Ep. 492 Reducing Risk in the Landscape Industry Series with Bill Arman: Safety

In the first episode of a special series, Bill Arman, head harvester at Harvest Group Landscape Business Consulting sits down with Rancho Mesa's Drew Garcia and discusses the key ways landscape companies can ensure a safe environment for their customers and team members.

Show Notes: The Harvest Group, ⁠Subscribe to Rancho Mesa's Newsletter⁠

Director/Host: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Drew Garcia⁠⁠⁠

Guest: ⁠⁠Bill Arman⁠

Producer/Editor: ⁠Megan Lockhart⁠

Music: "Home" by JHS Pedals, “Breaking News Intro” by nem0production

© Copyright 2025. Rancho Mesa Insurance Services, Inc. All rights reserved.

Transcript

Drew Garcia: Welcome back everybody. I'm Drew Garcia Vice President and Landscape Group Leader here at Rancho Mesa You're listening to Rancho Mesa's studio one podcast where each week we break down complex insurance and safety topics to help your business thrive and today we've got a treat. I've got a legend in the industry. We're joined today by Harvester Bill Arman, he's co-founder of The Harvest Group, done a lot of great things in this industry, Bill. And today I'm excited because we're going to talk about safety and risk. And I'm going to just let you have the floor and talk to us about how we help create safe work environments within the landscape industry. Thanks for being here.

Bill Arman: Well, thanks so much, Drew. It's a pleasure to be in here with you and Rancho Mesa and great facility, great hospitality. And it was pretty safely arrived. You know, we got here safely. So that was pretty good, right? So I want to talk about, today, a very important subject. Obviously, it's safety. But when you really look at operations, Drew, there's really three fundamental things. And we at The Harvest Group, we like making things pretty simple. So there's really three functions: work safely and provide safe environments for our customers, right? Work efficiently and work effectively. And when I say effectively, effectively deliver quality.

So during my journey in this landscape industry, and I've both been, if you add it together, over 100 years now, which is kind of crazy, right? We've learned a lot, and it's just not from the books and here-say and that it's actual hands-on experience dealing with safety. So today, we're going to talk about safety. We're going to talk about, we have another whole edition, we're going to talk about--another podcast--on security. And then we're going to talk about liability, and then we're going to talk about asset protection. So really looking from the lens of a customer, you know, one of the things that we do provide our customers is we teach them a quality review program or quality assurance process. We call it the quality counts, because quality does count, by the way. So we go out and inspect jobs, and I count weeds and dead plants, Drew, and I have a scoring process and it really gives objective measurements for our team members and what we expect of them. And then it leads us to what training and discipline and everything else we need to do in the performance management system.

So a big part of it is safety. So first lens would be looking at the customer's business and what are the safety issues and potential safety things for people that move into their environment, come into a building or a homeowner association, or even a resident. So these are some of the key things, not everything, but I just want to share with you some of the things that we look for. We'd have a checklist, we'd photo doc, a lot of this stuff, and we even videotape some of these things, right? So let's just kind of go through some of the ones. This is pure safety, right?

So what's going to happen out there slips, trips, and falls, right? Those are the very first things we look for. What's out there that you can slip on, trip on or fall over, right? So not only from our own employees, but for their customers and our customer, right? So debris on sidewalks, people walk on sidewalks, hopefully most of the time, right? And if there's leaves and debris and something that we leave a branch or something they can trip over, you know, we want to make sure that's removed. I've had lots of issues

with that. And when I say issues, that's, it's called legal going to court on some of these and having interrogatories and interviews. And if you ever have not had an interrogatory with an attorney or a bank of attorneys, I wish you don't ever have to do that. It's not very fun. And some of these are a result of slips, trips, and falls. So let's look at raised hardscape. We see hardscape where trees lift up the concrete on the sidewalk. And that's a great trip opportunity. These are all things that you need to bring the attention of your customer. So we look for those, right? So we're looking for the slips, trips, and falls.

Water, water really enters this a great deal. You know, if you have leaky valves, this is for maintenance people, even construction, you know, when they install landscaping and irrigation, water is coming across the sidewalk. If it's been there a long time, there's algae on there, it becomes very slippery. So that's, that is really a hazard. And so you really need to take immediate action on when you have leaks or any water going anywhere.

