AS I WRITE THIS, it’s just hours until I am due to collaborate with a customer’s leadership team on the company’s annual strategic plan. We will take an objective look at the past year and its good, “meh,” and ugly outcomes; look at the market’s components; and use our creativity and best judgment to forecast the future. It’s the most important meeting of the year, and it may well determine our success—or lack thereof—for the next two.
These sessions are full of excitement, trepidation, collaboration, and creativity. When done with people who want to enhance organizational strengths, recognize where improvements might be needed, embrace change, and leverage business fundamentals, extraordinary things can happen. Success doesn’t flow from chance; it flows from a strategy founded in clear insights.
To put it into the language of erosion control, the smartest companies don’t just manage runoff; they manage revenue, margins, and run rates and blend them with environmental intelligence and business acumen to create predictable, resilient, profitable, and sustainable organizations.
Business as an Ecosystem
To do this, you must think of your business as an ecosystem and read your market as closely as you would read a site plan. Only then can you can chart the currents that drive opportunity and mitigate risk. Knowing the most important players in your market will help you build a strategic plan for the future.
We start with our customers—those who truly value long-term sustainability and understand the need to balance compliance with creativity, proactivity with practicality, engineering with environmentalism, and best management practices (BMPs) with business. Whether working with municipalities, departments of transportation, engineers, or developers, the best clients see compliance as an investment, not a cost.
Next, look at your partners and sales channels; they are the market players and tools that determine how customers find you. From distributors to landscape contractors and environmental consultants, who helps you execute projects flawlessly and win new ones? Do you find customers through bid lists, certifications, or partnership networks? Whatever the method, streamline your go-to-market flow.
Then, take an objective look at the competition. What’s their niche—is it product innovation, price, or project speed? Differentiate your company with purpose and performance. And don’t look at suppliers as materials and inventory specialists but as educational and training partners. Your supply chain helps define your credibility.
Engage with and contribute to credible professional associations such as IECA and local stormwater groups to stay ahead of codes, training, education, and policy shifts.
Once you map these six inputs, patterns will emerge to reveal where the momentum of the market is going, and where new value pools such as green infrastructure, regenerative design, and nature-based solutions are forming.
Smart companies don’t fight the current; they design and lead strategy with it. The companies that are thriving today treat stormwater not as waste, but as an opportunity to protect resources, reduce risk, and build resilient communities and profitable organizations.
Before you propose another project, read your market. In erosion control—as in nature—those who understand the flow will lead the future.
About the Expert
Judith M. Guido is the chairwoman and founder of Guido & Associates, a business management consulting firm in the erosion control and green industry. Guido can be reached at 818.800.0135 or judy@guidoassoc.com.
