Finding the right national landscaping company requires a strategic approach. With goals to align, significant costs to consider, and stakeholders to satisfy, procurement teams can’t afford to risk a poor decision made out of haste. Like sourcing any other product or service, careful planning and analysis must guide the final decision. But commercial landscaping is considered indirect spend, which comes with its own set of challenges. Among them: a lack of category-specific knowledge. Perhaps that’s why many companies rely on local managers to select their own landscaping services, despite the associated drawbacks.

Why use a national landscaping company?

Leaving the decision to purchase landscaping services up to local managers is common. After all, property managers have a better understanding of their market and property needs. They are also who develops a relationship with the suppliers. Sourcing commercial landscaping this way is good for those reasons. But for larger companies–those with dozens or even hundreds of locations–this approach can lead to problems:

• Increased “maverick” spend
• Unqualified suppliers
• Lack of spend visibility

In other words, non-procurement sourced landscaping services can cost organizations significantly. But finding the right national landscaping company isn’t an expertise of many procurement professionals. Here are five tips to help find the right service that will support your organization’s strategic goals.

1. Get Educated

As mentioned above, commercial landscaping falls under indirect spend. While many procurement professionals become experts in their industries over time, indirect categories often remain overlooked. This poses a real challenge for sourcing indirect services. How can an organization make the right purchase decisions without understanding what it’s buying? Take the time to learn the basics of how a landscaping company operates:

• How do they set pricing?
• What goes into a landscaping invoice?
• How do specific markets influence operations? Costs?

Having insight into how the different regional offices are influenced by factors such as climate, environment, and market will better prepare you for learning about the specific landscaping vendors you interview and help with negotiating prices.

Online resources such as Landscape Management and Lawn & Landscape are great places to learn about the industry from a supplier’s perspective.

2. Understand Your Needs

There are different approaches to consolidating your landscaping needs into a national account. Each company has its own unique set of benefits. For example, a facility management company could potentially manage all your facility needs, inside and out. Here at NLM, however, we focus solely on landscaping with the goal to increase spend visibility and reduce overall annual costs. Understanding your needs and having clearly defined goals will help determine which is best for your company.

Remember, sourcing a national landscaping company requires strategy and real analysis. Your spend analysis will provide you with the right insight into why and what type of national landscaping service your organization will need.

3. Consider Your Corporate Structure

How centralized your purchasing process is will largely determine what type of national landscape company will best support your strategic goals. The more centralized a company’s procurement efforts, the more using a nationwide service like Brightview would be advantageous. But if your organization allows local managers to find their own suppliers but pays all the invoices from corporate, a nationally managed program would be an optimal solution.

4. Ask the Right Questions

Once you start selecting landscaping vendors that could be good candidates, be sure to ask the right questions. You’ll want to learn as much as you can about their services and how they can benefit your organization. Detailed questions help you gain insight into:

• Management
• Sustainability
• Processes
• Continuous improvement policies
• Costs

Clearly define your requirements so each supplier understands your objectives. Once you have this data from all the vendors you include in the RFP process, you can scorecard them to help you decide which will best suit your company.

5. Build the Right Team

Strategic sourcing is never a one-person operation. It requires a team of dedicated people, often from a variety of departments. You’ll likely need to involve colleagues from finance, accounts payable, and perhaps operations. Building the right team will help you tackle sourcing a national landscaping company from a variety of angles, and can help prevent different departments from working against each other.