Next week begins March Madness and the great college basketball tournament got the enterprise value specialists at Ceibass thinking about the “madness” of the lawn and landscape industry.
“When I reflect on ‘madness’ I think about behaviors that just don’t make sense given the reality of being a business owner in our industry,” said Tom Fochtman, Ceibass CEO. “Being too busy to think about where the business is headed is typical. Not having an exit strategy or running the business as if they were going to sell it is another form of madness. Being task-oriented rather than being strategic is another, along with moods of arrogance, conceit and thinking they can figure it out themselves is pure madness.”
The team then got together and came up with more examples of madness. Do you see yourself or any members of your team in these examples?
- Painfully slow estimating that puts the brakes on sales and revenues
- Lack of full-time recruiting efforts
- Setting unrealistically high or low management targets
- Not implementing work in progress billing to improve cash flow
- Poor anticipation of nursery stock or other landscape material shortages
- Investing too little time and money on training
- The gaps between how management sees a situation and the reality of things on the ground
- Unclear and vague metrics for holding the team accountable
- A blurred focus on company culture
- Weak cross selling
- Sense of entitlement
- Delaying difficult cost-reduction or performance decisions
- Slow transition from gas to electric
- Little forward thinking about technology
- Don’t know the realistic value of their business in the marketplace
- Behind on autonomous mowing
- Not getting your financial benchmark study from NALP
- Neglecting safety and risk management issues
- Not making new offers a top priority
- Not having a plan and not working the plan you have
- Forgetting about your plan after 2 months
- Poor CRM systems
- Being behind on billing
