"I feel like I'm standing in front of all you here in my underwear."

It wasn't even 9 a.m. yet on Monday, May 19, and John Wheeler's world was being turned upside down. Wheeler Landscaping, the business he had built and run out in Chagrin Falls, OH, with his wife Mary over the past 33 years, was being invaded.

Owners and employees from four other landscaping operations around the country had taken over. All doors and file cabinets in the building were unlocked. The business' books were left open on the table. Wheeler employees began spilling their guts about every mistake the company had ever made.

All was going according to plan.

The complete kaizen team

Wheeler Landscaping was hosting the inaugural kaizen event of the J.P Horizons' Working Smarter Training Challenge. This event brought five companies together into a peer-network "smart group" for a three-day event. They were there to streamline and cut waste from Wheeler Landscaping.

Though those first few hours of the kaizen (a Japanese word for "continuous improvement") event may have felt like chaos for John, it was all part of a detailed and premeditated process called lean.

What is lean?

Jim Paluch Jr. gets a lean lesson from Ariens' Paul Leao

Lean has been exemplified by Toyota and brought to the Green Industry through the Ariens Co., which used the lean tenants of eliminating waste, reducing production time and improving quality to improve its bottom line, trim debt and lower its inventory levels by more than 50% since 2000.

Ariens is partnering with Cleveland-based consultants J.P. Horizons to spread lean to the service side of the industry through the 52-week Working Smarter Training Challenge program that teaches lean and continuous improvement.

Brice Quibodeaux of Southland Engine explains his team's progress in improving efficiency.

More than 250 companies participate in the Challenge. About 70% of them from the Green Industry. The five companies arriving at Wheeler Landscaping for the kaizen event — Wheeler; Outside Unlimited of Hampstead, MD; Madison Planting & Design of Jackson, MS; Wood landscape Services of Columbus, OH; and Southland Engine of Lafayette, LA — had all completed a year's worth of coursework, and were now metaphorically working on their master's degrees in lean.

"Kaizen is not always about saving $30,000 or $50,000 in one fell swoop," says Jim Paluch, president of J.P. Horizons. "It's about working in little increments. We found here at Wheeler that if we can cut just six minutes out of the yard time for each employee each day, it would save up to $17,000 per year. Or you chop off a few minutes here and there, get to jobs faster, then the sales team can find time to schedule in another mowing job."

"Lean is about finding waste in the process and weeding that out — it's about working smarter, not harder," says Paul Leao, director of lean resources for Ariens, who served as a consultant for this kaizen event. "We like to say lean is hard on the process, not on the people. We don't want to eliminate employees or cut resources. We want to find a better way to do things so that employees can be more productive and the company can be more profitable."