When a turf rebate aimed at reducing water consumption prompted some companies to get into the business of removing turf and replacing it with gravel, the results were not always what the homeowners envisioned.

That was the case with three properties that Gothic Landscape rehabbed. The Valencia, California-based company added grass back to the yards and installed plants that were mostly drought-toleratant and attracted wildlife.

“We are finding that a lot of folks who got badly designed turf conversions want their grass back,” says Michael Gillett, regional manager. “But those who received a well-designed landscape don’t miss their turf at all. There were a lot of suspect contractors doing bad work and taking advantage of the rebates during the drought. It’s too bad for our industry.”

Gillett says each job cost approximately $9,000 each for roughly 10,000-square foot backyards. The projects lasted two days with irrigation installed on one day and planting done on the second day.

Gothic tends to stay away from residential work because it’s not a client they are built for, and Gillett does not expect many more jobs like this.

“But I see a great opportunity for good contractors to fix bad landscapes and add back usable turf areas,” he says. “Turf is not a bad word. You can still be environmentally conscious and have turf. Usable turf, smart nozzles, drought-tolerant plants and smart controllers make a pretty good landscape.”

A commitment to growing its maintenance division without losing focus on the construction side has catapulted Juniper Landscaping in Fort Meyers, Florida, from number 42 in last year’s ranking to 29 this year.

Owner Brandon Duke says his father, Mike, who started the company more than three decades ago and is now chairman, intended to have a 50/50 mix between maintenance and construction, but the construction industry was so busy, it was hard to keep up on the maintenance side. The company’s 2008 revenue was $3 million compared to $49 million in 2016.

“We were growing so fast that to sit back and say we are growing disproportionately, we need to grow this other aspect of our business when you are doubling in size is not something you can really do,” Duke says “Once we realized how disproportionate our revenue had gotten, we stood back and looked at some ways to even things out.”

That meant hiring someone whose only focus was to obtain maintenance work, and having everyone in the company commit to selling a maintenance package after an installation job.

But changing the mindset of employees wasn’t done overnight and took constant communication of the message.

“In all of our meetings, when we set goals for the company, when we have public conversations with staff, we continued to reiterate what our goals were and what we wanted to be as a company,” Duke says. “And we wanted to be a stable and balanced company that is built to last and that can weather the storms of ups and downs in the economy.”

Before the maintenance push, the company was at 85/15 mix but now have it closer to a 70/30 mix. Vice President Dan deMont says the company has succeeded in converting about 70 percent of their installs on a maintenance package. To avoid a slowdown on the construction side, the company has dipped its toe in acquisitions by buying Turner Tree & Landscape in December, and now have private equity backing, though Duke and his father and still maintain majority ownership.

“It’s a piece of our growth strategy going forward,” Duke says. “Some of it is simple math of wanting to get to 50/50 and you don’t want to stop growth in install so you may need to buy some maintenance focused companies.”

One major benefit to acquisitions is expanding into new geographical markets quickly, deMont says. “If we were to buy a midsize maintenance company it gives us the opportunity to grow that maintenance only branch into a maintenance and installation branch,” he says.

Mike Cox was hired as COO recently and the company now has employees whose job is not to only sell jobs, but manage it from start to finish and continue a relationship with the client.

“They aren’t just selling the job and moving on,” deMont says. “That’s something we’ve never had.”

In the years since the merger, BrightView has seen key leadership leave, including co-CEOs Roger Zino in 2015 and Andrew Kerin in 2016, and struggled to integrate the cultures and staff of the two legacy operations. Andrew Masterman joined the company last fall from Precision Castparts, a $10 billion aerospace parts manufacturing company recently acquired by Berkshire Hathaway.

In an exclusive interview, Masterman shares his vision for BrightView, discusses the company’s first major acquisition since the merger and what it means to have a leader from outside the landscape industry at the helm of the world’s largest landscape company.

Chuck Bowen: There’s nobody within the landscape industry that’s ever led a $2 billion company. But there’s a contingent in the industry that says “This guy doesn’t know landscaping. He’s not one of us.” Do you worry about that?

Andrew Masterman: I don’t worry about it at all. Look, we have 23,000 employees. When you put in all of our sites, we have almost 300 geographical locations throughout the country. Managing that kind of an enterprise takes an approach to make sure you create the entrepreneurship and the autonomy within the structure of having all the advantages of scale.

