Have you ever watched someone trim a tree?  Unless they are a professional, it is usually one ornament at a time.  The hand goes down, grabs an ornament, the hand goes up, they climb the ladder, they come down from the ladder.  This goes on for an interminable time period, over and over and over again. 

From a time management point of view this is excruciating.  Long ago I watched someone do just this on a Holiday job we were installing and agonized as the time we’d allotted quickly grew and grew til the job was never going to be profitable.  Sheer agony.

That is when I asked Sara our Holiday Chief Elf (not the one hanging the one by one ornaments), what could we do to save time and speed things up.  Sara, bless her heart, showed me the trick she used for decorating large trees.  To get ornamentation that fit the scale of 12 and 16 foot and larger trees, Sara made up what she called "elements".  Some call them swags, others have other names.  No matter what you call them, they are several regular size ornaments with bows or strands or silk flowers attatched so that the finished piece is both beautiful and LARGE!  These "elements" are made in the facility beforehand by a crew that copies them from a prototype Sara made in advance and then placed on the tree on site.

Talk about time savings.  48 times instead of 480.  Piece of cake.  Storage is easy too, just wrap and box and they will be ready for next year. 

I tell you all this even if you already know about this and even if Holiday is many, many months away,  because periodically I run into a ’scaper still playing the onesy-twosy game and because by applying this same principle to just about every thing your business does, you can save steps, time, materials, and stress.  And, that, as Martha Stewart would say, "Is a good thing".