Landscape Leadership Culture Blog

Well, another year of HubSpot's annual marketing conference, INBOUND, is in the books.

And while Chris and I had attended the previous year, our newer teammates Pete, Pamela and Emmett were first timers in 2015.

I remember being beyond overwhelmed — a hilarious combination of deer in headlights and chicken running around with my head cut off — when I stepped into the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center in 2014. (It’s a maze of hallways, walkways that criss-cross the conference center by means of confusing shortcuts, rooms designated with letters and numbers.)

I was determined not to let that happen to us a second year in a row.

My grandfather Robert Hayes died in February 2014.

Here at Landscape Leadership, we can (and often do) strategize until the cows come home, till we’re blue in the face.

But in inbound marketing, the work we do really comes down to one thing: compelling writing.

The articles we write, the guides and checklists we produce, the emails we send to our clients’ prospects and customers…all that strategy falls by the wayside without the right words, chosen with keyword savvy and a panache for language.

In the past, all that great content has been written by talented contractors all over the country who are masters of the written word (and the green industry!) — until now.

Working remotely with co-workers in two different countries, not to mention time zone differences, has its own set of special challenges — but to be honest, I myself couldn't do it any other way. (The cube farm life? Not for me.)

To find employees with the skills and personalities necessary to do the niche work we do, we'd be shooting ourselves in the foot limiting our hiring pool to a single city. So we come together every day as a distributed team.

But how do we communicate, you ask, geographically diverse as we are? How do we build our company culture and manage to stay productive day to day, too? I thought you'd never ask.

Ah, the joys of being a growing startup!

We seem to have an insatiable craving for marketing talent.

Just months after hiring two fantastic content leaders, we suddenly found ourselves looking for one more employee to fill out our ranks: a kickass, strategically-minded, get-shit-done kind of account manager. To put not too fine a point on it.

Our vision as a business and team is to create a "Bulletproof Agency". To me that means two distinct things:

To meet in Toronto or San Antonio – those were the options for this year's Landscape Leadership team retreat. 80 degrees...or snow and ice? Hmmm...

The Tex-Mex (mostly the margaritas) and barbecue won out.

It’s hard to pick what I like best about Pamela Weir.

Like me, she was bitten early on by the entrepreneurship bug and spent several years building her own small business, Mythos Marketing.

When we spoke for the first time, we geeked out together over a blog we both enjoy, Marcus Sheridan’s The Sales Lion.

She casually slipped into conversation that she’s on a roller derby team. Roller derby, guys. It basically entails skating around in a loop and trying to knock people down — and it’s way harder than it sounds.

If you asked Chris and me the best part about working in this industry, we'd have one of those "JINX!!" moments: Both of us immediately say it's the people, hands down. Our newest hire has a different perspective.

I've attended my fair share of green industry events.

As managing editor of Lawn & Garden Retailer and GPN magazines, I flew to California for a whole week of plant goodness at Pack Trials, traveled coast to coast for two garden center bus tours each year, and experienced Short Course, the IGC Show and other trade shows for several years.

But as wonderful as those trips were for networking, education and just plain taking in the beauty that's so easy to take for granted when you work in our industry, they couldn't hold a candle to what I experienced in July: PLANET's Renewal & Remembrance.