Productivity Tips
1 Jan, 2004 By: George Witterschein Landscape ManagementCheck out what your colleagues and competitors are doing to squeeze more production and profits out of each day
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Getting more out of every hour of work - aka "productivity" - may be as close to a magic bullet for business success as you can get. We spoke with some of your colleagues and compiled a quick list of 10 things they do to improve productivity - tips you should consider for your business.
Tip 1: Night moves
"Eliminate the morning circus by taming the animals the night before," says consultant Jack Mattingly. "When you load at night instead of in the morning, several things work to your productivity advantage. In the evening, your people are eager to go home and have their dinner; they will get a move on to finish the task. You force yourself to get organized the night before, eliminating the need to shoot from the hip the next morning figuring out what your people ought to be doing."Mattingly (jkmattingly@ comcast.net) has been in the landscape business since 1976 as a contractor and, since 1996, as a Green Industry management consultant based in Woodstock, GA.
Tip 2: The 'toybox'
Dwight Hughes founded Dwight Hughes Nursery, Cedar Rapids, IA, in 1978. The $850,000, seven-employee business performs a variety of landscaping services (including running a nursery to supply itself) for a 50-50 mix of residential and commercial employees. Dwight Hughes Nursery |
Hughes, an equipment innovator, is passionate about using technology for productivity.
"We have a new tool truck and trailer setup. It holds virtually every piece of equipment that we need on the job site, and it travels to every single job. My guys refer to it as 'the toybox,'" says Hughes. "When they get to the job site, they pick and choose which 'toys' they need out of the box for that particular project. Everything has its place, and everything is in its place. The guys return the tools to their places so that, from a time management standpoint, the next time that they try to retrieve that object/tool, they know exactly where it is.
"The truck is a 330 Peterbilt with a 20-foot gooseneck trailer. It hauls two tractors and all the various implements. All the different tools are in shelves, pockets and compartments," Hughes adds. "People know where things are by memory because management and employees sat down as a team with the design engineer from a trailer dealership and came up with the concept. Every person in our organization had a say in how this was going to be implemented."
Tip 3: GPS - it works!
Employees at Landscape Maintenance LLC, founded by David Goodman in 1984, navigate via satellite for better efficiency. The $1.3 million company's 29 employees perform design/build and maintenance, plus irrigation repair and misting services from Phoenix, AZ."All of our fleet trucks have Global Positioning System (GPS) boxes in them," says Goodman. "The system lets us tune in on a PC and look at a display of where all our trucks are within a 700-foot range. We also type in the addresses of all of our customers, fast food restaurants and gas stations, and it remembers them as landmarks for locating our trucks.
"Instead of giving latitude and longitude, it gives us the name of the nearest customer or landmark to the truck. It also tells us what time they stopped the truck, what time they started it up again, how fast they were traveling and how many miles they drove from one location to another," explains Goodman.
"The system is detailed to the point where there's no getting around it," adds Junior Gonzalez, Director of Maintenance Operations. "It runs 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. And the crew can't turn it off; they would have to vandalize the vehicle to do that. The GPS system encourages good trip planning practices by getting them to understand the need to plan the shortest trips between two points."
"We print out our reports and do some one-on-one training," he continues. "'This is how your truck moved today.' 'Here's how you could have done it more efficiently.' And it's very clear on the reports. Or we can ask, 'Why were you at the fast food restaurant for 90 minutes?'"
Tip 4: Blades to give you an edge
Roy Megli, owner/operator of Megli Lawn Care, Sterling, IL, has been mowing professionally for more than 30 years, so he knows what it means to cut clean and fast. His operation mows for just about everybody - parks, boulevards, factories, home lawns, you name it. Roy Megli, owner/operator of Megli Lawn Care |
About seven years ago Megli started tinkering with some blades off an agricultural disc mower, and he asked himself, "Why not for turf?" Modifying the blades, he came up with a disc mowing system that replaces a mower's standard rigid blade with four free-swinging knives. He field-tested his system on his own mowers, and he claims it's changed the way he cuts grass...for the better.
Megli says that his blades cut the grass finer, remain sharper and keep mower decks cleaner than traditional blades. The free-swinging knives remain balanced and lengthen spindle bearing life too, he insists.
The mowing contractor- turned-inventor now sells and markets his blades through his sister company, Meg-Mo Systems. He says he can supply disc blades for any make of commercial mower. Check out www.meg-mo.com if you're curious.
 Productivity a people thing |
Tip 5: Production rates, my friend
Matt Caruso's 25 employees serve high-end residential and commercial customers efficiently because they carefully determine just how long each project should take before starting it. The company bills about $2 million annually.Develop and thoroughly understand your own particular productivity rates, stresses Caruso, who started Decrascape in Sterling Heights, MI, 15 years ago. He does, and he uses that knowledge in billing, bidding and in providing feedback to his employees about their job performance.
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