I’m happy to be hosting and moderating this webinar that will be presented by Brent Loescher, a fellow instructor with me at TKMG Academy.
A Lean practitioner at heart, Brent received his formal Toyota Production System training while working for Toyota Motor Sales in their North American Parts Operations.
He helped develop a Lean program for the landscape maintenance industry, implementing and evolving continuous improvement programs across the country since 2009. This included co-leading a team focused on the operational integration of a $2 billion dollar merger.
Brent is currently responsible for Learning & Development and CI for a start-up Landscape Maintenance & Construction company doing work in 14 states. He has a BA in Business Management from Mercyhurst University and is a retired military veteran, having served 21 years in the US Army and US Army Reserve.
REGISTER HERE:
Creating Leader Standard Work (LSW) Across a Distributed Business Model
It’s free and open to all!
In the preview, Brent discusses his career journey, beginning with operations and logistics in the military, progressing through roles in Toyota’s distribution sector, and currently applying Lean principles within the landscaping industry at Sperber Companies. He shares insights into adapting Lean methods to a range of industries and highlights the challenges and benefits of implementing Leader Standard Work across a distributed, multi-location business model.
Mark and Brent discuss the complexities of leading in a dispersed business model, particularly across varied state regulations and different company cultures due to Sperber’s mergers and acquisitions. Brent emphasizes the importance of Leader Standard Work in fostering consistent, effective leadership practices and shares his passion for this approach, refined through his work with TKMG Academy. Participants attending the live session will have an opportunity for Q&A, and those who register can later access the recording. Additionally, registrants will receive a special offer on TKMG Academy courses, adding further value to the session.
Preview Video:
Transcript:
Mark Graban:
Hi, welcome to the KaiNexus Continuous Improvement Podcast. I’m Mark Graban, senior advisor with KaiNexus, and today we are doing a quick preview of our next webinar. It’s going to be presented November 19th at 1:00 Eastern. It’s titled Creating Leader Standard Work Across a Distributed Business Model. So to register for that, look for a link in the show notes.
Mark Graban:
You can go to KaiNexus.com/webinars. and if you are watching or listening to this preview, after November 19th, the recording will be available on our YouTube channel and our podcast feed. If you register for it again KaiNexus.com/webinars, we’ll send you an email with a link to the recording if you’re not able to attend live. But if you do attend live, of course you’ll have a chance to ask your questions and I’m going to start today with a couple questions. Our presenter is joining us.
Mark Graban:
He is Brent Loescher. Brent, how are you doing?
Brent Loescher:
Doing well, Mark, how are you?
Mark Graban:
I am doing well. Thank you in advance for doing the webinar. I know Leader Standard work is a topic that a lot of our customers and our broader community have a lot of interest in. So I know you’re going to have a lot of great things to share. But, you know, first year is a preview rather than me introducing you real formally.
Mark Graban:
Tell us about yourself and your background in your own words.
Brent Loescher:
I’ll do that. First off, thanks for the opportunity. I’m kind of looking forward to the conversation with everybody and seeing what kind of questions and things we all learned from the conversation. I would classify my career, I guess as all operations and logistics since my first stint in the military right out of high school, through manufacturing, through distribution, and now landscape maintenance. All of my focus has been on operations and subsequently operational improvement along the way.
Brent Loescher:
My time in distribution was with Toyota, where I got my lean shops, at least more formally. Yeah, and, and then took that to what is now landscape maintenance. And I’ve been in the landscape maintenance business for quite some time, using lean ideas to bring about improvement in our operations.
Mark Graban:
Well, and I guess that goes to show in part that, you know, lean principles and methods and lean management really can apply just about anywhere. Right.
Brent Loescher:
That’s exactly what drew me to the opportunity in the first place. You know, I was working with Toyota when I got a recruiter call out of the blue and never really thought about landscaping, to be honest with you. But knowing that they were looking towards implementing lean was certainly piqued my Interest to see does it really apply? And certainly I think that I’ve seen in my time here and in some consulting I’ve done this side, it really does apply to darn near everything.
Mark Graban:
Yeah. If we work at it and figure out how to apply it, how to adapt it, that seems to be the key. And you’ve been at that how long now in the landscaping company?
Brent Loescher:
Oh, since 2009 and had a brief, you know, kind of period in between around 2013, 2014 where I went off to another business. But it was still a distributed services type business model and found the same things applied there as well.
Mark Graban:
Yeah. And the company is much bigger than. This is not your local mom-and-pop family landscaping company. This is, this is. Tell us more about kind of the scope.
Mark Graban:
And when you talk about a distributed business, it seems like it applies.
Brent Loescher:
Yeah, you bet. So Sperber Companies is a landscape construction and landscape maintenance company. We are just over five years old, so we consider ourselves fairly new. Although the company, I’ll say is full of years and years of experience in the landscape business. We are already at this five year stage in the top 10 of all landscape maintenance businesses in the country by a revenue percentage.
Brent Loescher:
We are a combination of self growing, organically growing landscape maintenance businesses as well as M&A businesses. We’ve acquired 16 now businesses and we operate in 11 different states across the United States. So very distributed. And those 11 states add up to about 37 or 38 P&M that are managed. So pretty well distributed.
Mark Graban:
Yeah. And that creates, I’m sure, some interesting challenges compared to a single-site or dual-site business. You know, I think a lot of our Kinexis customers are distributed businesses, sometimes across different continents. Even so that would be a good perspective for a lot of people in our audience.
Brent Loescher:
I hope so. We certainly learn every day because it’s not only the distribution, the geography of where we operate and the uniqueness of landscaping in Florida versus, you know, Oregon, but it’s also that with the M and A activity we have a lot of different cultures. We have acquired businesses that themselves had 30, 40, 50 years in the business. And all of them have very unique cultures and language. And much of our learnings around been how to harness that, embrace that, but also develop an organizational culture that is unique to Sperber.
Mark Graban:
Yeah. So maybe a final question for you, Brent, as a bit of a preview of the webinar, you know, maybe the broad question for you is, you know, why. Why is this topic, you know, so important to you? You’re presenting on it you’ve taught a class on Leader Standard work as part of TKMG Academy. Why is this such an important topic?
Brent Loescher:
One I think probably develops purely out of need. Out of need for myself, perhaps out of a need in a that as I experienced a lot of different leaders over the years, both that I worked for and was able to observe or work with, recognizing that there could be a better way to being a leader and a good leader and a consistent leader for our people and then getting an opportunity to meet Karen and work with her at TKMG and work on the course itself really helped help me refine my perspective on how Leader Standard work can be shaped how and the benefits ultimately it can bring to the leader and their people. And so been pretty passionate about it since doing that work with Karen.
Mark Graban:
Well, I’m excited about the webinar, Brent. There’s going to be a lot more to learn. There’ll be a great chance to interact with you and do Q and A and a good conversation in addition to the presentation. And then, you know, one other shout out and thank you to Karen and TKMG Academy. Stay tuned.
Mark Graban:
There’s going to be a special offer sent to everybody who registers for the webinar special discount to be announced for courses including Brent’s. And I have a course on mistake proofing and there’s a lot of great content in that library, so hope people will check that out. So again, the webinar is titled Creating Leader Standard Work Across a Distributed Business Model. It’ll be live November 19th, 1:00 Eastern. Look for a registration link below or go to KaiNexus.com/webinars… presented by Brent Loescher.
Mark Graban:
Brent, thank you so much for joining us and doing a preview today.
Brent Loescher:
Mark, thank you again. Appreciate the opportunity. Can’t wait to see you again in November and chat with everybody.
Mark Graban:
All right, thanks.
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