It’s fall … time to review your goals, budgets, benchmarks and progress, see where you stand, and come up with ideas to close strong. How are you doing? The enterprise value specialists at Ceibass also want to remind you that it is time to begin thinking about planning for 2024, especially planning for competitive advantage.

“One of the blind spots that we see in planning is the lack of commitment for producing competitive advantages, for creating new and valuable offers for your customers,” said Tom Fochtman, Ceibass CEO. “It is too easy to fall into the trap of taking last year’s offers, budgets, and plans and just adding 10% or so. There is a lot of sameness or parity in markets which tends to drive prices downward reducing margins. New offers, new products and services, if they are valuable to the customer, produce differentiation, increase margins and add to enterprise value.”

So what are some of the things you should do as a lawn and landscape owner? Here are some ideas from the team at Ceibass:

  • Produce a structure for new products and services. Who on your team is responsible for coming up with new ideas?
  • Know what your competitors are offering. Fundamentally, there are going to be gaps in your competitive analysis that you can exploit. At the very least, your analysis will expose areas you need to shore up.
  • Make innovation and observing new and different things in the marketplace a regular topic of conversation for everyone on your team.
  • Fundamentally technology, economics, demographics, politics and competition drive change. Specifically look for computers and computer driven tools, climate change, aging populations, local law restrictions on water usage and runoff, security and safety concerns, and better science on plant and grass care to drive your ideas.

“The very idea of what a lawn and landscape company can offer is changing,” added Tom. “Be on the forefront of change by developing practices to observe, assess and deal with it and you will increase your margins, and drive up your enterprise value. Make competitive advantage a regular practice, an intention of your planning.”