2007 was the year when the few big contractors got even bigger and the many small ones became so many more. Of all landscape contractors in Sweden only 10% have more than 10 employees and the real stronghold of the business are the many one- and two men businesses. It is also there that the growing power is strongest, at the real small and the real big contractors. The traditional, well-established medium-sized landscapers have really difficult to compete on maintenance, but on hard landscaping they still retain the number 1 position in the country.

Especially profitable today are the smaller ?hard landscaping? jobs, in the range of 10000 ? 200000 ?. 2007 was also the year when more general contractors sought to subcontract more work, especially when it comes to continous maintenance tasks on public green spaces, i e mowing the lawns, empyting paper baskets and other tasks with a high manual labor factor. At the same time we have noticed an increasing number of firms having access to ?cheap labor?, partly from abroad and partly of domestic origin. Cheap labor for maintenance works now run for 11-15 ? per hour excluding VAT when bought from these cheap firms. The average landscape contractor normally sells this kind of work for around 20 ? per hour.

Among the public authorities, the resistance against outsourcing grounds maintenance is becoming less and less, partly due to that they want to retain only such work themselves that have an external market price of about the same size as their own self-cost. Another reason is off course that the politicians feel much stronger for education, social care and other publicly financed departments, compared to public green spaces and that maintenance and other facility services often contain a high degree of variable costs making it attractive as to bring quick results in the budget.

Those cities and municipalities who have the most part of their own staff doing qualified maintenance and special hard landscaping instead of doing just about everything themselves might be seen as the 300-club-strategists here. Where the market price is low and competition strong, they outsource the work, mostly for 3-5 years and it is only the large corporations and facility management companies who stand an actual chance to take on the big, public contracts.

Generally these general-contractors will then retain between 1/3 and 2/3 of the workload in their own operations and subcontract between 1/3 and 2/3. The cheaper the price tag is, the more will be subcontracted. Best value is always used for evaluation and the mix could be around 60% price, 15% quality and experiences, 15% organization and capacities and 10% environmental questions.

So how will it be 2009? What can we in Sweden expect for this upcoming season 2009?

Leadership

Let us start with the leadership issues. We face more and more difficulties when trying to recruit qualified and experienced field-supervisors and team- leaders, especially those who can lead the work in the field, find new jobs and be responsible client-managers, with a good eye for costs and profit as well.

A well-performing team leader is gold worth today and must both be paid good money and be treated right if they shall remain in our service. Therefore it is essential that we develop better systems for leader development and leader-recruitment to secure access to future team leaders and client-managers. Maybe, we should do as many other industries and start our own trainee-program in a small and down-sized version

Tailor made solutions to fulfill customer demands

A competent and flexible leadership is the basis if we want to be able to cope with changing customer demands and a clear tendency today 2008 is that more and more customers have complex demands of quite a unique character in both grounds maintenance and hard landscaping. The customer seeks total solutions.

Many landscapers are not well-equipped to deal with facility management demands and cannot offer all services that the customer demands. Neither do they have an extensive networking or partnership with other property services contractors that can go in and fill up the gap that they self cannot fill up.

It is vital for our industry to look carefully on genuine customer demands and be the ones that can deliver complete solutions on our own, with subcontractors or within a ring of a network. It is also worth to note that many times we think that we know what the customer wants but it is actually a mix of wishes and demands and often put all in a pot where it is difficult to separate from each other and to deduct priority and validity of those so called customer demands.

Marketing for the future

During the latter part of 2007 I was in charge of an extensive educational program for Farmer services Ltd and the Machine rings around Sweden, on behalf of the Swedish Agricultural Association. One question that we dealt with was how to gain the customer. And the answer was off course that the landscape industry is no mail-order business and that our two main alternatives are to wait for the customer to come to us or to go out there and find him ourselves. This is a business selling on relations and trust, quite different from buying a new car or other large products. Buying a service, you cannot evaluate it before you have a certain experience of how the services are performed and what the service-provider are like and that take a long time. Much longer time then when you buy a new car.

Waiting passively means spending a lot of time calculating on jobs where there is a lot of competition and where there is a good chance that someone else gets the job instead of you.

Every serious tender from potential customers should off course be subject to our attention and receive an appropriate amount of effort in relation to what we expect to get out of it, i e our chances and the value of a potential order. But many times contractors spend way too much time calculating or writing offers compared to the time he actually goes out and visit prospects and customers. By actively trying to acquire work we often get less competition and work that more fits into our schedule, organization etc. I am not saying that grounds maintenance and hard landscaping should be sold as vacuum-cleaners or tupperware through home-parties or door-to-door sales but paying more attention to customers and actively do some old fashioned relation-selling might often do the trick in today competitive business.

We are off course talking about private sector work. For public tenders it is quite a different thing, though a close relation and a serious approach to customer care will take the contractor a long way if prices and quality matches.

The more active selling we do in this business, the more important it is for us to know who our key-account customers really are. Those that give the highest turnover and / or profit, who are they and what do you as a contractor do for them? It is necessary to guard the key-accounts and protect them from being snatched by the competitors. Here it is vital to develop and maintain a customer-care-program that is tailor made for the unique situation of the individual company.

Garden machinery

On the machine side we clearly see how productivity and running safety are becoming more central argument in the marketing as price pressure, increasing hour usage and expanding outsourcing of grounds maintenance to smaller subcontractors with a cowboy kind of character. When marketing new machines, especially zero-turn mowers, productivity is often exaggerated and put in front of other arguments to such an extent that the user himself and user advantages plays a clearly reduced role. Other important sales arguments today are quality of the materials, performance, long lifetime etc, also around the machine itself and not around the user. We should like to point out that it is essential that the user of the machine is not forgotten in all this productivity hunt. The value of ergonomy, comfort and enjoyment must play a central part as long as we care for those who actually does the job on the sites and wants to keep a high profile on the status of working in the green field. That is a key factor when trying to recruit competent, young people today and tomorrow.

Competence and resources

It is overwhelmingly how many of the small contractors, the cowboys, who actually have a qualified education and a broad experience from different fields, making them true professionals. I have personally educated more than a hundred farmers this last autumn and I am amazed how many of them who actually are fully fit for qualified maintenance work and even hard landscaping. The farmers have two different organizations in Sweden, the Farmartj?nst and the Machine rings and all in all they have a turnover of about 70 million ?, of which maybe 10-15% is grounds maintenance and landscaping, but they increase the turnover in our business with like 20% per annum.

The explanation is off course that they are often hired as sub-contractors to the larger firms, like facility management companies etc. What these smaller contractors do not do correctly is the marketing of their services, I e they do not show the competence and their resources enough so the market does not value their services to the full extent, but sees them more of an extra resource. It is essential in 2008 that the customer easily and fully can understand the competence and resources a contractor has available. It is easiest done by using a computer based competence-and resource-databank with CVs for managers, team leaders and specialists, pictures and data of all vital machinery and vehicles etc.

Another crucial factor this year is to create