“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,” - Ryan Markewich, owner of Creative Roots Landscaping
easy, understandable, and something that everybody knew was to create more opportunities,” Aquilino says. “Not for us to question every decision that’s made out there.” McDuff says one of the biggest challenges they had starting out was ensuring the team had access to all the financials and information they needed. “It’s not just the owner going out there and gathering the information and giv- ing it to the team,” McDuff says. “It needs to be other people in the organization that are responsible for making those forecasts every week.” McDuff says they’ve refined their
forecasts into a dashboard of key metrics, such as their gross profit, equipment costs and revenue streams. They have a weekly open-book update with the entire staff. Aquilino says they conduct open-book
reports weekly with the team, focusing on total revenue and forecasting their gross profit line. “We want them focusing on those things that they can control,” Aquilino says. “The things below gross profit, like our G&A type stuff that’s heavily reviewed by myself and our controller. Whereas our teams out in the field, we want them responsible for and constant- ly looking at the direct costs that they easily influence.” Markewich says they meet on a
bi-weekly basis and they also focus on covering metrics their team can affect. He notes you shouldn’t overlook non-fi- nancial metrics like people development. He says they create smaller scoreboards where they can track the behaviors, processes and systems that can impact a set target. Price says they share everything from
profitability and sales metrics to cus- tomer satisfaction and labor efficiency metrics.
“We are trying to drive specific behav- iors and performance, and if we measure something and are transparent with the data, we are able to manage it,” Price says. One decision you have to make with open-book management is how far down in the business you want to com- municate the metrics. Landscape Workshop ensures all ac- count managers, general managers, esti- mators, project managers, and adminis- trative and corporate team members are on their monthly ‘all managers’ calls. Price says they share more limited information with their crew leaders. Markewich says they have monthly company-wide meetings where every- one on the team participates, even if they just started yesterday. Aquilino says they also go over their financials with everyone in the company. “The reason for that is just so we can get people talking about something as simple as not going back to a site twice, making sure you have the right tools,” Aquilino says. “That’s what we all want. We all just sell time out in the field, so how we control that time is how we control our margin.”
CREATING EMPLOYEE BUY-IN How well you go about messaging the addition of open-book management and what it means for your organization will greatly affect your employees’ response. Aquilino says employee buy-in was the easiest aspect for them because of the way they rolled out the system. They made it clear that open-book manage- ment is simply a tool to help them all win and potentially earn a bonus. He says it was essential to eliminate any stigmas associated with open-book management. “Controlling the narrative to make
sure that everybody knew that this was a great opportunity and that this was really something that’s going to allow all of us to think and act like owners was the biggest thing that we needed to focus on,” Aquilino says. Aquilino says that by involving their leadership team and getting them on board first helped as well. For Creative Roots’ team, Markewich
says the response was a mixed bag as employees weren’t sure what they were getting into, but the team quickly real- ized that open-book management was a positive change. Price says that early on, some man- agers were resistant to everyone seeing
their num- bers every
month, but these folks didn’t fit the culture Land- scape Workshop was building so they either learned to appreciate the transparency or left the company. “Some folks
didn’t enjoy the accountability that comes with clearly measurable performance,” Price says. “But high perform- ers love knowing how they are doing and being recognized for their performance, and they want to be on a winning team and appreci- ate that the company keeps score in a transparent way.” McDuff says his team was receptive
to open-book management from the start. He says they’ve appreciated the transparency and it’s helped with their retention.
“I can see that being an issue for some companies, where at the beginning, it feels additive, like it’s taking up more time,” McDuff says. “You already have enough on your plate as a manager, and
“We want them focusing on those things that they can control. The things below gross profit, like our G&A type stuff that’s heavily reviewed by myself and our controller. Whereas our teams out in the field, we want them responsible for and constantly looking at the direct costs that they easily influence,”
- Mark Aquilino, president of Outdoor Pride Landscape & Snow Management
National Association of Landscape Professionals 33
Photos: (Far left page) Creative Roots Landscaping (Top bubble) Land- scape America (Bottom bubble) Landscape Workshop
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