This week we are hosting one of our first account manager training seminars with all branch account management teams represented in Raleigh, NC.
We value our customers, our employees, and the landscapes we manage. This 2-day training with Robert Clinkenbeard will set the tone for a successful year of landscape management!
Check out Bland Landscaping President Kurt Bland’s notes on the first seminar below.
Day One of Bland Landscaping Company 2024 Annual Account Manager Training was a tremendous success. Thirty four management team members from across North Carolina gathered at Carolina Country Club – Raleigh for a day of facilitated learning led by our friend and coach, Robert Clinkenbeard.
At lunch we had round table discussions about Dale Carnegie’s timeless manuscript “How to Win Friends and Infleuence People”. Reed Thorndyke’s table earned bragging rights for the best verbal presentation shared with the group following their lunch discussion.
Following the afternoon session, we were joined by some of our good friends from Foster Lake & Pond Management, Inc. and they took us on a field trip to a nearby SCM (stormwater control measure). Mitchell, Ryan, David, and Brandon led a field discussion about SCM maintenance and repair, and explained how our teams can better work together to improve water quality and meet the compliance needs of our clientele.
After an informative field trip we returned to the club and enjoyed a cocktail hour of networking and fellowship. The crowd livened up, and as we sat down for supper the voices climbed to the point that the entire dining room was filled with laughter, camaraderie, and the sounds of people behaving like the social animals we are wired to be.
It felt good to watch, and even better to participate. I had to pinch myself, because this is the single largest gathering of managers for a training and team building event like this in the nearly five decades we’ve been in business. It is a milestone, and it took a ton of effort to pull it off, but it’s worth every ounce of energy that has gone into this journey so far. Joe reminded me during the planning of this event that when he took over as VP in 2012, he had three Account Managers to manage. Today, Joe is General Manager and we’ve been through hell and half of Georgia since then, but standing there looking at a room of nearly fifty managers who all do sales and customer service brought tears of joy to my eyes as I thought about what it’s taken to get here.
I often times have people ask me, or even more frequently say behind my back “What are you/they trying to do over there at Bland and why are they trying to grow so much?”
Years ago, Matt and I came up with a business plan that would allow us to determine our fate rather than have it written for us. Faced with the choice of scaling for market dominance or succumbing to the threats of commoditization and irrelevance in a rapidly changing industry, we chose to scale and we did it with the goal of creating unprecedented opportunities for ourselves and those people who believed in us enough to be along for the ride. It hasn’t been an easy ride whatsoever, but by damn I love it!
Last year, we crushed our 50-50-50 plan two years ahead of schedule. Today, I shared our 50+50=100 plan for the first time in a group setting, and I am psyched about all of the advancement opportunities we are going to create…
—Kurt Bland, President, Bland Landscaping
