beSlick helps Urban Planters to scale sweetly
Background
It’s come a long way from its roots; five years ago Urban Planters was selling plants in pots to facilities managers in a bid to make office environments more visually appealing. But with a strong scientific link established between the impact plants have on wellness at work and employee behaviour, the business has gone from strength to strength – now engaging HR departments directly to help them improve the working environment, and growing beyond pots, to a multi-service offering including living walls, plant art and Christmas displays.
The challenge
While the success that Urban Planters has experienced is the envy of most SMEs, it does come with its challenges.
Growing pains
As Urban Planters has scaled through organic growth, it has hired new talent and invested in different IT systems. But in time, this organic growth becomes challenging as the internal infrastructure simply doesn’t exist to support a business of this size and is no longer fit-for-purpose. And that means that senior management are increasingly distracted from their main roles.
Poor productivity
With the whole company reacting to factors that were affecting their business – whether it be a new order through the website, solving a customer’s issue, or excess stock perishing while sitting in storage – Urban Planters wasn’t able to plan for success, and therefore not operating in the most efficient, productive way.
Inconsistent customer journey
Embarking on a productivity drive, Urban Planters knew it needed to create the internal processes necessary to guide its operational efficiency. A big part of this is ensuring the customers receive a more consistent service, by taking them on a journey that demonstrates Urban Planter’s passion, helps them understand the science behind ‘greening’ a workspace and rationalises the investment. But achieving this requires all employees to remain compliant with the overall brand standards to deliver that consistency.
The solution
beSlick is software for process enablement. It enables you firstly to map all your processes and then ensure that they are performed the same way by everyone, every time, it means that your business is capable of running without you – freeing you up to get back to the things you really enjoy.
Currently on a productivity drive, Urban Planters has a number of initiatives running in parallel that will see the business transform over the coming months. A key element in the strategy is to use beSlick to help facilitate these initiatives.
Speaking about his choice to implement beSlick, Rory Waterer, managing director of Urban Planters, said:
“I very much subscribe to the Richard Branson way of thinking – that if you look after your staff, everything else looks after itself. Seeing beSlick I knew everything in my business would run pretty sweetly because the product is built with people at its core.”
The Results
Free to get on with activities that add value
Like many entrepreneurs, Rory’s first skillset lay elsewhere. As well as being the managing director, day-to-day he’s also the leader of a sales team who take care of a territory that now spans most of the south of England.
Supporting strategy
Using beSlick as part of its initiative to re-define its strategy, will enable Urban Planters to better support its senior leadership team when implementing the Entrepreneurial Operating System® (EOS).
Effectively managing core processes
It’s the core processes that determine the blueprint for how the organisation operates and delivers a consistent experience. For Urban Planters, managing stock is central to its success. Dealing in live plants, they need looking after to stop them deteriorating, and some plants will perish quicker than others. There’s a high potential for wastage if the process isn’t right, covering steps such as reconciling/replacing stock or ‘just in time’ production.
Enabling continuous improvement
But you can’t control people and force them to do things a certain way. Regardless of how big the company has grown, there’s a passion that sits at the heart of the business, where the people simply love plants, love what they do, and love the customers they serve.
Integrating with the business
Embarking on an initiative to update its current website and intranet, Urban Planters is looking to converge its IT systems. This will create a more joined-up way of working that allows its employees to just get on with the job in hand.
workflow
- Drag & drop builder
- Forms, video & documents
- Centralised & secure
- Feedback & improvement
tasks
- Checklists that follow workflows
- Simple to-do list for every user
- Visual reports & dashboards
- Integrate 3,000+ apps
visibility
- Track compliance
- Record ‘why not done’
- All activity time stamped
- Audit trail of changes
beSlick integrated features
be collaborative
- View and manage everyone’s work in real time.
- Automatically notify each team member when things need doing.
- Raise & resolve issues as tasks progress.
be consistent
- Easily create complex process & workflows
- Centralize in your secure, searchable library.
- Run as task checklists that exactly follow the process.
- Everyone knows what to do and when it needs to be done.
be productive
- Standardize information with online forms, reducing errors.
- Approvals, onboarding, requests & audits.
- Use internally or externally, for clients or suppliers.
- Implement in minutes, not months.
be informed
- See progress, what is overdue and issues raised.
- When something can't be done, see why.
- Every activity is timestamped with an audit trail.
- Visual data you can analyse for informed decision making.
be compliant
- Real-time process compliance.
- Track non-confrmance, see why.
- Full timestamped audit trail.
- Group based permissions handling.
be focused
- Every user enjoys a daily to-do list of what to focus on.
- Prioritize, snooze, reassign & email integration.
- Automated notifications ensure nothing gets missed.
Time to make work better
Free 30min consultation call. Our privacy policy.
Co-founder
