Ep. 496 Reducing Risk in the Landscape Industry Series with Bill Arman: Security

In the second 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 security while at work on customer grounds.

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 of the Landscape and Tree Care Group 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 we welcome back again, Harvester Bill Arman. We're working through a series of four topics when we talk about landscape environment safety and keeping a safe work environment for our employees and also for the customer.

And topic two is all about security, Bill. So educate us, talk about security and how that's an important piece to the overall safety environment.

Bill Arman: Hey, you bet. Thanks so much, Drew, for having me. So, important topic, we shared earlier in our first session the importance of operations. There's three major components. And the very first one is the most serious one is safety, right? The second one's efficiency. The third one's effectiveness, the quality of the work.

So over the years, I've done quite a few inspections. We call the Quality Counts Program, where I go out and count weeds and dead plants. I call it my Weeds and Dead Plants Tour. And it's amazing how many weeds and dead plants are out there. I do a quantitative score. And part of that scoring system, which gives feedback to our employees and what they should be looking for as well when they're doing their job is safety. We're looking for safety issues for our employees and for our customers. So on the security side, this is pretty big time in today's world what's happening, right? There's a lot of crazy things going on out there and security is very, very important part of your customer's business, right?

So basically everything's being videotaped. People are watching it all the time. Now you can be on YouTube, who knows, right? So people are watching you. They're listening to you as well, you know, the high end private residential projects we work on, they're listening to you. So part of that is you want to be able to enable to that happen, right? And some of that cannot happen as a result of not doing our job and monitoring the security part of the business.

So that would be like trees that are blocking the recordings, right? Any sound effects that are affected, lighting that, you know, this is a big one; I used to go on tours at night with my customers and trees block the light coming down into the parking lot in security. So we did a tree tour on a regular basis and we recommend you, if you're in the tree business out there, this would be a great thing, little added value pack to your tree service. But even from the maintenance standpoint, you should be involved with your customer, even checking the lighting at night. This would be also along any pathways or ATM machines. This is another thing that's very, very important. People are getting their cash out of there. The pruning and the plant selection near those, so you're not blocking any of the bad guys hanging behind the shrubs, right? So maybe a low profile plant selection in there, right?

So video, audio. Then the other one I'd say, this kind of falls into liability as well, would be visualization of traffic. You're driving in a car on a site and if the shrubs are high and I was just having breakfast with my wife the other day and a vehicle is coming out behind some shrubs and lo and behold man, there was an example right there high you know these are six-foot-tall shrubs growing right to the edge of the entrance to a parking lot so I know that's also more liability but as well security as well.

DG: Well, I think a lot of these topics, they're going to interweave between each other. That's why it takes four for it all to work, right? And an example that I wanted to kind of throw out to you just to see if you thought it maybe fits the security angle is how about, let's say we're a landscape maintenance company taking care of an HOA. Finding an appropriate place to park the vehicle for loading, unloading, grabbing debris bags, grabbing the grass clippings, loading them up into the truck. Is that something that should be identified before the crew gets there so that they know where they're supposed to be parking the car? Because the convenient spot might be the red curb that has a lot of area around it that they feel like makes it easy for them to get in out but probably not the spot for them to be in. What do you think about finding the appropriate place to park one of these locations?

BA: You know, Drew, you ought to be a landscaper. That's a great observation. And we see this all the time. So the resolution to that was we call job sequencing. And it's really when you get a brand new job, you should sequence each job you have. So that's really coming out of the yard safely, you know, it's called dispatch, then you route them correctly to the job. And then here's what you brought my attention here; where do you park your vehicle? Who does what in what order and how long was it going to take to do it? And I see this all the time. Where do you park your truck? Where do you take your breaks?

I was visiting a large landscape. I'm not going to mention any names here, but it was in Southern California, unfortunately, where I saw a very large truck, no cones out, in a red zone, main entrance to a pool area, and they're taking their break in the shrubs that are just eating their lunch there. And I have a picture of an older couple walking around the truck in the street because the sidewalk was blocked off. That could have been a tragedy. And so, you know, I don't mean to make fun of that, but that's pretty serious business. So where do they park? Where do they take their breaks? And coning out correctly.

Now, you know, now you got me going. I get excited about this. And I see these all the time because I visit a lot of job sites, right? And I see these, you know, when you're on a high traffic area and it's 50 miles an hour zone, there's certain codes with certain seeds, cities that you have to put signs out in front. And I see these guys using soccer cones, you know, they're like 12-inch-tall soccer cones that are using during the weekend or something. You know, it should be the 28, 32-inch-tall cones and have it, depending on how fast the traffic is, there are city codes for that. And it's pretty, pretty intense and the violations are severe. And so, so you brought up a great topic. Thanks for getting me going on that one. That's a good one.

DG: Oh, I think it's something that you know is pressing any time we get to get out into the field You know so insurance can be you know behind the desk answering phone calls doing spreadsheets putting together analysis but we really benefit when we get out to see our customers at some kind of risk control or loss control opportunity and it's a chance for us to learn and really breathe in what the industry is doing out in the field so that we can better communicate that to the to the carrier network. And that was something that always kind of draws my attention is trying to pick the appropriate spot because you can imagine, just like you said, with the couple that they're veering out into the street just to get around the truck—fortunately, nothing happened there—but how easy something could happen.

And also, I think it shows that level of professionalism, too; is it routine for those cones to come out? Are they in that appropriate spot? Kind of affirming that the selection that the landscape company that they've contracted with to do this is taking care of the little things and you would feel more confident that they're going to handle their business if you consistently see that professionalism.

BA: Yeah, you bet. And documentation, we talk about documentation in our former session here, making sure that when you have security issues, you're bringing these to the attention of the customer. And you always want to find out their pain points anyway, but some of the times they just don't recognize that.

From another security standpoint, you know, there are some instances where there are maybe homeless people living on site, you know, and they're probably not doing all the best things in the world for us, and they're maybe sleeping here and sleeping there. We've had some companies have been contracted to clean up after some of those things. And that could be dangerous as well. So I know we're going drifting in a couple of areas, but it all kind of rolls together, doesn't it?

DG: It does.

BA: You know, so you So you have to train them from hypodermic needle pickup and those kind of things showing caution there. But then making sure that their security system is notified where we have people staying around that probably shouldn't be there hanging around.

So documentation, when you first get the job, meet the customer, do the walkthrough is important. Document, document, document. And make sure it's under the banner of safety or security. It's not blended in with a bunch of other proposals.

DG: That's a great tip. Alright everybody, so we finished up security, join us on our next one we'll be diving a little bit mo