Stand out from the crowd with your USP
1 Feb, 2006 By: Ron Hall Landscape ManagementFlorida's Crawford Landscaping builds business by focusing on its unique selling proposition.
It's a simple, direct selling proposition. There's no room for misunderstanding or compromise.
Founder Blake Crawford and the rest of his management team at 19-month-old Crawford Landscaping, Naples, FL, have been building operating and administrative systems into their young company. They've also been scrambling to meet the challenges of remarkable growth. And, in spite of the damage that Hurricane Wilma caused to customers' properties this past fall, they still confidently tell customers, "we do what we say we're going to do." Then they deliver that promise.
Crawford and his team have found the golden ticket — their unique selling proposition.
If you're not familiar with the term, also known as USP, you should be. Matt Shooner, founder with his wife Irene of the Cincinnati-based Focal Point Communications, a Green Industry marketing and advertising firm, encourages landscape companies to find their USP and capitalize on it.
So what's the definition, you ask?
"It's that definable 'something' that your company offers customers that distinguishes it from competitors," Shooner explains. It's a claim of uniqueness, supported and reinforced by advertising and marketing that delivers an over-riding easy-to-understand customer benefit.
Crawford Landscaping's USP — "We do what we say we're going to do" — meets Shooner's top criteria: "It must be believable," he says. "You must be able to deliver upon the promise of the USP."
Consider your own company. Is your USP your low, low price? A claim to great service (with testimonials)? Client retention? Awards received?
Shooner says the USP concept is critical to any marketing strategy and basic to clear, effective advertising.
It's all in the delivery
Crawford's message is resonating in Florida's Collier and Lee counties. This year it's budgeting revenues of $3.5 million. Early renewals and sales show that $4 million might be closer to the mark.
How has the company turned its USP into profit-generating action?
"Doing the things the way that we have promised to do has created great word of mouth," says CEO Crawford. "It's catapulted our business. Our promise is to offer best-in-market, quality service, and so far the market has responded."
Crawford, like so many other transplants to Naples, one of the fastest growing cities in the country, came from the industrial north. In fact, he's a decade removed from a career in Detroit's automotive industry, with a stop in between to manage apartment communities in Bloomington, IN, and Orlando and Tallahassee, FL. These experiences taught him many business lessons, but he puts two to use in particular in the day-to-day operations of his landscaping company.
Lesson #1: Companies with efficient systems to perform repetitive, time-sensitive services will out-perform companies without similar systems.
Lesson #2: It's not enough to strive for quality and customer satisfaction; you have to constantly monitor and measure it as well.
But he wanted to see how they're implemented in a successful landscape company before he started his own. He and Timothy A. Felts, one of the first people he hired two years ago, spent months "benchmarking" a successful Detroit-area landscape company. Felts, a graduate of the North Carolina State Turfgrass Management Program and former golf course superintendent in Florida, now serves as president of business development for Crawford Landscaping.
"We started with one account, a hotel. We're now up to nearly 300 clients, counting all bundled communities," says Crawford of his company's start in Naples.
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