Close to the Customer, Close to the Employee

U.S. Lawns has been helping franchisees build sustainable and profitable businesses for over 30 years. With a brand vision of 100% customer retention and a focus on positive experiences and overall satisfaction, customers come back again and again.

To better accomplish this vision, we rely on our brand’s mantra of “close to the customer and close to the employee”. Experience tells us the best way to develop long lasting relationships with customers is twofold: by staying close to the customer through excellent customer service and by staying close to the employee through development and by being an employer of choice.

Close to the Customer

Through relationship building and a service mentality the franchise owner works to create positive customer experiences by focusing on service quality and value. Proactive and regular communication helps the business to consistently exceed customer expectations and build long-standing trust.  By looking at the property through the customer’s eyes and understanding their needs and long-term goals the franchise owner is also well positioned to identify enhancement opportunities that help the customer reach those goals and provides additional revenue opportunities for the business.

Close to the Employee

It should go without saying that keeping crew members happy, safe and productive is critical to the success of your business. This is not only clear in your bottom-line, it’s clear in your organizational health. When you take care of your employees, they in turn take care of your clients. When you take care of your clients, they renew their contracts, offer enhancement opportunities and even refer you to new business. This all starts with hiring the right employees, training them properly to be consistent and efficient, and by creating opportunities for growth. Ensuring safety, seeing that equipment is well maintained, and creating a positive and growth-oriented work culture all contribute to being an employer of choice.

Growth Happens

Franchise owners who follow these principals closely and are successful in building strong, lasting relationships with their customers and staff. Then, as their businesses grow, they begin to find it difficult to juggle the number of relationships that grow along with it. While this is undoubtedly a good problem to have, it can also strain the business and prevent the franchisee from taking the next step toward sustainability. For that reason U.S. Lawns has put together all of the tools necessary to fill a key role in your business: the account manager. With time, the account manager will become an extension of you, the owner. They will take on many of those key relationship oriented responsibilities and allow you to take a step up to focus on other, big picture relationships and tasks.

Account Management 101

From job description templates to attract quality candidates, to onboarding tools to integrate them into your team and get them started off on the right foot, U.S. Lawns has created comprehensive resources and training programs to help you find, train and grow the right person for the role and responsibilities of the account manager.

Through our proprietary 12-week development plan account managers will learn how to effectively manage customer and employee relationships. They will learn things like proper job sequencing techniques, how to efficiently manage a labor budget and how to onboard and train new members for their crews. They will learn how to price and sell enhancement work and, in turn, create high margin revenue opportunities for your business. They will learn to become key members of your team as you grow toward a level sustainability that removes you from the responsibilities of your day to day operation and create the lifestyle flexibility that comes with being your own boss.

This is how U.S. Lawns makes a commitment to 100% franchisee satisfaction. This is also how you can build a business that makes a commitment to 100% customer retention. By leveraging simple systems of standardized procedures that yield consistency of product and efficiency of process. By leveraging training programs, processes and resources that allow you to replicate your results through successful team building. By building trust and loyalty by simply doing what you say you will do when you say you will do it.

If all of this resonates with you, you might have a cultural backbone that will fit well within our organization. Click here to start a conversation today.