The end of summer has been an exciting time here at Spring-Green Lawn Care. This year, the late arrival of spring in much of the country has meant Spring-Green franchises have been busier than ever getting the work done this summer. Despite these production pressures, franchisees were able to take a few days away from their business to attend the National Training Conference we hosted in August in Bloomingdale, Ill.  This year’s theme was “Building for Profit,” and focused on ideas to provide franchise owners with the building blocks to increase profitability, which allows them to achieve their own individual goals. It is the achievement of each franchisee’s individual goals and dreams that fuels the long term success of the Spring-Green organization.

A major topic of discussion at the conference was based around the customer’s perception of lawn care services and their expectation of their lawn care provider.  Lawn and Landscape recently conducted the survey of American homeowners’ perception of the lawn care industry and found that almost three-quarters of them do some form of lawn, tree or shrub care, and many believe that lawn care operators like Spring-Green are the best source for products and effective treatments. People hire lawn care operators for any number of reasons – superior knowledge, better results, access to products, lack of time to do it themselves, because their neighbors do, and more.  The data collected by Lawn and Landscape just confirms what we’ve known all along: Lawn care operators are a resource for superior technical information and have a better understanding of the products and services needed to maintain healthy turf and trees than the average homeowner. This means lawn care operators are in the best position to create and maintain the kind of lawn that your neighbors envy.

But Lawn and Landscape also reports that even though two-thirds of homeowners already support the idea of lawn and tree care, only 12 percent hire a lawn care operator to take care of it; while 76 percent choose to do it themselves. Since the same study showed that lawn care operators are definitively viewed as experts in this area of home care, what could be at the root of this statistical discrepancy? They found there are a number of reasons homeowners fire contractors they hire to work on their lawns – dissatisfaction with the timeliness of the work, felt they were being overcharged or taken advantage of, found someone less expensive, or decided to do the work themselves – but the number one reason was because they were dissatisfied with the quality of work. Lawn and Landscape speculates that this may be because some contractors are performing low-quality work, or some homeowners have expectations that are unrealistically high, but posits the most likely reason for this dissatisfaction is a lack of good communication between the homeowner, the salesperson and the technician actually doing the work. They assert that lawn care operators need to manage customer expectations better at all levels to ensure satisfaction with work that is given to the precocious character of the elements, weather, and nature herself.

Findings like these are at the core of how we at Spring-Green continue to assess and refine our processes and training for all of our franchisees. The better equipped they are when they go into their communities to work on lawns, the more satisfied their customers will be.
In addition to all of the great information and conversation shared at the conference, we were delighted to be able to sign in time for them to attend the conference! Two of these new owners, Barry Robinson of Fredericksburg, Va. and Frank Garrett of Pilot Point, Texas, were established independent business owners who took advantage of the Green Associate Roll-In Program. That program provides a fast track for established owners who want to convert the lawn and tree care portion of their existing business to a Spring-Green franchise. The third owner, Chad Shaylor, bought an existing Spring-Green business and is also an experienced green industry business owner and operator.

We welcome these three newest owners into the Spring-Green franchise family.  As we go through the change of seasons, Spring-Green looks forward to the challenges and opportunities of fall, and the continued growth of our business and industry.

Thank you for reading,

Ted Hofer

 

Source for statistics: Lawn & Landscape