Landscape leaders learn industry best practices during 24-hour field trips

Have you ever seen a company experiencing great success and wondered, how do they do that? Most of the time, you’re stuck watching from the outside, making guesses and fighting off the green-eyed monster.

In the landscaping industry, there’s another option: Grunder Landscaping Co. field trips.

Grunder Landscaping Co. is an award-winning, full-service design, build, and maintenance business headquartered in Dayton, Ohio. President and CEO Marty Grunder (whose well-known industry consultancy The Grow Group organizes the field trips) runs the company alongside COO Seth Pflum.

Several times a year, they invite other industry professionals to go behind the scenes at their headquarters in Dayton. During a jampacked 24-hour workshop, attendees get to see exactly how the business operates—and learn how to replicate its success.

They tour the shop, yard, and administrative offices, learning actionable strategies for running operations, marketing, HR, and sales. Throughout the event, Grunder shows participants how they’ve integrated Aspire into their overall processes, and how they maximize the platform’s capabilities to optimize efficiency and increase profits.

Field trips are open to all Aspire clients, and the schedule of upcoming events can be found here.

If you’re considering attending, here’s what you can expect.

What to expect

Field trips start at 3 p.m. and go until 3 p.m. the following day. On day one, attendees tour Grunder Landscaping Co. and have dinner with the group to build connections and share knowledge. On day two, they take a deep dive into best practices for running a landscape business (including sessions on operations, HR, sales, and finance) as well as leadership training.

Throughout the event, Marty and the team at Grunder are transparent about the lessons they’ve learned from decades in the landscape industry, offering unprecedented business intelligence insights for those looking to scale or improve operations.

“These are the kinds of conversations that weren’t happening 25 years ago,” says Aspire’s solutions engineer manager Cris Poggi. “You don’t just walk away with big ideas—you have actionable steps to start putting into practice immediately.”

The content covered during each field trip is relevant for landscape professionals from companies of all sizes.

What you’ll learn

The Grow Group’s approach to helping landscape leaders build stronger businesses is based on four pillars: platform, people, processes, and profits. During the workshop, they guide attendees through activities to identify strengths and weaknesses in these core areas, and come up with a plan for growth.

Instead of being confronted with vague business ideas, attendees learn about things like value propositions and ideal client profiles with specific examples from Grunder Landscaping Co. itself. They hear directly from the team members who do the work, too, with a chance to speak to anyone within the organization and scheduled time to hear from each key department. 

As experts in Aspire, The Grow Group also shows attendees how to maximize their use of the platform so it’s fully integrated in operations. Here are a few of their key tips:

1. Have a growth mindset
2. Embrace the system
3. Use the software

They share best practices for using Aspire, from managing prospects during the sales process to creating proposal templates, scheduling work tickets, tracking job costs, updating materials, and handling end-of-month procedures.

At the end of the 24-hour experience, attendees walk away with a clear vision on how they can improve operations for their own landscaping company.

How to attend

Interested in signing up for a field trip? Register for an upcoming event on the Grow Group’s website here.