When you’re starting out in the lawn care and landscape industry, it’s easy to want to be all things to all people as customers request you do complete various tasks that might not be your specialty.
Mike Rorie, CEO of GIS Dynamics/GroundSystems, says this can put you in a deep hole of doing a little bit of a lot of services instead of a lot of a few services. He argues that most contractors have too many profit centers and this fragmentation is what makes it so hard to scale.
“Small businesses get fragmented and that’s why they don’t scale,” Rorie says. “That’s why they can’t become more competent and more brand recognized for what they do.”
In Rorie’s session “Systematizing Your Business Model To Maximize Growth” at LANDSCAPES 2021 on Thursday, Oct. 21 at 11:15 a.m. he will be covering why it’s important for business leaders to define, optimize and communicate their business model.
He says to get any brand traction, owners need to define their business model.
“What it means is they’ve taken the time to vet who they want to be in the marketplace,” Rorie says. “The marketplace is somewhat infinite for them, meaning they could scale their business beyond their wildest dream. Whether you want to be a $2 million, $10 million or $100 million brand. It’s there. You can go do it.”
By narrowing your focus, you can become extremely competent in the lane you choose. The more diversified your business model is, the harder it is to deliver well on all your service offerings and one-off jobs can distract from your core work. Rorie says if you want to grow your business, don’t complicate it with a lot of different profit centers.
Also, during this LANDSCAPES session, Rorie will discuss “big rock” systems that can help deliver maximum growth.
“Systems provide relief,” Rorie says. “They provide predictable functionality. They provide efficiencies.”
Rorie compares implementing systems to a thermostat. For instance, if you want the house to be 72 degrees whether it’s hot or cold outside, once you set it, that’s the temperature it will stay at.
“We’re the benefactor,” he says. “We don’t have to think about it. We don’t have to provide effort for it, whereas you do without systems.”
These systems should add to your bottom line so you can get more throughput on things that still require your attention.
“You’ve got to devote time to get systems in place versus a person doing this, and the person being the system,” Rorie says. “They could be doing something else if you can systematize a lot of what you’ve got them doing.”
Rorie says you should always validate your systems to make sure they are tried and true.
“I tell people to first go to the market and buy systems before you ever build them,” Rorie says. “By going to the market to buy, you see what’s out there and what we’ve not even thought of.”
If you do decide to build a system yourself, you have to maintain it and keep it current, which is why Rorie advises buying one instead so the provider will keep it relevant.
Lastly, Rorie will also how one landscape business owner transformed his company by systematizing his business model, ultimately leading to a high-multiple acquisition by a national provider.
This session is worth 1 CEU credit. You can earn up to 13 CEU credits by attending sessions at LANDSCAPES 2021.
Want more information about systematizing your business? Register for LANDSCAPES 2021 and we’ll see you in Louisville!
