A number of years ago I had the opportunity to work with local Landscape companies and volunteers in London to complete a beautification project as a tribute to our veterans on Veterans Memorial Parkway.

It was a huge project and represented an opportunity for members and associates of Landscape Ontario (London) to show our pride and involvement in the community. Companies donated time, equipment and resources to work on the project and together with community volunteers we planted thousands of trees along the parkway over a 5-year period.

At the time I was the chair of the board for the VMP and worked alongside some incredible business leaders in the community including the President of Trojan Technologies, Canadian President of 3M, City of London deputy Mayor and other prominent business owners.

The project was an incredible experience because it brought the local members of Landscape Ontario together on a single project. It gave us the opportunity to use our expertise, experience...

Blog - part 2

Welcome back to the conversation with Ryan from Mountview Landscaping. We received such great feedback last week about this interview style blog post so if there is an area of your business that you’ve worked on we would love to hear from you. We can all learn from each other. 

Last week we covered the different things that Mountview tracks and how they track them. You can read that blog post here. 

Here’s part two from our interview with Ryan of Mountview Landscaping:

Why did you choose to measure these particular things?

So I can sleep!  Honestly it relieved so much stress. I like to be able to plan, know whats going to happen, have an idea what we need to do or change. If we wait till the end of the year it's too late. 

Measuring is a predictive tool that allows you to predict if you will make money but tracking also helps us when we are quoting on jobs. Let’s say a potential client told us they needed us to drop this quote by 10% - knowing the numbers allows ...

Do you have a budget that you work from and review on a monthly basis? More often than not when I talk to business owners the answer to this is no, and though I have gotten used to this response it is not something we should be okay with. We simply cannot build successful business on hard work and hope - we need a budget.

When we started working with Mountview Landscaping I asked Ryan about their budget, like I always do, and was pleasantly surprised to hear that they have a budget and methods of tracking to ensure they are meeting that budget.

We interviewed him recently and Ryan agreed to share his insight with all of you. Here is part 1 of 2 posts from that interview:

What do you currently measure on a weekly, monthly and annual basis and why?

During the winter we track maintenance hours for snow, additional job hours from snow events, salt and icemelt product use on a weekly basis. This translates to lawn maintenance contracts during the summer season.  

We have people on a fi...

When do I need to hire someone to help with my books?

Who do I hire?

Do I need a book keeper, a controller, both?

You’re not alone in the questions you are asking yourself - This is one of the most common questions I get asked when we host our BOOST events. We want to ensure we are always giving you the best information, so we reached out to a friend who specializes in finance, Nathan (@southbrookconsulting), and he gave us a tonne of incredible information to share with you.

First up is hiring a bookkeeper, or as Nathan recommends calling them, an Accounting Associate. Traditionally this is someone who takes care of AR/ AP, invoicing, payroll, wsib, quickbooks, creating cheques and recording everything that comes in. Most are not accountants, will also do administration and are the 1st touch point for anything to related to finances in the company. 

Cost for hiring is around $18/30 per hour or $40-45,000 as salary and is for sure necessary around $1 million in sales. Nathan recom...

I believe it’s imperative to be invoicing and reviewing A/R & A/P reports on a weekly basis with your team. Too often I speak with business owners who have installed a lot of work but haven’t invoiced or collected on that work they have completed and are quickly becoming stuck for cash.

When you are reviewing the following weekly you will always have a clear understanding of where you sit financially and it’s a great reminder to follow up on outstanding invoices. Waiting too long to invoice, or follow-up often results in the final payment never being collected because business owners feel like it’s been too long since the job to go collect. Too many of these result in a huge amount of lost revenue and can very quickly lead to the becoming noncollectable revenue for the business.

Weekly Accounts Payable/ Receivable Checklist

• Create invoices for work completed in the last 7 days
• Create files for work to completed next week 
• Track incoming receipts per job 
• Follow up on outsta...

Have a weekly team meeting. This one piece of advice I give leadership teams every time I speak with them is also the one thing I seem to get the most push back on. Now, often this is because the meetings they are having are unstructured and therefore unproductive so the idea of doing more of them seems like a waste of time. 

Having and sticking to an agenda will add structure to your management team meeting. It’s the difference between sitting around talking about the business and having a purposeful conversation where you leave with actionable steps. 

Here are some helpful hints and tips for a successful weekly team meeting:

• Have a set agenda (topics for the agenda)
• Good news
• Company scorecards (tracking system)
• Employee and customer headlines
• IDS (identify, discuss solve) issues
• Cascading message (what do we need to communicate to the staff)
• Have a leader for the meeting
• Assign specific tasks to each person prior to ending the meeting.
• Have it at the same time each week...

Employees who feel like they are in the know at work are happier and more engaged. A lot of us have heard this before, yet most business owners still do not feel comfortable sharing the numbers and real time status updates with their staff. Jack Stack, author of The Great Game of Business, did the complete opposite and it paid off.

What did he do? He introduced a concept known as the open book management operating system. It’s a system built on sharing business and financial information with employees so that everyone is informed about the status and goals of the business and how their contribution directly impacts the company as a whole. It will completely change the way you look at business and it can really be summed up by doing 3 things:

1. EDUCATE all employees about business in straightforward and easy to understand terms using the analogy of playing a game. 
2. EMPOWER them to use that education to make business decisions
3. ENGAGE employees to drive business success by rewarding t...

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