Ep. 605 Building a Scalable Safety Program with SafetyOne™ for Landscape Professionals

Rancho Mesa's Alyssa Burley and Vice President of the Landscape and Tree Care Group, Drew Garcia, talk about building a scalable safety program for landscape professionals with our SafetyOne™ mobile app and website.

Show Notes: ⁠⁠https: ⁠Subscribe to Rancho Mesa's Newsletter⁠

Director/Host: ⁠⁠⁠Alyssa Burley⁠⁠⁠

Guest: ⁠⁠⁠Drew Garcia⁠⁠⁠

Producer/Editor: ⁠Megan Lockhart

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

© Copyright 2026. Rancho Mesa Insurance Services, Inc. All rights reserved.

Transcript

Alyssa Burley: You’re listening to Rancho Mesa’s StudioOne™ podcast, where each week we break down complex insurance and safety topics to help your business thrive.

I’m your host, Alyssa Burley and my guest is Drew Garcia, Vice President of the Landscape and Tree Care Group with Rancho Mesa. Today, we’re going to talk about building a scalable safety program for landscape professionals with our SafetyOne mobile app and website.

Drew, welcome to the show.

Drew Garcia: Alyssa, thanks for having me.

AB: Now, you recently wrote an article where you cover developing a scalable safety program and you highlight data showing that a significant percentage of workplace injuries occur during an employee's first year. How does a structured safety onboarding process help reduce those new higher injury risks?

DG: Yeah, the focus was to bring some more attention to that area because we've noticed that that's mostly where the majority of the claims happen that first six months to a year in employment within landscaping. And so the way that you can kind of attack that is to just create a strong formal onboarding process that isn't as brief and verbal, you know, how do we make this more effective? How do we put training together? And then how do we do that so we don't have to recreate it every time, you know, or somebody has a good idea, how do we capture that?

And so that's where SafetyOne could be so beneficial because as you have a new hire and you can run them through a process through SafetyOne and whether that's having them you know watch a video or read a couple tailgates or do some quizzes, go do some hands-on training and get signed off on that those are all areas that someone can create a very repeatable onboarding process. And you can take it a step further because you know, you could have somebody transitioning from the maintenance division into more of an install side, and you can still treat that as a new employee because now they're getting into a new line of work. And so you can even create onboarding based on the scope of the operations that the employee is going to enter into.

AB: Absolutely. Now, you also describe SafetyOne as being built around onboarding, ongoing engagement, and compliance. Will you explain how layering these three components together create a more effective and scalable safety program?

DG: That was the goal here is to create a scalable safety program. So, you know, landscape businesses, as they grow, generally you grow with either the branch model where you're going to open up a new location in an area further away from where you're currently operating so that you have an isolated area that you're working out of. And so then how do we bring the same processes from the home office into all of our satellite offices or branch offices? And how do we do that so that we're not calling the home office and saying, “Hey, where was that report that you had or where's that Excel file?”

And so that's where SafetyOne, again, is super beneficial because, you know, home office can own that and they can create the processes. They can update the processes. And then as your branches are growing or your teams are growing, it's all in front of them with the SafetyOne tool. They just need to use that as the resource. And so that builds a strong foundation for the safety program. And then you can use that for ongoing training. So whether that's tailgate trainings weekly or if you have, you know, we all think about work-related injuries that we're trying to prevent, but there's the whole component of liability prevention too. So if you're doing mobile forms for jobsite safety analysis or job hazard analysis, you can use those as engagement tools throughout the year to try to uncover issues that might be sitting at properties that you can document.

And the last piece to that is compliance. And I think it all just feeds into it. So at the time of an injury, or if there's some kind of a hazard that happens, people are going to want to know where's the documentation, show me what you've done to try to prevent this from happening. And then you can lean on SafetyOne as a quick resource to gather it, so there's not that panic moment of where did I put that or where is this information? We know right where it is and we can get the appropriate information timely.

AB: Yeah, I like that you touched on the fact that everybody is using the same content because it's all out of SafetyOne. And then again, like you just mentioned, when you do have to document that there is an injury or something like that, everybody knows where to go to get that information; it's all in SafetyOne. You're not having to look on somebody's computer for a file or look in a cabinet somewhere for a paper document. It's all easily accessible.

DG: Yeah to that point, I think a lot of businesses look at it well, when the business gets bigger, I'll invest in something like that.

AB: Do it now.

DG: Exactly. Yeah. You build a foundation early. This isn't, you know, you're not overachieving or it's not going to be overwhelming, it's not going to get in the way of doing business. It's going to make your process stronger. It's going to make you feel more confident with what you're doing. And it's going to open up that gateway to growth, you know, because now safety is not a concern for me because we've got that taken care of. Now I can focus on, you know, the business in terms of growth and process.

AB: Yeah, absolutely. Now, based on the results you've seen, like the reduction in claim frequency among active SafetyOne users, how does using data reporting and mobile tools change the way companies manage risk and predict outcomes over time?

DG: A lot of safety and insurance related information is generally lagging just because it's easy information for us to all get. We look at historical claims, historical experience mod, OSHA rates. Those are all occurrences that have happened in the past that we're looking at as if we're kind of predicting the future. And with SafetyOne, what I really like is we want to have an eye on lagging indicators, that's important. We got to see where we've been and are we seeing improvement, but SafetyOne allows you to monitor leading indicators.

So these are things that you can set up to create goals. We talked about tailgate topics. You could create a threshold goal that you want so many tailgates done. You want an annual percentage of people who have attended those trainings to be completed. You could have a formal driving program where you got one, two, or three different driver trainings from SafetyOne that you provide to all your drivers annually. And that can be a goal that you're trying to complete. So not necessarily waiting for the claim to happen to say, okay, now we've got data to manage, manage the, you know, completion of these leading indicators to hopefully eliminate having the claim from actually occurring.

And it might sound overwhelming, but it's not, you know, it's like a couple forms you're doing a week and in a year's time, you've got a lot of really good data that you can point back to say, hey, we really took our eye off the ball in August because we were busy. But look, we had these injuries. We had this auto accident. You can start to make those correlations that say we stopped with our trainings or we didn't do those mobile forms that we were consistently doing. And so that allows us to be a little bit more efficient with how we're going to manage the safety program.

AB: Yeah, it really makes being proactive easy. So Drew, if listeners have questions about managing their safety program, what's the best way to get in touch with you?

DG: They can reach me at my email that’s drewgarcia@ranchomesa.com.

AB: Alright, well Drew, thank you for joining me in StudioOne™.

DG: Thanks for having me.

AB: Thanks for tuning in to our latest episode produced by StudioOne™. If you enjoyed what you heard, please share this episode and subscribe. For more insights like this, visit us at RanchoMesa.com and subscribe to our weekly newsletter.