How often do you have your business grounds maintained? Most businesses will have regular and effective maintenance in place for their buildings and equipment, along with regular cleaning services to make sure everything is clean and looks polished and professional. So why wouldn’t you do the same for your grounds? To show you that grounds maintenance is just as important as your building’s maintenance and cleaning, we have a few things for you to think about.
First Impressions Really Do Count
If you were to visit another business and the first thing you saw was dying trees, leaves covering the ground, grass poking through the paving slabs, and long, scraggly grass that hasn’t been cut in months? It would probably make you think the business doesn’t care about their environment, and it might even make you question how much effort they put into their work – if they can’t put in the effort to maintain their business premises.
We know the phrase ‘first impressions matter’ gets thrown around a lot, but when it comes to the business world it holds true every time. Often, your grounds are the first thing your customers and visitors will see as they approach your building, and you want them to leave a good impression. That means having your car park cleaned, grass cut, hedges and trees trimmed, and a general tidy up around the grounds. Regular grounds maintenance ensures your outdoor areas are always looking their best, so that you can make the very best impression possible.
Safety
As a business owner, you are responsible for the health and safety of everyone who comes to your site, from full-time employees to one-time visitors. That makes safety the single most important reason for having regular grounds maintenance carried out. Maintenance work includes making sure there is nothing in your external grounds that customers or employees could injure themselves on. That includes everything from rubbish lying around, slippery leaves or hidden dips in grass. By having regular grounds work carried out, you can make sure you don’t need to worry about the safety of your staff and visitors, and have proof that you have made every effort to ensure that safe environment.
Improve Productivity
This is one of the benefits a lot of business owners don’t think about, but having good, consistent grounds maintenance in place can actually improve the productivity of your employees, and ultimately the profitability of your business. There have been a lot of different studies over the years showing the impact your physical environment can have on your emotions, with everything from the lighting and music to plants and greenery playing its part. There’s even a study from the University of Warwick showcasing the link between employee happiness and their performance levels. And since a pleasant environment improves employee happiness, and happy employees means more productive employees, creating an attractive and well-designed outdoor environment to work in might be more important to your business than you thought!
Cost Effective
And finally, while it might seem like the more expensive option, having regular grounds maintenance visits is actually more cost effective for your business than some of the other options. Think of it this way – if you don’t have any regular maintenance done, the only way you’re going to know something is wrong with your grounds is when something breaks, or is in dire need of attention. That could be anything from branches coming down in high winds to overgrown hedges causing damage to visitors cars. At that stage, you need to call in specialists to fix the problem, and it usually needs pretty quick attention. This will end up costing you a lot more to fix, and could do some damage to your reputation (or even cause your business to close down for a few days). But if you have regular grounds maintenance done, we can spot these things long before they become a problem, and either alert you to the issue or fix it ourselves, so you never end up with that big, expensive problem.
At Pod Landscapes, we specialise in all areas of grounds maintenance for commercial premises. Our team of experts can put together a maintenance plan that fits your business and your budget, so that you can have immaculate looking grounds all year round. If you would like to find out more, just get in touch with the team today for your free, no-strings attached consultation.
