Web Extra: How GreenEarth Landscape makes employees’ dreams come true

Shawn Knight (left) and Jeremy Durgan, co-owners of GreenEarth Landscape Services in Santa Rosa Beach, Fla.

Improving company culture has been a major shift at GreenEarth Landscape Services.

Building trust among team members has played a major role in that effort. One way the company has done so is through its dream-fulfillment program, a concept organized by John Ratliff when he ran Appletree Answers and one that consulting firm Petra Coach introduced to the organization.

With the dream-fulfillment program, each team member is asked to fill out a dream sheet with his or her dreams listed on it. Names are then placed in a hat and two people are selected to have their dreams fulfilled.

For the first drawing, one dream award went to a team member who’d always wanted to take his wife to a music and art festival in Texas but was never able to afford it. GreenEarth fulfilled that dream by giving him two tickets, VIP, to the event and covering the cost of their hotel.

“The response from him and the reward to us for being able to do that for him and his wife has been awesome,” says GreenEarth Co-owner Jeremy Durgan.

The second dream winner was a young man who was paying his own way through college, taking community college classes when he could. He was the first one in his family to go to college and he was proud of it, but he was in desperate need of a computer to do his schoolwork on and he couldn’t afford one.

“Our dream fulfillment was to purchase him a computer to help with his education,” Durgan says. “It was great! Later, however, I heard that people were surprised that we actually followed through with fulfilling these dreams. That shocked me because as a business owner, I thought we followed through on everything, but apparently, we didn’t. It was then that the point of the program really hit home with me. It built trust and created genuine happiness on the team.”

Excerpted with permission from “No Try Only Do: Building a Business on Purpose, Alignment, and Accountability,” by Andy Bailey.