Today’s landscaping students are tomorrow’s Green Industry leaders. Attracting great people to the field and continuing to keep it thriving is reliant upon efforts to support those students. That is a key reason why the National Association of Landscape Professionals (NALP) Foundation has been awarding scholarships to worthy students over the years. In fact, since the Foundation’s inception, it has awarded more than $1 million in scholarships.
GROW! is a three-day immersive and educational event for Green Industry professionals being held from February 19 - 21, 2018 in Tampa, Florida. Led by award-winning entrepreneur, Marty Grunder, the GROW! event offers unique education with inspiring speakers. This year, there will be a behind-the-scenes tour of Ameriscape Services, a premier provider of commercial maintenance. You’ll get an in-depth look at how this successful company runs and have to chance to learn from what’s worked—and also what hasn’t worked—for them.
Finding a software company that is continually looking to improve and update its landscape business management software product is important. After all, a company that is continually improving its product and its processes, is a company that cares about its users truly getting the most out of what it has to offer.
Landscape company software is a big investment and landscape professionals expect it to continue to be relevant for many years to come. That’s why it’s important for landscape companies to align with a software company that is not becoming stagnant over time. Find a company that is continually evolving.
Each year, thousands of landscaping professionals attend the Green Industry Expo (GIE) and NALP's Landscapes in Louisville, KY to learn about new products, equipment, and strategies to improve their businesses. The team at Include Software has been attending this event for a number of years and would love to connect with you!
A few weeks ago, our team at Include Software traveled to Louisville, Kentucky to take part in the green industry’s GIE + Expo. We got to meet a lot of great people and we learned what you, our customers, want to know about our product.
In the Dark
Do you remember the intense thunderstorm that hit Louisville on the first day of the show? Half of the trade show floor was in the dark. Our half.
Marty Grunder and his team did another spectacular job hosting Grow! 2016. The theme this year: Go Big or Go Home. Location: Dallas, Texas. (Get it – everything is bigger in Texas, right?!) And, indeed, we went big! Big ideas, big lessons learned, big networking, big time motivation.
Marty challenges all attendees periodically throughout the conference, “What have we learned?”. For Grow! 2016, here are a handful of tidbits that I picked up over the course of the three day conference:
Sales JAM 2015 took a different course this year. Instead of visiting a “famous landscape” or “garden” as we have done in the past, this year we headed south to Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Like many who are reading this, you are probably asking yourself the same thing I did, what in the heck and where in the heck is Muscle Shoals, AL and why had Jim picked this place to go?
NALP’s Renewal & Remembrance — A Family Day
Though I’ve participated in NALP’s Renewal & Remembrance for many years, this year was especially memorable for me as I brought my 5 year old daughter along. Like many 5 year olds, she is full of questions, and about a week prior to the event, we started to discuss what we would be doing at Arlington National Cemetery. The physical work was easy for her to understand; her mom is a horticulturist! Flower arrangements, planting annuals, ‘landscape work’ – she’s well versed in that. A tougher process was helping her to understand WHY we were doing this work.
NALP’s 2015 Renewal & Remembrance Event
More than 400 volunteers spent Monday morning, July 21st on the grounds of Arlington National Cemetery. Most of them are professional landscapers representing 100 companies from 30 states. Include Software volunteers helped with the Children’s Garden. Fifty children ages 3-13 also planted perennial flowers on the cemetery grounds in the morning. During Renewal & Remembrance, volunteers tended to 200-plus acres of the cemetery’s 624 acres. Volunteers mulched, pruned, aerated, and applied lime and gypsum to the grounds. Approximately 80 tons of lime will be applied to 182 acres of turf by the end of the day.
