10 Tips to Release Spring Pressure - Part 1
With the beauty of spring comes the stress that accompanies the start of the season for landscaping companies. It’s been nicknamed the “100 days of hell” because of the chaos that so often ensues. This year, much like last, we have the added stress of COVID-19 and the stress of the unknown when it comes to zones and restrictions.
As Bruce Wilson put it, “In less disciplined organizations, spring makes everyone a firefighter”. You’re constantly putting out fires, it gets out of control quickly and by the time you see the financial impact, it is too late to do anything about it. Some companies never escape the spiral.
If this is sounding a little too familiar (and uncomfortable), here are a few tips Bruce Wilson suggests to help you move out of the firefighting space permanently:
- Understand the difference between routine and non-routine work. Weekly maintenance is routine work, while nonroutine work includes things like post-winter cleanups, mulching, planting, etc.
- Non-routine work, if allowed to pile up, leads to overtime problems. Therefore they should be scheduled so they don’t overlap. Try to avoid pulling nonroutine work from teams assigned to routine maintenance. It may cause them to get behind.
- Ensure you are training your supervisors well and that they are observing crews to make sure they are sequencing jobs properly, not performing work that does not need to be done and/or wasting hours. ie. edging when it’s not needed.
- String trimmers are time wasters. Crews shouldn’t trim an area until they mow it. This way they only trim what the mowers don’t reach. If they trim first, they overcompensate to make sure they’ve trimmed enough.
These seem simple enough, don’t they? It’s the simple things, done regularly, that make a huge impact on our businesses. We’ll share a few more tips next week.
To read the full Bruce WIlson article - click HERE.
