Successful landscape business leaders seem to have things come easy to them. That’s not anywhere near what’s true. They have sacrificed, they have put in the hard work, the blood, sweat, and tears.
I see tons of blog posts about the top 5 or 10 things that successful leaders do or the top things you have to do be successful and honestly a lot of them are fluff. So I started thinking about what the very successful landscape business owners that I know do on a regular basis to be able to perform the way they do for a sustained period of time. There’s lots of commonalities.
Here’s what the successful landscape business leaders we know do to crush it!
- Be relentless when it comes to sticking to your vision.
- Don’t ever compromise on the quality of your work.
- Be present with your family and friends.
- Make time for you to recharge your batteries.
- Pay attention to your numbers, know them and know what they mean.
- Be involved with your team, know their struggles and celebrate their wins.
- Adopt a community project and rally your team around making a significant contribution to the place where you live and work.
- Deal with the issues as they arise. Be swift and fair.
- Embrace the awkward or difficult conversations. Be great at them.
- Focus your business on your core strengths. Be the best at what you do.
- Leaders provide the scaffolding around their team. Let your team know that you’re there for them when times are tough.
- Have an unquenchable thirst for information. Consume podcasts and audiobooks. For a leader that’s always on the go the easiest way to stay on top of your learning goals is to listen while in your truck. Sync your podcasts and audiobooks to your phone and listen through your speakers as you go from one stop to the next.
- Be involved in your local and national trade associations. These associations represent your best interests and the only way they can know what you need is if you tell them. Plus their education and networking opportunities tend to be very good.
- Participate in an industry peer group. Many prominent landscape industry consultants run peer groups. They meet fairly regularly and hold you accountable for goals that you have indicated that you want to achieve. You can benchmark your company’s performance metrics to see how you’re doing in comparison.
There are lots of ways to improve what you do and how your landscape business operates and I could probably continue to list dozens more ways to stay at the top of your game, but really as long as you remember who the most important person is at your company you’ll crush it.
The customer.