via email: [email protected] or on my cell phone a: 224-688-8838. We’re here to help you Harvest Your Potential!
