Standardize your landscape specifications to your advantage

Using Standardized Specifications as a Property Managers Unique Service Proposition.
By Steve Hoogenakker Steve@Landscape.Pro
It was a hot Monday afternoon in July and the humidity made it feel like an Indian sweat lodge. The air conditioner was refusing to work through another day, much like the temp that was hired here last week. My desk, looking like it belonged to Andy Rooney was strewn with paperwork facing every direction.
Emails had come in over the weekend about sprinkler heads shooting fountains 15 feet in the air, and I’d received 2 calls from the Vice President of the board asking when the pruning was going to be done. I even got an email asking about the sidewalk edging. Sidewalk edging? Who asks about sidewalk edging?
I scrambled through the papers looking for the maintenance specs, then through my files. I called my assistant and asked her for the contract, but nobody had found it yet.
The contractor finally called me back at 3:00 PM. He didn’t think the pruning had been due yet. The edging might have been kind of done using a weed whip, he didn’t know. As for the sprinklers, how was he supposed to know? He said “I’ll get my irrigation subcontractor out there in the next week”. A week? Oh no.
At 5:45 PM, I left the office, never finding the specifications. I emailed the Vice President before I left and told her I was working on it, but didn’t feel like I had made a lot of headway.
Tuesday morning. Another email about wasting precious water due to the fountain sprinkler heads asking if I cared about the environment, if I worked for BP and asked if I was going to pay the water bill next month. I get a phone message from an angry resident about one of their bird baths being damaged by the mowers last week. With the edging and pruning questions still fresh on my mind, we did a full press search for the specifications. Voila, we found them. My assistant has saved us!
Well, saved might be a strong word. I start to read through it. Hmmm, I’ve never seen specs like these before, they’re only a couple of pages long, should be a piece of cake.
Let’s see here, mowing; “Contractor not responsible for damage to personal items left in common areas”. I don’t remember seeing that. I hope the birdbath was inside the sidewalk, but it’s not likely. I’m not looking forward to that visit and phone call. Ah, here’s edging. “Edging shall be completed once annually”. Well, no end date, so I guess they have until Halloween to finish. I’m sure they won’t wait that long, but when?
Then I found pruning. Pruning shall be completed twice annually, but after shrubs have flowered. What does that mean I wondered? Surely some shrubs have finished flowering, it’s July for Pete’s sake. Have they done any of it? OK, one more question, irrigation, let’s see if that’s any better. Irrigation: “Lawn Sprinklers will be started up in the spring and blown out in the fall. If adjustments or repairs are necessary, it is the responsibility of client to notify contractor.”
So, I feel good that I found the contract and specs, but I still don’t have a single answer to give to the association.
This story happens hundreds if not thousands of times in Minnesota each year in one form or another. The problem arises because there are no standardized specifications for grounds maintenance. The specs could’ve come from a book, or more likely, they’re using a contractors specifications. I’ve run the largest landscape maintenance business here in the distant past and I can tell you that 20% of the language in contracts being passed around is language I wrote in 2000, and I am not an attorney!
In the past the board probably took 3 bids with 3 sets of specifications and accepted one. If they were one of the lucky ones, they kept using the same specs even after the contract ran out. If not, when the bid was up again, they asked for 3 more bids and got 3 different sets of specs to try to compare and had a new board to re-learn everything all over again.
So, what’s the solution? Whether you’re non-managed, a managed association, or a management company, you need to come up with your own set of specs and standardize as much of it as possible. To me, NOT having grounds maintenance specs for one of the biggest budget items and complaint items is just like trying to run an association without having MCIOA as a backstop!
There are only a couple of large management companies that have their own specs and they have a big competitive advantage over all the others. Their property managers already know what’s required at each site, why and when. They have deadlines for pruning and edging and they’re the same date, so on July 15th, sidewalk edging had better be done at every site. 80% of the thinking and brain damage of the board and property managers has already been eliminated. Just mark it in your Outlook calendar in February: First edging to be completed July 15th. You’ll see July 15th coming up so you can contact the vendor 2 weeks in advance with a reminder if you wish. The standardized specification makes less work for the manager, and in turn makes the manager and the board more efficient, and that translates into a happier association.
So, how do you go about making standardized specs? Since 90% of the horticultural items apply to all sites, standardize as many dates and descriptions as possible. For those few items that have to be customized, put them on as an addendum WITH DATES.
Grab 2-4 of your current landscape contracts and setup a meeting with me 1-2 of your property managers with 2-4 of their current grounds maintenance/snow contracts and optionally 1-2 respected board members. Send the documents out ahead of time and ask all to comment. Then, buy them lunch to come up with best parts of all contracts. Have them combine the specs into two sets. One for very small associations and one for larger associations. Run these by your accounting and legal departments and start using the “ABC Grounds Maintenance Specifications” as your own competitive advantage. Once done, 90% will always be done. You can tweak it over the years but you can have a new competitive advantage in a couple of weeks.
Steve Hoogenakker
Concierge Landscape Environments
Steve@Landscape.Pro
763-213-2410

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LinkedIn and Commercial Property Managers, how will this help my property management business

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By Steve Hoogenakker Concierge Landscape Environments
LinkedIn and property managers – The link to the top professionals in the property managers Community.

