Pacific Goes to Next Level

PACIFIC GOES TO NEXT LEVEL

For three days last week, 21 members of Pacific Landscape Management's managers attended Next Level University in Santa Clarita California, their Next Level Network Peer Group's annual educational event.

For the past eight years, Pacific Landscape Management has participated in an industry Peer Group with five other companies from across the country. These companies are some of the premiere landscape organizations in the United States including Heads Up Landscape Contractors , Albuquerque NM, StayGreen , Santa Clarita CA, Integrated Landscape Management , Phoenix AZ, Lawn Maintenance Company , Houston and Emerald Isle , Denver CO. The goal of our group is to work together to support each other to continue to grow and develop to the "next level". The owners of each company meet three times annually, share our organizational and financial plans, and challenge each other to make improvements that will benefit our customers, employees and organizations.

In 2010, we created the Next Level University, bringing 175 of the managers from the six companies together to share and learn on subjects involving production management, customer service, sales, performance measurements, and personal development.

NLU15's kick-off keynote speaker, David Friedman, brought organizational culture to horticulture by stating that high performing companies have great cultures by design, not just by choice. Set the tone for the culture-centric theme and workshop takeaways.

Elias Godinez of Pacific Landscape Management led a discussion of the production managers of each company about how to work with their production teams to improve communication with customers.

An inspiring discussion panel featuring the host company StayGreen's clients: Eric Ducat, GM Hyatt Regency; Tina Nakamura, Property Management Professionals; and John Calhoun, Vanguard Property Management Valencia on closing the excellence and expectation gap between landscape services providers and property managers.. Crawling behind our customers' eyes requires us to first open our ears. The panel was awesome and we came away with a richer understanding of how to be better partners.

Christine Soderlund facilitates another great educational session on compliance, talent sourcing, people development and best HR practices as fundamental to high performing cultures and companies.

Bruce K Wilson Landscape Business Exchange facilitates the peer group and event. The Santa Clarita Signal reported on the event in their Tuesday edition.

As we plan for our corporate improvement going into 2016, this was a great experience to share with our peers ideas and strategies on how to help us serve you, our customer, better. In early December, our management team will spend two days in strategic planning and our experience last week will be very helpful as we look in the future.