The Edge July/August 2025

LETTER FROM THE CEO

Technology and Leadership for You AS YOU WILL SEE IN THE PAGES THAT FOLLOW, THIS ISSUE HAS a heavy focus on technology. As we advance and grow as an industry, technology will become more and more essential. As a member of this industry, you owe it to yourself to keep up on technology whether it be robotics, AI, routing systems, new design tech and even cybersecurity. You need to be informed. However, as many of you may be thinking, how do you keep up with it all? The answer is: you don’t keep up with it all, but you need to enable your team to help so, as an organization, you can keep up.

given us a path to earning an “A” in the future. Now I know many of you are wanting to get more detail on what I am talking about here, and all I ask is that you give us some time. We need time to develop the strategies, the tactics and the KPIs we need to make sure we are serving our membership in the best way possible. So, stay tuned; I will be updating you in the col umn for the next several months. SHAMELESS PLUGS I have two shameless plugs for two NALP programs that I need to get on your radar in 70 words or less: Our Executive Leadership program with UVA Darden School of Business recieved a five-star rating and Net Promoter Score of 100 in its first year! 26 partici pants came; 26 participants loved the program. Did I tell you that Darden is the No. 1 university for executive education? Check it out on our website. NALP’s Business Manager Training and Landscape Techni cian Training are free for NALP contractor members. Please take advantage of this great value!

attempted. It will be a process that we will work on over the six months and will lead NALP to be more in sync with what you, our members, want from NALP. The first step in this process was conducting a survey of our membership about what you think NALP is doing well, as well as how important some of the things NALP does are to you. Needless to say, we learned a lot. So, thank you to all of you who completed the survey! The good news for NALP was that the items you all thought were important for NALP to be doing, we are doing many of them well. However, there were several items you deemed highly valuable that NALP is not doing as well as we should be. In addition to those insights, we learned a few things we focus our time and energy on were not important to you. So, on the whole, the survey seemed to indicate that NALP is getting a firm “B,” maybe even a “B+” if we’re being generous. With that said, we feel like you have

It’s funny, as I was recent ly reviewing the agenda for

ELEVATE, I noticed that we had a wide assortment of sessions on technology while also having a wide assortment of sessions on leadership and empowering your team. These two go very much hand-in-hand. And that is why they are positioned with each other at ELEVATE. Because being a successful user of technology can only be accomplished if you are part of a successful team. Successful teams can be creat ed at any level of an organization; they just have to have the right leaders. And those leaders need to have an eye on technology and empower their teams to embrace it and learn more about it. And there is no better place in the in dustry to do both than at ELEVATE in Phoenix this November. STRATEGY FOR NALP Earlier this year, the first week of April to be specific, NALP embarked on the first stage of a new strategic planning effort, the likes of which NALP has never

Britt Wood

6 The Edge // July/August 2025