Ignite Day One Highlights and Recaps

Beyond the Paycheck: Smart Ways to Motivate Your Crews

Key insights from Aspire's Ignite conference on building high-performance teams through effective motivation and leadership.

Understanding Your Organization

A successful organization is really a team of teams working towards a common goal. Whether you're a company manufacturing products or maintaining beautiful landscapes, this principle remains constant. Incentives are powerful tools for boosting productivity, and they extend far beyond just money to include recognition, growth opportunities, and purpose.

The Reality of Rolling Out Incentives

“Incentives are hard to implement. When rolling out the first production operational bonus program, it took about 18 months to get it right,” says Seth Pflum, President & COO of Grunder Landscaping. The first commission plans also required 18 months to properly develop. You have to weigh all the different options and ensure the financials work.

The key is balancing intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation:

• Intrinsic motivation comes from within, seeing team success, personal growth, and being part of something meaningful

• Extrinsic motivation includes external factors like earning money, receiving recognition, and avoiding negative consequences

Aligning Incentives with Growth

When designing incentive programs, start by understanding your team's current standing from both intrinsic and extrinsic perspectives, then determine where you want to go. Align incentives with personal values while supporting your growth objectives.

For growth-focused companies, Pflum explains, "We want someone who intrinsically likes to be working. They like to see success. They want to be part of a team that's growing and growing. But they're also motivated by money. So how do you balance all that to create a program? We're still trying to figure it out."

Creating Ownership and Purpose

Effective programs create a sense of ownership and purpose. "We're on a big growth plan," says Pflum. "So commissions are tied to gross profits of contracts and projects. And then on the production side, it's tied to hours of dues and bills and indirect costs."

Types of Effective Incentives

Financial Rewards:

• Commissions are truly earned (like salary without a contract)

• Bonuses are discretionary rewards for hitting specific objectives

• Team-based bonuses when entire teams reach collective goals

Recognition Programs:

• Shout-outs for behaviors that drive success

• Handwritten notes 

• Public acknowledgment of achievements

Career Development:

• Clear advancement opportunities

• Skills training and growth paths

• Leadership development programs

Non-Monetary Perks:

• Flexible schedules

• Extra PTO for top performers

• Special privileges for high achievers

Designing Effective Programs

Keep it simple. Team members should easily understand:

• What they're doing to affect their own bonus

• What they're doing to affect the team bonus

• How their efforts connect to company objectives

Tie incentives directly to organizational goals. If your goal is profitable growth, ensure every incentive program supports that objective. For example, requiring the completion of specific billable hours while maintaining quality standards and staying within budget.

The Team Approach

The most successful programs encourage collaboration between sales and production teams. Sales commissions tied to gross profit motivate sellers to work with operations managers, while production bonuses tied to efficient hour utilization encourage quality work that stays on budget.

When both teams understand how their success interconnects, they naturally collaborate to ensure projects are profitable, completed efficiently, and meet quality standards.

Implementation Challenges

Success requires keeping programs simple and clearly communicating how individual actions impact both personal and team rewards. Take time to explain and articulate the program so team members can accept and embrace the changes.

Remember: it's not just about money. Recognition, growth opportunities, and creating a sense of purpose are equally important in building a motivated, high-performing landscape team.

Seth Pflum, President & COO, Grunder Landscaping 

Effectiveness Before Efficiency: Why Doing the Right Things Matters More Than Doing Things Right

The Hidden Cost of Doing Things Right

"There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all," says Mark Pyrah, President and Director of Client Care at PEAK Landscape. This powerful principle cuts to the heart of a critical business challenge: 

Are we doing the right things first, or just doing things right?

Too often, landscape companies find themselves trapped in cycles of efficient ineffectiveness—working incredibly hard on tasks that don't move the needle, optimizing processes that shouldn't exist, and sacrificing long-term success for short-term urgency.

The Efficiency Trap

Many landscape teams fall into common patterns that feel productive but lack real impact:

• Working hard on the wrong priorities while critical issues go unaddressed

• Optimizing processes that weren't worth keeping in the first place

• Reacting to urgent demands instead of being proactive about what matters most

• Focusing on individual efficiency rather than overall system effectiveness

Real-World Impact: When Efficiency Isn't Enough

Consider a maintenance crew that efficiently follows its established route, completing all tasks on schedule. Everything appears to be running smoothly—until the property manager calls with complaints about areas that look neglected.

The crew was being efficient, completing their work in the same sequence every time. But they weren't being effective because they failed to prioritize the most visible areas that directly impact client satisfaction. They were doing things right, but not doing the right things first.

This scenario plays out across the industry: irrigation technicians who check for broken heads but miss coverage issues, teams who follow procedures without considering strategic impact, and operations that measure activity rather than outcomes.

Building the Foundation for Effectiveness

True effectiveness starts with establishing the right foundation—what Pyrah calls "root before shoot." Just as a tree needs strong roots before it can support healthy growth, your operations need solid foundational systems before they can scale successfully.

The Four Pillars of Effective Operations:

1. Alignment on Strategy, Purpose, and Scope

   • Establish what truly matters most at any given time

   • Ensure everyone understands the primary objective

2. Clear Goals and Responsibilities

   • Define who owns what from start to finish

   • Eliminate overlaps and gaps in accountability

3. Continuous Feedback and Adaptation

   • Treat processes as living documents, not set-in-stone procedures

   • Regularly assess and adjust based on results

4. Clear, Ordered, and Repeatable Systems

   • Document step-by-step instructions for consistent execution

   • Ensure tasks are performed safely and to established standards

The Power of Focus

"People who try to push many goals at once usually wind up doing a mediocre job in all of them," Pyrah notes, citing The 4 Disciplines of Execution. "You can ignore the principle of focus, but it won't ignore you."

The most successful landscape companies understand that there has to be one goal that's more important than anything else at any given time. Like air traffic control managing multiple aircraft, you must identify which "plane" needs to land first before directing attention to others.

Identifying High-Impact Performance Drivers

Before optimizing any process, evaluate it through these strategic lenses:

• Strategic Impact: Does it directly advance your key business objectives?

• Customer Value: Does it improve the client's experience or measurable results?

• Measurability: Can you track success with clear, actionable metrics?

• Implementation Ease: How quickly and smoothly can this be executed?

Use this framework to filter every initiative before investing time and resources in optimization.

The Decision Matrix Approach

Create an effectiveness decision matrix that categorizes initiatives by effort required and impact delivered:

• Low Effort, High Impact: Priority initiatives that deliver maximum return

• High Effort, High Impact: Strategic investments worth the resource commitment

• Low Effort, Low Impact: Activities to minimize or eliminate

• High Effort, Low Impact: Projects to avoid entirely

This systematic approach ensures your team focuses energy on activities that truly move your business forward.

From Reactive to Proactive

The shift from efficiency to effectiveness requires moving from reactive problem-solving to proactive strategic thinking. Instead of asking "How can we do this faster?" start with "Should we be doing this at all?"

When alignment exists across your organization—from executive leadership to field crews—you create the conditions for sustainable growth and exceptional performance. Without alignment, even the most efficient teams will struggle to deliver meaningful results.

Implementation Strategy

Start by asking these fundamental questions about any process or initiative:

• What is truly the most important objective right now?

• Who is this process serving and under what conditions?

• What is the desired end result we're trying to achieve?

• How will we measure success with leading indicators, not just lag measures?

The landscape industry demands both efficiency and effectiveness, but effectiveness must come first. By ensuring your team is hyper-focused on what truly matters, you set the stage for sustainable performance improvement and lasting competitive advantage.