Executive Director message

It certainly does not need to be said, but I’ll bet you would agree: good riddance to 2020! While spending more quality time with family was a blessing, it’s time to a return to normalcy in our lives.

As a professional association for the landscape industry, we’ve made significant changes to our

“educate” mission, and except for the wildly successful October Sporting Clays tournament (see the photos on page 6), all other 2020 events and even those through early 2021 are virtual. 4

Landscape Pro University on January 27 offers nine separate educational tracks, all offered “live” in a virtual setting. Please look for more information about LPU on pages 30-31.

Three virtual Lunch + Learns are on the calendar for January 13, February 17 and March 17: “Business Planning for Financial Growth.”

Unfortunately, the pressures from Covid-19 restrictions have dealt a blow to the 2021

entries and judging plans, so we will postpone the GALA entries and judging, moving this to 2022. Please look for new information for submission of these awards on our website – and start taking photos now!

We still plan (keeping fingers crossed) to hold a UAC dinner “Spring Kick-Off” at Piedmont Park’s Magnolia Hall on March 23 and follow this with the always popular April 17 dinner at Topiary Courtyard. Let’s all hope that we’ll be able to meet in person on those dates.

On the horizon of a whole new year, many landscape business owners say that they will use what they have learned in 2020 to move forward with cautious optimism. Brian Horn, editor of Lawn & Landscape magazine, prefaced their annual “State of the Industry” report with this:

“While uncertainty surrounds the industry due to COVID-19, the numbers from 2019 show the industry was healthy before the pandemic. After three consecutive years of median revenue decreasing, it grew to $297,000 compared to $273,000 in 2018. This is a good sign for the industry, although mean revenue decreased to $1.3 million from $1.5 in 2018, meaning the smaller and larger companies – the outliers – saw a slight decrease. Contractors’ outlook for their companies is still positive, but those numbers did see a slight decrease. About 94% of landscapers were confident their companies would grow in last year’s survey, and this year it dropped to 88%. Last year 6% were “not confident at all” that their company would grow, and this year that number jumped to 11%. Labor once again remains the top concern but decreased from 6.9 out of 1-10 (10 means very concerned) scale in 2018 to 6.5 in 2019. COVID-19 was listed as a concern option this year and it tied for 7th out of 27 in our rankings with a 5.5 score.”

We wish you a highly successful 2021 and will do everything we can to support our members and our industry as we advocate, educate and promote Georgia’s professional green industry. Please do not hesitate to reach out to us at any time!

Mary Kay Woodworth Executive Director