You should be ready for spring startup right now.
If you are responsible for ensuring your commercial property is ready for springtime, the first thing you need to do is make sure you’ve got everything squared away with your landscape service provider. Particularly if you’re in a region of the country where contracts are seasonal.
So, if you’re in a seasonal market, from the administrative side you’ve got to make sure:
– You’ve got your commercial landscape service provider selected
– You have all required certificates of insurance
– The contract is in place
– Everyone is on the same page with the payment terms, and
– Your service provider is set up in your accounting system to get paid timely
Get on your landscape service provider’s schedule early.
From a service level standpoint, if you want a spring cleanup done, along with spring mulching and flowers installed after the last possible frost date, you need to be scheduling all of that with your service provider between mid-February and the first part of March, so you can get on the schedule before it fills up.
By contracting early, you’re also enabling your service provider to ensure they’ve got the labor force and equipment in place to deliver on your expectations. If you’ve got events scheduled in your place of business, you’ll want to verify with your service provider that they’re planning to gear up early enough to handle it. That way you as a customer have a comfort level that your service provider is ready.
This is also the time to approve any ad hoc charges. Be mindful that if you wait too long to commit to these services, you’ll be at the end of the line.
Clearly convey your expectations.
Once you’ve chosen your service provider and you know which landscape management services you need for your commercial grounds, it’s important to convey your completion expectations–the date by which you expect everything to be done. Make sure your service provider can meet those expectations or is able to give you a realistic reason why they can’t.
Legitimate reasons could include things like:
– Material availability–the flowers you want won’t be available from the grower until after your desired completion date.
– You want new plantings before the latest projected freeze date in your region–it would be irresponsible if your service provider didn’t advise you that it would be unwise to plant something too early, since you risk damage or loss to the cold weather.
This is an important point. It can be a costly mistake to push new growth on your turf or shrubbery until you’re nearly out of the freeze window. Your service provider should know the proper time for new plantings as well as fertilizer and preemergent weed applications, which are all soil temperature dependent.
So, when it comes to making sure your commercial grounds are effectively helping you meet your goals, whether that be keeping occupancy high or providing the perfect retail experience, it all comes down to this: You must set clear expectations early and communicate often with your commercial landscape service provider. When everyone is on the same page, amazing things happen.
