While you may have a loyal staff that come in with smiles on their faces, there are a few low-cost and simple perks to offer to show your appreciation for their hard work. We tend to hear about the mega corporations’ benefits and roll our eyes thinking, “pffffft, I wish.” Airbnb offers employees a $2,000 stipend each year to stay at any Airbnb property. Starbucks will fully reimburse their employees’ college tuition. Google offers daily free gourmet meals. Netflix provides an unlimited vacation policy. (I’m still trying to wrap my head around that one.)

Since this industry is made up of primarily small businesses, we need to think on a bit smaller scale. Consider some of these perks:

• Recreation: Hop on Craigslist or the NextDoor app and buy a foosball table, an air hockey machine or a ping-pong table and let employees have a little fun on breaks. Or set up a Wii bowling tournament and give away prizes.
• Health and fitness: Hopefully you’re leading some nice stretching exercises each morning to loosen up, which is great for your safety program. So why not take that a step further and offer on-site yoga classes, create a walking group, host some dance lessons or start a “biggest loser” weight-loss program. Invite a nutritionist to talk about better food choices and organize a healthy recipe contest. Check with your county and ask about healthcare services that may be available to your employees at no cost or a reduced price, so they can receive basic health screenings.
• Give back: Allow employees the chance to volunteer in the community. This is a popular perk at my own employer, GIE Media. Serve food to the less fortunate on Thanksgiving, prepare backpacks for the homeless or select some homes that need repairs and create a construction and cleanup team.
• Fellowship: Your employees certainly spend a lot of time together during the week, but think about setting aside a day annually for an outing with employees and their families. My employer does this, as well. Options include a sporting event (AAA games are much less expensive than their MLB counterparts), an amusement park (group rates are available), or the zoo.

What type of perks do you offer? I’d love to hear from you and share your ideas with our readers.

Cestrum ‘Orange Zest’ is a tropical treasure for northern gardens. The genus Cestrum has several species and cultivars that deserve more consideration by the horticultural community, including growers, designers, and gardeners. ‘Orange Zest’ is a lovely evergreen shrub in USDA zone 8, and a deciduous shrub in Zone 7 or even 6. I have a plant in my garden that survived -8°F several winters ago and looks stunning today. ‘Orange Zest’ is a selection of the species C. aurantiacum. There is another cultivar in the trade named C. ‘Orange Peel’ which is a hybrid between C. diurnum and C. nocturnum.

Cestrums are alternatively known as jessamine and are members of the family Solanaceae, and thus being nightshades are toxic if ingested. This functions in the gardener’s favor by keeping deer from browsing on the leaves. Orange jessamine is evening fragrant, giving up its perfume only after sunset. During the day, the beautiful tubular flowers are a delight to the gardener, as well as to bees and hummingbirds who feed on the sweet nectar.

In the garden, I’ve been pleased with the longevity and habit of ‘Orange Zest.’ It requires little or no pruning to maintain a pleasing shape and is in an area of the garden that gets minimal summer watering. It blooms from late June through October. I would compare its habit to that of a lilac, though it will stay much smaller than a mature Syringa vulgaris cultivar. My ‘Orange Zest’ is about 5 feet tall and wide. It’s also a great container plant or used as an annual in colder climates. This is a wonderful plant that should be more readily available in the trade.

Assuming your fall potting went according to plan and your perennials are finishing nicely, the only thing left to do is guide them through the winter and sell them off to some lucky customer this spring. It’s that easy, right? True, unless you consider that your cold frame retains heat like a compact car, your freeze-thaw cycle is on repeat, and dormant plants aren’t fighting back against diseases while they sleep. Depending on your location, overwintering can be no small challenge, for very different reasons. But with a few tips and some simple pre-planning, overwintering can be outstanding for your business and your perennials.

Problem: Long-term cold, wet conditions, but short-term below-freezing temperatures.

In the south, conditions can often be cold and wet during the winter months, but with temperatures that drop below freezing for just a few days at a time. This becomes a problem when you combine cold-but-not-freezing temps with high moisture.

If you’re growing outside, that can translate to lots of issues, but perhaps the biggest is when dormant plants are subjected to long periods of wet and cold. Because dormant plants can’t actively grow and recover from a disease outbreak the way actively growing plants do, root rot can run rampant. This takes its hidden toll in winter and waits for spring to show up.

Solution: Before dormancy, do a preventive broad-spectrum fungicide drench. Watch plants carefully, and if signs of root rot appear, consider repeating with a second drench to help reduce losses. You might consider using a better-draining mix as well if you are planning on wet conditions.

Problem: Cold frames turn into warm frames.

In the south, overwintering perennials in cold frames will help solve your moisture issues. It can be the right answer for certain crops, but if you’re trying to vernalize your crops, cold frames can reduce the amount of cold hours you can provide. That means you may not be able to provide enough hours to encourage flowering if that’s your goal.

Farther north, cold frames are also a great option for keeping plants protected from the elements but still providing nice, cold temperatures at night.

