BOOSTING YOUR BUSINESS
Fostering Transparency Through Open-Book Management
By Jill Odom
IF YOU’RE WATCHING THE SUPER BOWL, OR ANY SPORTING EVENT FOR that matter, and you don’t know what the score is, it can be hard to stay engaged. Similarly, it can be difficult for your team to feel like they have a stake in the business when they don’t know how your landscape company is performing or how their actions can influence its overall success.
This is why some landscape com- panies have implemented open-book management in their organizations. “We practice it because in any team
effort, the players need to know what’s happening on the field, and they have to have a deep understanding of the game they’re in,” says Ryan Markewich, owner of Creative Roots Landscaping, based in British Columbia, Canada. Mark Aquilino, president of Outdoor
Pride Landscape & Snow Management, based in Manchester, New Hampshire, says they have been practicing open- book management for four years, and they started because he wanted people to know how to play the game of business.
“Because the game is played
live, we forecast every single week,” Aq- uilino says. “We’re able to be much more proactive about our business instead of reactive.” Doug McDuff, president of Landscape
America, based in Wrentham, Massachu- setts, says they started using open-book management in 2019 as a way to stop playing from behind and analyzing the business from a rearview mirror. “Open-book forecasting just helps us
to, in a way, predict the future,” McDuff says. “One of the other reasons why we wanted to do it was we were trying to engage our team more and get them more involved in understanding what it means to run a business and having some ownership thinking in our busi- ness.” J.T. Price, CEO of Landscape Workshop, based in Birmingham, Alabama, says they don’t call it open-book manage- ment at their company, but one of their
five core values is ‘We are transparent.’ “Fundamentally, we at Landscape
Workshop believe that it’s not reason- able to expect people to perform at a high level if they don’t know how they individually are doing, how their branch is doing, and how the company as a whole is doing,” Price says. “And without knowing how we are doing, we can’t possibly be focused on getting better in an efficient way.”
IMPLEMENTING OPEN-BOOK MANAGEMENT Markewich admits he was the biggest
roadblock to implementing open-book management at first. “I just didn’t have a high level of busi- ness acumen when it came to strategy or stuff like that,” Markewich says. “It was just getting past the behaviors of myself and committing to the system.” Aquilino says the hardest aspect of open-book management was learning the system and teaching it to others. He recommends hiring an open-book coach who can help with this process. “We wanted to make sure the way
that we rolled out open book that it was
32 The Edge //March/April 2025
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