Last week’s blog entitled Welcome to 2029 generated a lot of interest for the enterprise value specialists at Ceibass. For many lawn & landscape business owners the reality of a new decade, and the exercise in looking ahead ten years and thinking about where they want to be with their businesses was an eye-opening practice that generated a lot of great conversations.

“Time is a space of possibilities. And most business owners are not used to thinking of time in terms of a decade. But when you think about it, if you are building a business to take care of your future now, and ten years from now, you tend to move more strategically than if you think in short horizons of time like the fourth quarter or the first quarter of 2020,” said Tom Fochtman, Ceibass CEO. “We have noticed that the best of class lawn & landscape business owners work in many horizons of time. They can look ahead at their retirement years and speculate about how much money they need for their retirement. They seek advisors to see what their business needs to produce in revenues, profits and EDITDAs to achieve their desired retirement nest egg – after taxes! And then they work in all the interim time horizons, 3 – 5 years, one year, quarterly, monthly and weekly –to make it happen…to produce the future they have imagined. It’s a special skill.”

Tom and his team went on to divulge other insights of time that you might find valuable:

“By thinking ahead, you produce for yourself spaces of possibilities for creating the future you have imagined. Without thinking about the future you want to produce with your business, you don’t produce the space.”

“One of the things we see with successful lawn & landscape owners is that they declare time. They declare time with their  management teams to think through the outcomes they want to produce, and they come up with strategies and tactics to produce those outcomes…by a certain TIME.”

“Being able to declare these are the outcomes we will be satisfied with (revenues, profits, market share, etc.) BY this time produces the necessary VELOCITY to get it done.”

“The thing about time is that you can never get it back. Don’t squander the opportunity. Thinking about horizons of time and what you want to produce in each interval should add up to something in the future that you will be satisfied with. This is the beginning of being a professional business owner.”

“Time is very important consequentially. You either use it to your advantage and produce the future you want. Or you don’t.”