PHC Monitoring

[BigLnasty]

I'm wondering if any of you would be willing to share how you've managed to package and sell Plant Health Care, as a service. Currently, if a customer calls with a plant health concern we react and prescribe a course of action. We also offer a seasonal tree and shrub package that consists of 4 foliar apps and a root zone fertilizer injection. We profit really well from all of our individual plant health treatments but not so much on our tree & shrub "package". I'm also not a fan of a shotgun approach to treating plants, for obvious reasons. My hope is to create a win-win scenario where we can profit and provide the appropriate PHC while being good stewards of the environment (Duh...). I'm having trouble convincing my boss (the owner) that this is a service we can show customers enough value in. I'm envisioning an every 4 week monitoring trip by a skilled PHC tech who has some of the more common products that we use with them, to apply during that trip if necessary. Maybe a tiered program with the higher tier(s) including things like site evaluation, soil sample analysis, plant inventory, etc... Have any of you struggled with this? Overcome this? I'd really appreciate any thoughts, insight or advice. Thanks in advance.

Lance

 

[BC WetCoast]

From experience, you should have a pretty good idea what problems occur at what time of the year ie when do aphids hatch, spanworm etc., when to treat and what to treat. Then from your customer lists, determine who has the trees that will have those problems and market to them.

Depending on your soils, a spring fertilizer application and maybe a dormant oil application.

A monthly monitoring inspection I think would be a tough sell to most residential clients, might be easier to commercial ones.

What I would suggest is when your salesmen visit the property, inventory the trees/shrubs on site and make up a program for the client. If they buy into it, then follow up to make sure it meets their expectation and then resell every year.