But in either scenario, cold frames can heat up from the sun’s intensity during the day, then cool back off once the sun goes down. In colder climates this can cause plants to thaw during the day and refreeze at night. Repeated freeze-thaw cycles can cause temperature fluctuations that damage roots and cause other problems you may not see until plants start to break dormancy in the spring.

Solution: Get a simple thermometer for your cold frame. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, just something that’s easy to read and provides a basic temperature reading. Watch your temperatures carefully – in fact, the sun’s intensity is more important than the temperature outside. A clear, sunny day can quickly elevate daytime temperatures above freezing in a cold frame, even when it’s still frigid outside.

To prevent the freeze-thaw cycle, make sure you have a way to vent your cold frames when the sun comes out. Don’t be afraid to let your pots stay frozen during extended cold periods.

Throughout the winter, watch for loss or plant death around pot-to-pot edges – those pots will thaw first and freeze and thaw more often. That’s a sign you need to vent your cold frame.

Problem: Getting plants covered or uncovered before they’re damaged.

If you’re growing outside and are covering your crops with some sort of winter cover for extended periods, a little work on the front end can help fend off problems down the road.

Solution: If you know you’re going to have fluctuating temperatures and moisture during the winter, a preventive fungicide drench can help keep root issues in check. Removing dead foliage before covering will also keep rotting plant tissue from becoming a potential source of disease.

It’s important not to underestimate the time it takes you to cover your crops for overwintering. You don’t want to spend two days pulling perennial cloths, then turn around and spend the same amount of time uncovering them, but sometimes that’s what it takes. Watch the weather and gauge your geographic area’s trends to leave your plants alone as long as you can. Again, don’t be afraid to let perennials stay frozen and dormant – it’s their own built-in protection mechanism.

Most people want to take shortcuts; however, the more thorough your preparation, the greater the likelihood you will have success. Preparation is essential to having confidence in yourself no matter what setting you are in—this will build your confidence when you are in high-pressure situations such as interviewing for a job or dealing with higher-level bosses.

It takes time to build your skills to a deep level of mastery. It does not happen overnight. With practice, you will build deeper awareness of yourself. You will develop greater confidence. You will demonstrate your emerging growth in mastering your new skill.

1) Daily efforts are essential for success

If you aspire to leadership in any area of your career, you need to invest time in each of the many components required to be effective. By engaging in your practice daily, you create a more manageable method to prepare yourself for success.

Break your skill development down into smaller components so you can practice your progressions in more manageable chunks. This is especially true with all the demands we have on our time and attention.

Each day you must determine at a micro level what you need to do to be prepared for your advancement to your next level of success. How you then practice those required skills is your preparation.

2) Build your skills before you need them

The saying “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity” is so true. If you’re not prepared, you won’t have any confidence in yourself when the opportunity to move forward toward your dreams presents itself.

To be prepared to progress to the next level, you need to look ahead. Pay attention to what others at that level are doing. Ask yourself, “What else is going to be needed from me as I move up to my next level of success?”

You can practice your skill development anywhere—at home, at school, in your job, in a church group. You can even practice while you are interacting with your children, shopping at the grocery store or coaching soccer.

Finding opportunities to practice new skills are all around you. You should plan to practice your new skills both inside and outside of work.

3) Volunteering accelerates your preparation for success

You may think you are too busy to volunteer for a leadership role in an association, community group or non-profit organization. Work and family responsibilities likely leave very little room in your schedule for taking on any kind of outside leadership role. Yet this view limits your opportunities to accelerate your potential for success. The truth is, engaging in volunteer leadership experience can have an exceptional impact on your entire career.

By agreeing to serve in any leadership role, you will have an opportunity to practice skills and help you gain exposure to new skills needed for long-term career success. Confidence comes to you faster when you practice in a lower risk environment when you volunteer.

Your confidence will compound because you will have multiple opportunities to develop your expertise. Volunteering allows you a venue to learn to work more effectively with different generations. You will expand your network of contacts, as well.

4) Working through learning curves

As you build your skills, you will have learning curves. There will be times when you’re going to fumble and bumble. Mistakes happen to everyone. You must always be willing to learn from the experience. No matter what the skill, you will need to practice.

Sometimes you’ll blow it. It’s okay. Chalk it up to a learning curve. Resolve to do better next time. Don’t let a mistake or lack of expertise shatter you. Learn from it.

You cannot take big leaps toward success unless you first take small leaps to build your confidence. The success you learn in those leaps compounds over time. By repeatedly testing yourself, and by preparing yourself for your next opportunity to win, you’ll be ready because you’re practicing and you are progressing in your skill development. These two confidence keys are now intertwined.

Always have an ongoing focus as you practice. This will deeply embed your skills so you can call on them with growing ease every time you need them. Then you can work on mastering them to develop your skills to a highly refined degree of finesse.

Consider how you will prepare for your next level of success. To consistently move forward, you need to intentionally develop new skills and probe for deeper insights of understanding as the issues you address become more complex. The search to understand what it will take to propel you toward your next leadership challenge never stops. Each one is a progression for you.