How Freelo helped to streamline the management of 70 employees in garden centre

Published: 11. January 2018

Even a company that is heavily dependent on seasonal sales, can successfully run a business through the entire year. Garden Centrum proves it.
The small company started their retail in Jindrichuv Hradec and soon it was extended to Valasske Mezirici. Sales grew. Step by step it turned to wholesale. After more than 20 years on market, the Garden centre sells a wide range of gardening supplies, tools and flowers all over the Czech Republic.

Source: Private archive ZCJH.cz

Our industry is seasonal. We try to make every season a bit better than the previous one. We always want to offer something new and interesting to our customers. And amaze them by our services, proves garden center's owner Filip Klima, that the main point of company is the customer.

Before we started to use Freelo, tasks usually fizzled out

Management, Business, Storage, Logistics, Vendors, Gardeners. These are just some departments where Klima let us to look into. Meetings are the best way for team cooperation. Most of them are on Skype, because of two branches and regular business trips.

Source: Private archive ZCJH.cz

It turned out that when the participants do not sit together in one room and actually do not see each other, the discussion is much more effective. We do not switch the topic, commends the achievements of Freelo Klima. Freelo helped us to set up systematic agenda of tasks that were previously spoken, written down somewhere and never done. Today, the teams write assignments directly to Freelo, they add individual members and deadlines to them. The task does not disappear until it is solved. That is absolutely essential difference.

Czech language helped us to implement the tool

The Garden Center has felt the hole in project management for several years. However, the softwares that has been tested Klima indicates as a dead end.

After using Workplace from Facebook, we were totally amazed when we saw Freelo. At first, we were reluctant to believe it was a Czech product. The language made it very easy to introduce. Freelo implementation was a whole new philosophy of work. The absence of language barriers is very important to us because most of our employees do not speak foreign languages, points out Klima specifics of the traditional industry.

Source: Private archive ZCJH.cz

That Freelo worked, we know from turnover

How does project management look like in practice? Retail and wholesale have each one operating and one marketing project. Several projects are created for certain agendas ranging from company to company (eg HR) and others for time-limited tasks such as building completion.

That everything works the best, we know from satisfied customers and the increasing turnover, Klima reveals main metrics of success.

Source: Private archive ZCJH.cz

Most useful features of Freelo:

• Delegation of tasks from person to person — In the past, most of the projects have stucked. A certain task remained hanging on a partial assignee, where he had been stuck in some way, did not do it, and after a while he returned task as a boomerang. Similarly, there were "holes" in handing over tasks when one person solved the task, but the follower did not know it. In Freelo, tasks hang, blush, bubbling from one assignee to another, ultimately, one earlier and the other later, maturing to complete.
• Deadlines monitoring — the most difficult in our highly seasonal industry consider the need for strict adherence to deadlines. If tulips or daffodils are sold from September 1, I have to send an offer to our wholesale customers before mid June, which means our supplier has to offer us their offer in April.

Source: Private archive ZCJH.cz

The delay of any deadline means I have missed the season and I will have another opportunity next year.

Source: Private archive ZCJH.cz

We have started a program of monthly workshops where we show our practices and exchange experiences. Each workshop has pre-processed workflow outline for individual workflows that include screens of Freelo. Anyone from the team can refresh procedures, re-open them and learn, enjoyes the know-how sharing Klima.

Practical TIP from the Garden Center at the end

The work of current employees is one thing. Also the new-coming needs to be instructed and taught in your management system.