President’s Message

Aaron Raines 2020 President

During These Difficult Times, Unified Salesmanship Can Help Us Persevere

As green industry professionals, and as global citizens, we are currently facing unprecedented times. We’re experiencing significant disruptions to our working environments and our personal lives, and we have been asked to change our behavior in ways that feel new, foreign, and uncomfortable. But uncomfortable as they may be, we all have an obligation to protect the safety and welfare of those around us by helping to reduce the spread of the virus. This is, of course, important to do not only to protect the vulnerable but also to prevent deleterious effects to the function of our organizations that employ thousands of people across our region.

In both our individual and collective capacities as employers, supervisors, and employees, there are many steps that we can take to ensure health and well-being as we continue to operate through the peak season. Providing PPE such as masks and gloves, implementing social distancing policies, installing handwashing and hand sanitizer stations, and regularly cleaning fleet vehicles as well as shared tools and equipment are just a few of the many protective measures that can be taken. These practices may seem costly, inconvenient, or difficult to enforce, but they are actually within the scope of some of the core tenets of our industry: safety and training. They are of commonplace importance to us, and LCA members embody the utmost degree of industry excellence in our commitment to them. Our active efforts to better ourselves through participation in industry organizations is inherently reflective of this.

So, we have professional and moral obligations to be attentive and fastidious to safety during this widespread public health crisis—but some of you may be worried about the implications of that. After all, these protective measures will have a twofold impact on our operations; they impact profits by necessitating additional purchases and disrupting efficiencies, all while the economy is signaling that additional costs may not be viable. But our longstanding commitment to excellence can actually serve as a method for sustaining our revenue streams and livelihoods in these volatile times.

To achieve this, we need to utilize the characteristics of quality, safety, and professionalism that we embody as a sales tool. This should always be a key marketing strategy in our industry, but it is especially important right now because these matters will be of the utmost importance to our clients. Promoting and emphasizing implemented safety measures will go a long way in attracting potential clients who may be wary of the risks of having work performed at their properties. This can include advertising your COVID-19 response on your website, incorporating these safety measures into your usual advertising methods, and reassuring potential clients at the beginning of the sales process. Once a lead is secured, educate potential clients about these measures in detail and emphasize the importance of safety.

These strategies will help secure sales, but they cannot be a singular effort. Our industry is heavily saturated with unlicensed and unbranded entities, and this creates a stereotypical public image—one that won’t serve to assuage safety concerns. We need a concerted and unified effort to change public perceptions and sell our commitment to these principles. Fortunately, we as LCA members already individually possess the necessary branding to contribute to an industrywide rebrand. We are clean, organized, and hallmarked organizations that