PCT on the Road: Winner’s Summit Provides Ideas to Grow Your Business

ATLANTA — Listen. Follow through on your promises. Don’t hunt where there aren’t any deer.

About 75 pest management and lawn care professionals attended the second Winner’s Summit, sponsored by Dow AgroSciences, where entrepreneur Marty Grunder spoke about how to grow your business, build a good team, sell services and market your company. The conference aims at providing business owners and leaders with tips to help them introduce innovative ideas into their own companies.

Grunder, 40, founded Grunder Landscaping in suburban Dayton, Ohio, in 1984, as a way to finance his college education. What started as a one-man operation and a $25 mower (purchased at a garage sale) has grown into a $5 million-a-year company with 45 employees.

TEACHING OLD DOGS NEW TRICKS. He told the assembled professionals that the most important asset they have in their companies is the people they hire — not trucks, a building, sprayers or equipment. And what business owners often forget is that they are, in fact, leaders at their businesses.

So, when you have employees who can’t turn in paperwork on time, show up late or who cut corners on the job site, Grunder said, look to yourself and your own operation first. Perhaps the paperwork is too complicated

“Whatever you allow, you encourage,” he said. “Because everybody’s watching. As leaders, you’re always being watched.”

The trait most important to successful leaders is their candor. “It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it,” Grunder said. When you show up to a job site and see chemical leaking out the back of a truck, don’t explode on the technician. Step back, pull him aside and ask him if he sees anything wrong with the situation. Calmly explain why the leak needs to be fixed and ask what could be done differently — on your part and his — to prevent this situation in the future.

Some of Grunder’s other tips on better management included:

• Have a company handbook and live and die by it. Making sure everyone plays by the same set of rules builds a stronger company and ensures fair treatment.
• Accentuate the positive. Tell your employees when they do something well — a lot. And tell them in front of everyone else. Grunder reads complimentary notes he receives from customers aloud at company meetings, which brings attention to specific employees and encourages others to perform better.
• Listen. This applies to your customers as well as your employees. Ask what your technicians need to do their jobs better and more efficiently.
• Be personal. You don’t have to invite the company over for dinner, but ask about their families and attend their kids’ sporting events and send their spouses thank-you notes. “You need that significant other to understand and respect you as well,” Grunder said. “If they’re not happy at home, they’re not happy at work. If they’re not happy at work, they’re not happy at home. Those things are the same thing.”

BUILDING GREAT TEAMS. Grunder also stressed the importance of hiring good team players to strengthen and grow your business. He said enthusiastic people — even if they aren’t the most talented or educated — will do a better job than someone with a ton of degrees and no passion for what they’re doing. 

People make a conscious decision to be enthusiastic, Grunder said, and it doesn’t mean bouncing off the walls all day long. It only means working with a sense of urgency, being willing to do more than is asked of you and striving for excellence in your work

And while enthusiasm is a choice, not everyone is designed to love the pest control industry. Those people, Grunder said, don’t belong in your company. “You don’t want to hire people and think you’re going to change them,” he said. “You’ve got to find competent people.”

SELLING NEW SERVICES. One of the best ways to grow your business, Grunder said, is to take a look at your market, find out what no one else is doing and then to do that thing. Ask your clients what service you should start, stop or keep doing. Find out what people want and then exceed their expectations.

Listening to your current customers — when they praise and when they complain — is the key to providing what they want, he said. “That’s everything in business,” he said. “You’ve got to get out there and ask them how you’re doing. When a client calls mad, look at it as an opportunity to win them over for life.”

And listening to yourself is important, too. Grunder stressed the importance of daydreaming, of taking time away from the day-to-day operations of your business to think about what you want to do and how you’ll get there.

“I don’t think that’s a waste of time. I think an hour a week away from the office at the library with a pad of paper and a pen — even if it is during business hours — is time well spent,” he said. “I think taking a two-week vacation is a good thing.”

MARKETING YOUR BUSINESS. It doesn’t make sense, Grunder said, to hunt for deer in downtown Atlanta. You have to go to the forest. Likewise, it doesn’t make sense to look for customers where they aren’t. He gave the assembled professionals more than 60 tips on how to market themselves cheaply and in ways to make them stand out from their competition.

Some of his ideas included:

• Custom-made fortune cookies with your company’s name and phone number printed inside
• Having pens and pencils distributed at places where your customers — or potential customers — congregate, like car dealerships, golf courses or athletic clubs
• Color newsletters
• Community service or giveaways during Christmas, Halloween or Valentine’s Day
• Sending handwritten thank-you notes
• Putting door hangers on the houses of your customers’ neighbors
• Giving printed baby bibs to new parents or new grandparents
• Write a column for a local newspaper 

“Don’t put your ads where your customers aren’t,” he said. “I want you to think. I want you to think. You do not have to spend a bunch of money to move your company forward in marketing.”

MORE IDEAS. In June, the Winner’s Summit, sponsored by Dow AgroSciences, will take place in Indianapolis, St. Louis and Charlotte, N.C. For more information, visit www.businessideastowin.com or contact Maria Miller at 330/523-5373 or mmiller@giemedia.com.

To learn more about Grunder, visit www.martygrunder.com.