The other things that we look at, we look at stumps. You know, we take a tree out. Just take a tree out of a turf area, and if you stump grind it, there's a depression there. And people sometimes walk across the turf, and your guys are mowing the lawn. If you're a maintenance person, in Southern California, you mow the lawn 48 times a year. We've had some serious issues-- lower, soft back tissue injuries with employees that step incorrectly into a recession, depression. Recession's what we're just coming through, right? So the stump removal, so that even the stump itself, if you leave, I call them antlers, you leave a little stump on top, people can trip over those. So these are examples of some good things to document when you're on a job site.

A couple other ones, pruning clearance. So you're riding your bicycle with your son on your backpack. Is there enough clearance from the tree level up? You know, it's usually eight to 10 feet. You want to have clearance. Goodness, forget you don't want to be running into a tree with your kid. That’d be pretty serious stuff, right? We look at other things like guy wires. Guy wire is a device that holds the tree in the ground until the roots establish. And if you don't have that white protective seal across the wire, people don't see that. And people do some crazy things at night. You know, Drew, they run across lawns and things like that. And if they can't see the wire, that could be very, very dangerous. So that's another trip hazard.

Irrigation heads, simple thing. Irrigation heads not put the grade can be a trip hazard. We see where grading has been construction been done and there's new concrete laid, the grade change is different. And you have like a six- to eight-inch drop off the edge of a sidewalk. So those are just some samples that we look at when we're looking at jobs and we document those.

DG: And these are all great examples and I'm nodding my head the whole time because their conversations we ended up getting into on the insurance side, like you said on the legal side. And I think you had talked about it, but where are some areas where these things need to be called out? Before you've got the job? During the bidding process or pre-sale process? Once you've got that maintenance contract and you're working it, what does the cadence look like there? What are those opportunities to bring out this information to either the property manager or property owner?

BA: Yeah, great question. So it starts at the beginning when you start building that relationship with someone. We're here to serve other people. We don't really brag about how great we are with our landscaping company. We want to solve issues or potential issues that we see on your property. So you want to start almost deputizing yourself as, “Hey, we're going to be the stewards of your landscape. We're keeping watch for you, and we're here to protect you, your people, and our people as well.”

So right in the sales process, you can document some of these, photograph them, put them on a-- SiteRecon's a good product to use. Google Earth, you put a site map, “And here's where you have some hazards on the job that we recommend and here's what we would do to solve those.”

So that's the pre, when you're selling, so now you're establishing that trust and relationship with your client. Then you're going to sign the job, right? Because they're going to want to hire you because you're already looking for those things. You're looking at safety things as well, right? So then the next step, you get the job. So now what we call new job startup. So that's where you photo doc these things and you put it in a document.

And one lesson I've learned by going to court, didn't go to trial, but we mixed the safety issues in with just landscape enhancement issues and it got kind of blended in there. And so when we had to pay our share of the event, which was a slip on a piece of soil that was moistened--mud on a sidewalk where a young girl fell on her bicycle and cut her thigh and we had to pay for some of that. We weren't even responsible for the irrigation system or anything else, but we didn't notify them. And if we didn't notify them as a separate document as a safety issue, so that'd be a real big tip to take away.

You know, we need to document this on a regular basis. And here's what happens in the property management business. We have new property managers come in and or existing property managers and we call it property management amnesia. They forget some of these things that you remind them of. and they just forget about it. So if a new property manager comes in, you almost have to do it as a brand new job startup and walk the job. You know, there's a lot of things being done by remote today, you know, with all these Zoom calls and everything else, but one of the best things you can do is get your customer out there and walk the job and feel their pain and see some of the issues that you can solve for them.

DG: That's a great point. And you're kind of, you know, laying in a little bit of relationship building there too, right? You at somebody who's new maybe to that property and they've got a lot of things going on too and it's a change in relationship for the account manager, whoever has that key relationship there. So good opportunity to kind of huddle together and get everybody on the same page. And then yeah, make those corrections or call out those actions that need to be taken care of. It's a great example.

BA: Yeah, you bet. So that sums it up on the safety thing. You know, really go out and walk the job. We'll offer our listeners here, we'll have a checklist for this, so they can use that as a tool for them and add some of these things together as well.

DG: Bill, we really appreciate you coming in and educating us. We look forward to having a few more of these and thanks again for coming down and joining us in StudioOne™.

BA: Hey, you bet. Thank you, Drew, so much. Hey, stay tuned. We've got some more stuff coming up.

DG: Thanks, Bill. We appreciate it.