From Where I Stand — Time keeps on slippin’, slippin’, slippin’ Into the future - Fly like an Eagle, The Steve Miller Band
If you were born before 1985, the year 2020 sounded like the future. That wasn’t the first year that sounded like the future. In 2000, we embraced tomorrow. We all partied like it was 1999, bought silly glasses in the shape of 2000, and hoped the world’s nuclear arsenals wouldn’t launch the moment the clock struck midnight. Next came 2010. That year was more subdued as the country had just been plunged into a recession. That funk caused us all to forget about flying cars and consuming food pellets. Well, now 2020 is here, the future is nigh. ILCA recently held its annual Board and Committee Chair Summit this past December. Each year, we gather the entire Board of Directors, staff, and the Chairs and Associate Chairs from our 19 standing committees. In the end, we usually have a room full of 50 of ILCA’s most dedicated and forward thinking members. The Summit this year used the theme of external challenges facing the landscape industry. We asked committee members to come prepared outside of the typical complaints of “labor and weather.” We wanted a deeper dive into what keeps our members up at night and what concerns they have as we round the bend towards the next landscape season. We let all Summit attendees know they are not there to solve any problems that day. That is ultimately the Board of Director’s job based on feedback from the Summit. Instead, we want Summit attendees to have the types of dialog that we all love to have; we talk about problems without any interest in solving them. Basically, every social media and barroom argument since the beginning of time. The attendees were broken into six tables that mixed contractors of similar size with a healthy dose of Board members, staff, and suppliers sprinkled-in for nuance. We all asked-and-answered the same questions and then shared the results with the larger group. The final question of the day asked all the attendees to look into the future. At first, we were given 15 minutes to think about what the landscape industry would look like in three years and then 15 more minutes to discuss what it would look like in ten years. The three-year prognostications had less ambiguity and a lot less creativity. They revolved around the question of whether we anticipated a recession or not and how a recession would either eliminate or amplify a brutal labor market. We talked about contractors learning to say “no” to certain size jobs or clients as rising operating expenses will dictate stronger scrutiny. We dabbled a bit talking about the H2B program and robotic mowers and pesticide bans, but for the most part, 2022 felt remarkably like 2019. 2029 was a different story. Whenever we talk about “the future” we have a tendency to get a bit whimsical and farfetched. We talked about self-driving cars, robots and AI, growth regulators, and the magical discovery of the “fourth season” that would make seasonality obsolete. I mean, will we even have landscapes when we are living on the moons of Jupiter?
We even consulted a website called willrobotstakemyjob.com. It is a portal into the 2013 research by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne that examined the likelihood of 702 occupations being replaced by robots. The authors estimated that 47% of American professions are at risk for complete automation. The bad news for landscaping and grounds keeping workers is that those employees have a 95% chance of being automated. The good news for landscape employers is that those employees have a 95% chance of being automated. Landscape architects have a 5% chance. First line supervisors have a 57% chance. Tree trimmers have a 77% chance. Pesticide sprayers have a 97% chance. If Frey and Osborne are proven right, iLandscape 2040 may just be droids bumping into each other and sucking back pints of oil at vendor keg parties. After spending a few minutes conjuring up a scifi utopia somewhere between the Jetsons and Blade Runner, a heavy dose of reality set in. Brandon Losey, the Chair of the Sustainable and Ecological Landscape Committee asked a poignant question, “Looking back, what happened over the past ten years that was the game changer?” Immediately, we felt our tether tighten and we began to get pulled back towards earth. When you look back ten years versus forward, a decade doesn’t seem so long. Flying cars come back to earth in the form of battery-gas hybrids. Robot foremen running robot crews get replaced by human crews running a robotic mower. Clients strapping on virtual reality helmets to do a digital walkthrough gets replaced by 3D visualization software run from a laptop. Progress is made, the industry changes, but squint and 2009 looks a lot like 2019. We never feel like we are living in “the future” even though we are literally and perpetually always one second behind it. Our group at the Summit considered the top five changes to the landscape industry over the past ten years. First, mobile phones have completely changed how we communicate with our clients, colleagues, and coworkers. In 2009, I had a clamshell Motorola Razr with a 1.3 megapixel camera. The iPhone 11 has a duallens camera with a 12MP camera with both a wide angle and ultra wide angle lens. My Razr had 1GB of storage, there is an iPhone 11 version with 256GB of storage Phones can be a distraction, but they have made all of us better and more efficient professionals. Phones have become swiss army knives whether it’s GPS, vehicle tracking, digital timesheets, Google Earth, or the ability to snap a photo of any plant or problem at anytime, anywhere. Second, client demands have changed. Part of this is the popularity of HGTV and the misunderstanding that landscape and construction projects can fall neatly into 60-minute blocks minus commercials. Clients are more demanding and expect service professionals to be available 24 hours per day because those clients are usually accessible to their own employers 24 hours a day. Clients want to see landscapers less (or not at all) and demand more. If landscape contractors are expecting that to change, it’s not going to. In fact, it’s going to keep heading in the other direction. We are probably a few years away from landscape installation jobs being completed without ever speaking to a client in person. Contractors can bemoan the loss of customer service,
Back to the Future
The Landscape Contractor January 2020
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