It takes a different skillset to understand how to do that to go in and manage that kind of a scale. Fortunately, I’ll tell you, the senior leadership we’ve tapped into in the organization, well, they may not all – some have – come from the industry. Taking that balance, taking that mixture of talent that allows you to understand the advantages we can do from taking a scale and then translating that into an entrepreneurial environment for our leaders in the field to excel at their craft I think is unparalleled in the industry.

CB: As we’re talking today, you’ve got 100 days under your belt. Tell me what you see as BrightView’s biggest challenges in the next year or two.

AM: Well, I think the challenges we face are no different than the challenges the rest of the industry faces. You said it right when we walked in, crew hiring, crew retention, the challenge you have on immigration. I mean, all that continues to face us, just like anybody else. That being said, we’re seeing an increasing number of just full-time U.S. workers that apply here and are just permanent residents.

CB: What do you think is driving that increase in employees who are not guest workers?

AM: It’s just deliberate attention to making sure that we focus in on getting the communities that we have. Looking at diversified products that we can offer. We’ve made some push into looking at offseason activities, not just snow clearing. You look at our branches in Boston, you look at our branches in Chicago, we’ve had a heavy decoration growth. Most of Chicago’s downtown holiday decorations are done by our Chicago branch.

CB: You talked about the immigration being in the news. You guys are a very large user of the H-2B program. What impact do you see the Trump administration having on BrightView?

AM: We’re 100 percent E-Verify. So any new employees that we hire has to be – have to have the right to work in the United States. And that’s not any change versus last season. It’s something we just deal with.

CB: Tell me why Marina Landscape’s maintenance business was an attractive acquisition for you.

AM: We’re focused on organic growth with our current clients. We’re also focused in on joining up and acquiring those companies that make sense from either a geographic footprint or from a culture, but mostly from a geographic footprint either matching with our current locations or providing potential opportunities to provide those services. We have places we don’t exist. Marina was a great matchup with our current footprint in Southern California. Marina, culturally, the approach to business that the leadership has had matches up with how we approach running a business, which is a sense of accountability and a sense of – an orientation toward growth and an orientation toward safety and quality.

CB: For a long time Brickman or ValleyCrest was the exit strategy for a lot of companies. And I don’t think that works anymore.

AM: No. The reality is we have a great national presence. And number one, we want to make sure we service our clients we have today and create great opportunities for the employees we have, number one. As we look outside of that for either areas we aren’t present today or areas that make a lot of sense which complement our current activities, we’ll absolutely entertain those companies that culturally are going to fit within the way we run the business.

I think you said it well earlier. This is somewhat about the Marina acquisition and in light of that is what you asked and that it kind of that signaled BrightView’s back. All the change that has occurred with the merger and some of the instability in leadership … BrightView’s here. We’re solid. We have a committed group, a dedicated group of employees. We want to create safety, quality, excellence in the field. And we’re focused here on making sure that we have a local approach with a national presence.

CB: How do you do that?

AM: Really by giving the branch manager as many tools and freedom to manage the business as they see fit within the branches. So many times, national companies will come in and manage it nationally with a local presence.

CB: What did you change for those branch managers that wasn’t the case before?

AM: A lot of it is we decentralized functional businesses. So there was a strong central approach within the group and what we’ve done is really tried to take many of the central resources that we had and push them out into the field. For example, we had a very centralized sales organization. There was a head of sales here in Plymouth Meeting.

There’s no longer a head of sales. Sales reports into the regionals. We’ve taken out the bureaucratic layer that we have centrally, try and get as much functionality down day-to-day touching clients, touching crew into the field.

“We’ve made some push into looking at offseason activities, not just snow clearing.” Andrew Masterman, CEO

CB: So for example, the sales force in western Pennsylvania will report to a regional sales rep?

AM: As opposed to someone like me. Or more appropriately probably from Western Pennsylvania. Let’s talk about Phoenix, Arizona. OK. (Laughs) That guy in Phoenix, Arizona, is not going to report to somebody in Plymouth Meeting. That guy in Phoenix, Arizona will report up through a guy that’s in the Southwest region, who knows the region, gets the customer base, gets the horticulture, gets what we’re about in the Southwest.

CB: What about purchasing? Is that at the branch level? Is that at the regional level? Is that up here?

