“They may forget what you said but they will never forget how you made them feel” ~ Maya Angelou ~ I won’t claim to be an expert on selling in the traditional sense of the subject. Solely because in the 26 years Creative Roots Landscaping has been in business, I can probably count on one […]
Category Archives: Insights
“We must all suffer from one of two pains: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. The difference is discipline weighs ounces while regret weighs tons.” Jim Rohn Some of you might already know my story, but I will add a very brief history for those of you who don’t. I began in […]
“Great vision without great people is irrelevant.” Jim Collins. “Take our best 20 people away, and I tell you that Microsoft will become an unimportant company.” Bill Gates About halfway through my 26 years as the owner of Creative Roots Landscaping, I started to hit the same roadblock that most overly ambitious, chaos-thriving, “I can […]
The Wake-up Call “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together” ~ African Proverb This article has all the elements of a well-written story – a plot, a setting, characters – along with conflict and resolution, and serves as an introduction to my journey and one of […]
The famous French composer Claude Debussy said “Music is the silence between the notes.” Years ago, when I first started to think about business operations, I had the idea that they were typically only divided into the front-end and back-end tasks that you and your team believe are a priority and must be performed in […]
Last week, the company I started over 25 years ago with a shovel, a truck and some elbow grease held its 12th High Involvement Planning (HIP for short) meeting. I want to tell you that if you are not having these you are missing out on a BIG opportunity. You did the math, right? So […]
Before the luxury of GPS, stars led travelers home – and the North Star was a constant. If your team can’t point to your North Star, you might be having a hard time keeping your company on course. The Organizational North Star: A Purpose Statement It can be easy to get off course. Day-to-day routines […]
Ryan put this together to show at the LMN Leaders Summit in 2018. It’s our team talking about why they like Open Book Management.
Financial and Non-Financial Scoreboards – our “jumbotrons” I loved playing sports in high school. I learned that teams worked well together on a common goal – winning the game – when we could all track our successes and failures in real time. It just took some time for me to understand how I could apply […]
(Why a Piece of Garbage Tells a Story) Full disclosure: I generally try to stay out of the way when it comes to hiring, because I’m not that good at interviewing people. I consider myself a good judge of character, but for the nuts-and-bolts of an interview process, I tend to step aside. Our leadership […]