From a Yellow Wagon at 14 to Building a Scalable Landscape Business with Andrew Lala

How much of the design process do you actually have written out as a process that somebody could follow, and how much of it is just Andrew?

You know, whether I have it actually written down currently, I'm not sure, but I do have a pretty clear idea in my head of how I approach projects and how we approach projects.

So I actually, there's a lot of things that might challenge me is to determine, you know, look inward and say, who are we and why do we do the things we do and how do we do them? The design...

build aspect of it is actually something i think i can define pretty clearly because they're there it is rooted in a lot of um tangible um elements that i'm looking for to accomplish in a project

good yeah i'm i'm kind of in a similar phase in my own business and in that we're hiring a a director of delivery is what we're calling it um and some some companies might it might be a director of technology or director of production it's kind of been a hard title to recruit for but we're calling it director of delivery and I'm really excited.

We actually have somebody starting on Monday who we're really excited about.

We're feeling really confident, and we went through a really thorough interview process, and multiple team members interviewed this person.

And so what I've been doing... over the last year like i knew that i was going to need to do this is i i use apple notes and i have a note for that role and i started a numbered list of things that i did that i would want this person to do and then i and then i i like kept little notes on like how i made the decision and This actually today, later today, I'm meeting with one of my team members to finish the onboarding plan for this person.

And I'm really glad that I kept that list because I wrote into their onboarding plan a number of stories of things that happened in the last year and how I handled it and how I would want them to handle it.

And then I'm going to share that with them and be like, how would you handle it? So that's one of the things that, that's how I'm approaching this.

I'm kind of inventing this role.

I think, you know, landscape designer is more of an established role, but there's also like your way of doing it.

And what I'm getting at is that that's how I've, I'm hoping to then give this person like, hey, here, like one of them is like vendor negotiation.

I have vendors and I need to negotiate with them.

And it takes a lot of time.

And so I have all these, little documents that are like, here's how I arrived at this price that we agreed to.

Yeah.

I mean, that's, you named a bunch of challenges that come, especially when you're kind of creating a, you know, a position from maybe needs that the company has that maybe is not a clearly defined role.

We've also done something similar where, you know, simultaneously to bring on this you know, really designer salesperson project manager, which has a lot of hats to wear, but, um, is we also began using Aspire software a few years ago.

And, um, the, the management of that information is, is extremely valuable to us, uh, to, to inform our decisions.

Um, but if that information is not, uh, cared for well, and is not like, there's not a steward of that information, it's almost useless, you know?

Yeah.

So we began hiring, we were also searching, we transitioned one of our current account managers into a production administrator

position,

which is something that kind of developed and was a little loosely defined.