Schedule of Events

Formed in 1980, Prescription Landscapes grew from two young men with shovels and trucks to the $40-million business it is today. As the company grew, the founders were faced with constant challenges to improve output and productivity while also working as frontline producers and salesmen. Over time, competition and customer expectations required the addition of more staff and continuous improvement in business operating systems. From Excel spreadsheets and Quickbooks, to a painful experience with a custom ERP, to our current ERP, LaPlante and Haugen will tell you what worked, what didn’t, and the lessons they learned along the way.   

Avalon Landscapes needed to make a large-scale software and technology integration to grow the business. So, the team underwent a very aggressive and comprehensive integration of new accounting, management, estimating and scheduling software, as well as a new digital time keeping tool and smart irrigation controller integration. Cooke will discuss how the company prepared for it and managed to do it all simultaneously, as well as the roadblocks they hit after implementation, and come out still liking each other.

In today's world, businesses that embrace data analytics have a major competitive edge over those that don't. Landscape companies need to leverage the data they are collecting to drive their business success. In this seminar, we will discuss the process of creating a data analytics position in a landscape company and developing how to identify and display key performance indicators for each position.  We will explore how to compile data from multiple sources, including Landscape Software, QuickBooks, HR Software, social media, Websites, and vehicle tracking systems and using this data to create individual dashboards for sales, operations, and admin.

 The seminar will cover topics such as:

• The importance of data analytics in landscape companies
• How to identify key performance indicators for each position in the company
• Extracting data from different sources and transforming it to a usable format in Microsoft PowerBI
• How to create effective dashboards and KPI’s for various departments in the company
• Building custom reports and visualizations in Power BI to track performance.

Attendees will leave the seminar with practical tips and actionable steps they can take to begin building their data analytics department.

Do you wish that your crews communicated better? Reported the right things at the right time? As leaders, we can't be everywhere at once. We rely on verbal and written reports to understand job progress and team health. 

In this session we will dive into best practices in setting up internal communication tools and why it's crucial for a growing company to have them. We'll go through the pitfalls of verbal reports, how to not leak billable work, how to enhance the feedback loop, and how to increase team cohesion. 

Technology has also flooded our lives and it seemingly changes faster than we can keep up with. Some of it we don't understand and some of us avoid even trying to understand. How do you weed through it all, make the right decisions, and make technology work for your team, your clients, and your bottom line? The Pattie Group is a 55-year-old, award winning landscape design, build & maintenance firm based in the Cleveland, Ohio. The company has transitioned ownership from the first generation to the second. They employ professionals who have been with the company since its early years and developed many of the original processes and methods which helped lead it to success. Of course, they also employ hungry young professionals who started more recently and bring with them a greater understanding of the technology around us. Learn how the second-generation ownership is employing the immense knowledge of their long-time staff, partnering it with the technological skill of younger generation staff members and leading a technological renaissance in their organization.

Sustainability will be changing the very nature of the landscape industry.  We will need cutting edge landscape professionals leverage best available practices and technologies to combat climate change and differentiate themselves from the competition. This session will provide pragmatic steps that industry professionals from across the country are taking in both the private and commercial setting towards evolving how they do business sustainably with the use of technology. This session will cover a case study tied to California "Going Electric", how the state is dealing with drought conditions driven by climate change. The presentation is aimed at inspiring change and elevating the industry to be at the cutting edge of this movement.