By Taylor Tuomie
The best green industry business owners work hard to stay on top of their line of work. They study what experts in the field are saying, they attend conferences, they take note of what their competitors are doing, discuss best practices with other owners and are constantly trying to improve.
Learning is an important aspect of being a successful entrepreneur. Of course, there are business courses available across the country, there are entrepreneurial organizations you can join and books you can read, but where else can you learn about improving your business? Maybe you can learn something from businesses that don’t have anything to do with lawn maintenance, irrigation, landscaping or snow plowing.
Think about your last visit to your favorite restaurant and start applying some of the things they do exceptionally well:
Give recommendations
Don’t be just an order taker. Think of this as a server recommending an appetizer or a great beer to go with your meal. Of course, you should be providing the service your customers ask for, but you should also give your customers recommendations. Be the trusted advisor, you are the professional in your field. If you know that you can offer a service to your customers that they should be using, for instance a pest control solution, go ahead and recommend it. Make sure it isn’t simply an upsell for the sake of extra revenue, your recommendations need to benefit your customers enough for them to see value, otherwise you lose trust.
Be flexible
Schedules change, large parties show up, the kitchen might be running out of ingredients, but the best restaurants make it through the day! Be flexible with your green industry business. If you know you are going to be slammed with customers a certain week, you need to make it work. This might mean implementing software to help with those reservations, cancellations and people just showing up. Being able to modify schedules for your techs on the fly is a trait that will make your business more successful.
Thank people for positive reviews
Many restaurants offer their customers incentives for leaving reviews. The way people make purchasing decisions today is highly influenced by what others have to say about a business. Offer your happy customers a reason to leave an online review for your landscaping, maintenence, irrigation or snow plowing services. If you have a few customers in mind, it probably wouldn’t hurt to give them a call or send them an email to see if they would be willing to give your business an online review. Hey, you can even have them review your services on the same site they review restaurants, Yelp!
Resolve issues before they turn into negative reviews
A single one star review can be the reason someone doesn’t even give a restaurant a try. Good restaurants recognize when they have unhappy customers. Maybe their service wasn’t as good as it normally is because they were extremely busy, or maybe the food wasn’t what they expected, smart restaurants recognize an unhappy customer and intervene before that customer leaves their table. Make sure you learn the reasons why a customer is unhappy, do your best to resolve it on the spot. If you can’t, make sure you can get it fixed as soon as possible.
Make changes to the menu, but keep your specialties
One of our customers, Innovative Irrigation Specialists, does a great job of specializing in one service and offering a few other services one the side.
Your favorite restaurant is your favorite restaurant because of one thing that you order over and over again. Good restaurants change up their menu quite a bit and try new things out, but they know what their specialties are. Does your business specialize in something? Are you the best irrigation service in the area or do you provide unique landscaping solutions that your competitors don’t?
The recession forced many green industry companies to diversify their offerings. It created a market that requires businesses to offer more than one service in order to survive. But that doesn’t mean you should forget about your specialty. If you have a flagship service, keep that at the forefront of your business and let the rest be fixings. People will keep coming back to you for that one awesome “menu item”.
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