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Tip: When you have three separate businesses, it can get confusing. To alleviate the confusion, Heather Schuster, CLP, president of Terra-Firma Landscape, Inc., in Muskego, Wisconsin, came up with a color-coding system.

When you have three separate businesses, it can get confusing. To alleviate the confusion, Heather Schuster, CLP, president of Terra-Firma Landscape, Inc., in Muskego, Wisconsin, came up with a color-coding system.

“We distinguish each of our three businesses — Weed Man, Christmas Décor, and Terra-Firma Landscape — by using three different color schemes,” explains Schuster. “We color-code accounting files, checks, customer files, even the computer screen. When checks are mailed to us, we separate them immediately by placing them in color-coded envelopes.” The move, she says, has helped keep each of the three companies separated in her mind, and it saves time spent sorting through files if they end up lying on her desk instead of being filed.

The coding system makes perfect sense. Weed Man is green, Christmas Décor is red, and Terra-Firma’s maintenance-division color is teal to match the company’s logo. The landscape division is purple, allowing Schuster to further organize her filing system.

“This approach may sound a bit silly, but it saves a ton of time,” she relates, adding that she also color-codes the company’s payable files in yellow and then tabs the separate divisions within that file with their individual colors. “I highly recommend the system for people with a lot going on. It may take a little time up front to do the coding and organizing, but like anything else, the up-front work pays off.”

Take a close look at Terra Firma’s maintenance trailers and you’ll notice that hand tools are wrapped with color-coded duct tape. Here, the process just serves to keep tools where they belong. And, says Schuster, employees are more willing to lend tools to another crew when they can identify them and … get them back.

If you want to set up a color-coding system, either in the office or in the shop, do it during the off-season when the phone isn’t ringing off the hook and when trailers and tools stay in one place for more than a day. For color-coding tools, Schuster recommends using duct tape, which comes in a variety of colors, or RustOleum paint. Spray paint is less effective because it doesn’t last.

By Heather Schuster, CLP
Terra-Firma Landscape, Inc.
Muskego, WI
hschuster@wi.rr.com
(as told to Rod Dickens, ALCA Contributing Writer)