Mr. Brickman

Architecture & Design

Landscaping for a National Chain: What You Need to Know

By Scott B. Brickman, CEO, Brickman

When selecting a landscape maintenance firm for your national chain, it's important to find a provider who can partner with you, not only to deliver consistent, quality service, but to understand the overall goals of your organization and will help create that all important first impression in a manner that is consistent with your brand.

Savvy hotel executives understand the power of creating powerful brands as a way of building and sustaining guest loyalty. After all, a hotel's brand strategy should influence all aspects of a guest's experience from the time they arrive at your property until the time they leave.

But sometimes overlooked in a hotel's brand strategy is the importance of creating a fresh and inviting landscape that reinforces the hotel's identity. This is particularly relevant to national hotel chains since delivering a consistent brand experience is critical to generating repeat customers across multiple geographic markets.

So, how as a hotel executive, can you align your brand strategy with your landscape maintenance strategy to deliver a consistent guest experience among your different properties? Part of the answer is selecting a landscape maintenance provider with the expertise, resources and geographic reach to continuously deliver on your brand promise to your guests.

Whether you are considering a geographic expansion for your hotel chain or thinking about ways to consolidate your landscaping to create a single, unified brand experience, here are some thoughts to consider:

Past Performance - Previous work is often the best indicator of a firm's ability to achieve future success. In selecting a landscape maintenance provider for your national chain, it is important to consider if the contractor has successfully delivered high quality landscape maintenance services for hotel chains of similar size and geographic distribution to yours.

During your due diligence of prospective contractors, ask for examples of previous jobs of similar size and scope to yours. Pictures, case studies and client references will all offer critical evidence about the firm's ability to successfully implement a high quality landscape maintenance program for your multiple properties.

Expertise -Creating a dynamic landscape that communicates your brand experience to guests requires a combination of expertise. The best landscape maintenance providers keep skilled designers, arborists, horticulturalists and other professionals on staff to ensure that clients receive premium counsel and high quality service.

This expertise is an important differentiator between large national landscape maintenance providers and regional ones. Large national landscape maintenance providers are better able to absorb the cost of highly skilled designers, arborists, horticulturalists and other top landscape maintenance professionals and can therefore provide access to the industry's best and brightest. In evaluating potential contractors, ask about the expertise of the team and its ability to "matrix-in" experts when critical decisions about your landscape need to be made.

Geographic Reach - Large, national landscape maintenance providers are often in the best position to support hotel chains due to broad geographic reach. Firms with multiple branch offices are best suited to deliver localized support for your hotel property while still benefiting from the resources of its other locations.

This point is particularly important for hotel executives in thinking about how best to manage the recovery of your properties in the wake of natural disasters when local resources are stretched beyond capacity.

Large national landscape maintenance providers have a proven ability to marshal resources and equipment from other regions and quickly mobilize them when clients need them most. During your discussions with potential contractors, ask about geographic reach and their ability to mobilize resources and equipment from other regions. Additionally, talk about plans for disaster recovery and for examples of how the company has responded to landscape emergencies in the past.

Quality Management and Consistency - Perhaps most critical to the analysis of landscape as an extension of a hotel's brand is a firm's ability to deliver consistent results. Top national landscape maintenance providers understand the importance of consistency and have created quality management processes that achieve repeatable outcomes.

Total Quality Management (TQM), for example, allows national landscape maintenance providers to implement repeatable practices that can be continuously measured and improved. Over time, these processes eliminate defects and result in a series of consistently fresh and well manicured properties.

For hotel executives, effective quality management practices mean that that the knowledge and skill applied to the maintenance of one of your properties becomes transferable to your other properties. For your guests, it will mean that different properties will have similar characteristics that will reinforce your brand.

One-Stop Shopping - Busy hotel executives recognize the challenges of managing multiple contractors. Multiple invoices, different account executives and varied time zones can reduce operational efficiency and create unnecessary costs. Additionally, managing multiple contractors is challenging because some may have different contract lengths than others or require different payment methods - all of which can create big headaches for your finance and accounting department.

In contrast, by using a single landscape maintenance provider, national hotel chains can consolidate the management of contractors while creating greater operational efficiencies within their own organizations. Depending on which services it offers, the contractor may also be able to provide one-stop-shopping for additional services like snow and ice management in the winter months.

Organizational Culture - In evaluating potential landscape maintenance providers, one key area of consideration is how the contractor's brand can compliment your own. Beyond a logo and a tagline, a brand represents organizational culture and a commitment to client service that is built and sustained over time. If your contractor has organizational values similar to your own, there is a strong likelihood that the relationship with be long and meaningful.

While there is no standard way to measure a firm's organizational culture, there are some key things to consider. Longevity is typically a great way to determine a firm's ability to create a strong organizational culture. Simply put, people enjoy working in environments where there is a shared set of values and will typically remain with these companies for long periods. When looking at potential contractors, consider how long the firm has been around and its employee's length of service.

Another measure of a firm's organizational culture is its commitment to corporate philanthropy. Many hotel chains understand the value of giving back to the communities that they serve and should look to like-minded landscape maintenance providers. If a firm is making a positive impact in the world and accepts social responsibilities, there is a strong likelihood that it will be a great ambassador of your brand.

Implemented correctly across multiple properties, a fresh and vibrant landscape is a powerful extension of your brand and will add value to your overall guest experience. Maintaining your brand consistency starts with selecting a landscape maintenance partner that understands your needs and has the skill and resources to support you on a national level.

Scott Brickman is CEO of Brickman, the largest commercial landscape maintenance firm in the U.S. Brickman provides landscape maintenance and snow removal services to a wide variety of hospitality and hotel clients across the country. Mr. Brickman joined the Company in 1986 and in 1998 became a Director of the Company and was appointed Chief Executive Officer. His tenure with the company includes serving as a project director and a regional manager, and prior to 1998 he had responsibility for the Company's Northeast, Mid-Atlantic and Southeast operations. Mr. Brickman can be contacted at 301-987-9200 or scottb@brickmangroup.com Extended Bio...

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