If you google “get your lawn ready for spring” you’ll get about 25,400,000 results. Seems like a topic that’s already been pretty well covered. So, instead of writing another article about the importance of applying a pre-emergent, here are a few things that commercial landscape companies do to get ready to serve our clients in the spring.
As a commercial landscape business, spring means a return to regular landscape maintenance visits to our clients’ properties. Not that we haven’t been there over the winter, but most of what we’ve been doing in those visits have been to insure a successful spring.
When spring finally arrives, we are focused and have all our resources in place – equipment, people and training.
For large commercial landscape companies, spring brings truckloads of new equipment. At the end of the previous growing season, we’ve taken inventory of all our equipment – trucks, mowers, edgers and trimmers, and determined which ones don’t have another year left in them. Purchasing requests are filled out and signed, then we go shopping for the best tools of the trade we can find. Every company will definitely have their favorite brands, but no matter who they choose, there’s nothing quite as fun as picking up new mowers, tools, and trucks. They don’t stay clean for long, but when you see trucks, mowers, and power equipment fresh off the assembly line being delivered to our branches, you know spring has come.
Aside from the fun of having some new tools, the new equipment is absolutely essential to delivering quality commercial landscape services. Properly equipped service teams are free to focus on their task at hand because they know they have reliable tools to get their job done correctly and quickly.
Beginning early in the spring and continuing through the heart of the summer, our company’s employee roster will grow by more than 400 employees. Each new spring comes brings waves of seasonal landscape service professionals.
Someone has to use all the new equipment that we’ve bought over the winter, right?
Whether returning to us after an extended winter break, or coming to us with experience working at other commercial landscape service providers, we’re excited to see so many new faces around our shops each spring. As new growth begins to bloom, we realize that we would not be able to deliver quality landscape services to our clients without our dedicated seasonal work force.
Without a doubt, landscape service work is difficult. Summer temperatures can be unforgiving and the job is a dangerous one. The landscape service professionals we employ may not always get the credit they deserve, but they are always appreciated.
Once the new equipment is in and our new employees are on board, the most important thing that we can do each spring is offer training to our operators – new hires and veterans. Regular refreshers on how to properly use the equipment are important, but more important is the training our teams how to use their equipment safely. Weekly operations meetings and safety meetings are a way of life for all our branch operations teams. In-field tailgate talks and mentoring sessions by our senior personnel are how responsible commercial landscape service providers make sure that our teams know how to do their jobs and deliver the results that our clients expect from their landscapes.
As we enter spring with new equipment in our fleet, new hires on our payroll, and well trained professionals focused on safety, there’s only one thing left to do – go out and create premier properties for our clients.