To help get you started, go to LinkedIn, fill out the basic information, then look up my name, Steve Hoogenakker and "invite to your network" and just mention that you're in the property management field or in a supporting industry. I'll accept you. LinkedIn has a wonderful protection feature that if anyone tries to link with someone they don't know, they can flag your account making it harder to get others to LinkIn, so knowing that I'll accept your invite or using other very close friends is the best step, then you can read through my profile to give you ideas of what you can do next.

What is LinkedIn and why is it so important to property managers & HOA’s? First of all, it’s the best way to post your questions and have them answered by your peers. Second, there are members of groups like MHA, IREM, CAI and CAI Minnesota that you can join for free and get timely articles and discussions on topics you care the most about.
LinkedIn is not a passing fad, it’s here to stay and it’s your free tool for important information.
The average LinkedIN user is a college educated 43 year old making $107,000 per year. Where else can you connect to this level of professionals in your industry? There were 17 million visitors in February. Who is visiting? Your customers, your employers, your employees, your vendors, your fellow homeowners and your peers.
This isn’t your “facebook for adults”, and this isn’t a short “tweet”. This is a free, powerful tool to manage your professional life and career, even if you aren’t looking for a new one.
Recently, Accenture’s head of global recruiting , John Campagnino, announced that he is hiring for 50,000 positions. 40% of those he expects to get through social media, particularly LinkedIn, so if you’re not using social media for your benefit, you’re missing out.
You Google other people, don’t you think they Google you? Of course they do. LinkedIn organizes your life’s work and interests, so if people search for you, it’s all presented in a clear, concise manner.
Here’s an example of LinkedIn’s value:
Nishar was trying to decide whether his daughter, who was 12 at the time, should spend her summer at a program offered by Johns Hopkins University. He posted the question to his status update on both Facebook and LinkedIn. While he received more comments on Facebook, they were casual and congratulatory. Only four of his LinkedIn contacts wrote him, but they offered a rich analysis, describing experiences with the Johns Hopkins program that left them better off academically; they persuaded him to enroll his daughter. "People are in a different context and mindset when they're in a professional network," he says.
Property managers & LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is even more important to property managers. The most powerful aspect of LinkedIn is it’s groups. There are many groups available as of this writing; Professional Property managers group, MHA, IREM, IFMA, Community Associations Institute, CAI Minnesota, CAI – CT, and CIC and Townhome Mastermind Group.
These groups are made of your peers. There are relevant discussions there that can help you with your business or association. You can post your own discussion, or even ask a question. The members of these groups have been very supportive, and calls for help are almost always answered. We’ll tell you how to find these groups a little later.
So, how do you get started?
If you don’t have a LinkedIn account, go to www.linkedin.com, and setup an account. It’s free. There’s no need to use the paid version. It will take maybe a half hour to two hours to enter the information. If you’ve been a professional for awhile, you don’t need to enter in irrelevant information like grade school, or even high school information.
Your typical profile might have your current position and company on top with previous employment underneath, Then you might decide to list your goals. Also on your profile, you can have LinkedIn automatically grab your blog entries, twitter, facebook entries and articles you’ve written. You can also list things like the groups you belong to, your reading list, people you’ve recommended, and people who have recommended you.
After you’ve done the original profile and joined a few groups, you might want to spend 30 minutes every 6 months or so updating your profile and inviting others to join your network. I encourage you to join the groups I mentioned earlier. Post a thought, or pose a question and get involved with your peers.
After the original setup, look for the CAI groups listed above and ask to join. Use the searchbar in the upper right and change the search from people to groups. Besides the CAI groups, look for other interests that are not based in business, like bird watchers, executive weightlifters, speakers and panelists, gardeners, whatever. For every interest you have, there are probably already 5 groups or more to possibly join. If you’re really passionate about an issue, it’s very easy to start your own group, like I did with CIC and Townhome Mastermind.
So get LinkedIn, join a few groups, and share this article with friends and famly. I hope your life can be enriched a little like mine has.
Steve Hoogenakker, Concierge Landscape Environments