AM: We have buying programs that we negotiate nationally. We also look at individual branches on what’s needed for those branches for specifically what operates and how they can effectively – if they need to do something that’s unique, they absolutely should have the autonomy and flexibility to do something that’s unique.

Something that’s pretty unique on an equipment standpoint that we can do at BrightView: We’re buying hundreds of industrial strength electric lawn mowers. (Mean Green Mowers is) working with us on developing a national platform to be able to go into verticals and really sell a quiet service in multiple markets.

Again, we can do this. We have scale. We have size. We can experiment with some of these things. We have created dedicated vehicles and trucks with charging stations for this equipment that we’ll be able to put electric lawnmowers, you know, both push mowers and standup mowers in the same trailer, be able to be plugged in with battery backup, do a job, come back in, plug them in.

That trailer’s been outfitted to do this. And then to go to those clients, multiple clients in a string of routes where we can be a 100-percent electric crew.

CB: There are a lot of eyeballs in the industry and outside the industry on you, to a lot of people in the country, what BrightView does is what landscaping is.

AM: We pride ourselves on that. We are the leaders and we’re going to maintain leaders, whether it’s introducing electric mowers out into the field and taking all electric crews and seeing how that resonates within our client base, or whether it’s just trying to take a quality standard and making sure that quality standard is the same whether you go to Boston or you go to Southern California.

That’s an innovation, just an innovation in a different way. It’s an innovation of quality. Every single one of our crew members should expect that we manage the company to the point where they arrive at work and leave work exactly the same. And we need to be the torchbearers that absolutely drive that message in, and proves that this is the best and safest place possible.

As gas prices hit $4 a gallon in 2012, Sebert Landscape was looking for an alternative to gas to reduce costs, cut down on noise and lessen its carbon footprint. So when commercial electric equipment became a viable option, the Bartlett, Illinois-based company jumped at the opportunity.

“It was about doing the right thing and, of course, if we could help reduce our energy costs, that was a benefit for us and create a healthier way of doing our work,” says Jeff Sebert, owner.

But Sebert needed to find an efficient way to charge all of those battery packs. Since the company’s LEED-certified headquarters has solar panels, they decided to put the panels on the trailers to power equipment in the field.

“We knew immediately with the battery-powered equipment, we had to have on-board charging for that because you can’t have them go dead halfway through the day,” says Ralph Meyer, fleet manager.

The company built its first prototype in 2012 and crews really started rolling out in retro-fitted solar trailers the year after. Employees were a little reluctant at the start, but now they’re embracing the technology.

“At first, they really didn’t like electric because it impeded their efficiency and that frustrated them. But, as the equipment gets better and more powerful, and the battery power is getting longer, they’re actually finding it to make them more productive, so they’re really embracing it and they’re really starting to like it,” Meyer says.

One branch liked the electric equipment so much, it requested five more solar-powered trailers and Sebert happily delivered.

Now with 16 operating trailers, the company is still improving on the technology. Every time they retrofit another trailer, they try to make it a little more efficient and cost-effective, and lessen the footprint to take up less space in the trailer.

The first solar system cost about $10,000, but by switching to a smaller inverter, it’s down to about $5,000 now. “We actually cut our power source capacity in half,” Meyers says. “We basically went through the learning curve of understanding how much we need and how long lasting. We overbuilt it to start with and we kind of knew that but we didn’t want our crews to run out.”

On the mower side, Sebert made the switch to run on 90 percent propane around the same time it started using electric handheld equipment. Sebert says it reduces carbon, leaves less wear and tear on the equipment and in the end, it’s better for both the operator and those around the crews.

Plus, Meyer says, upkeep is much easier. There are no repair costs for things like spark plugs, air filters and recoils, and there are no carburetor problems. Crews don’t have to worry about spilling gas or priming, choking and starting equipment

“The guys with the battery powers grab it and walk out of the trailer and they’re working,” he says. “There is increased efficiency. There’s no doubt about it.”

Crews can also start earlier in the morning without having to worry about noise disrupting residential areas.

Sebert says other companies in the area have been asking about their system, and if fuel prices rise again, he thinks more companies will jump on board.

“I think the manufacturers need to give us more options to be able to provide for the systems we’re building because it’s not the most simple thing in the world to do and the average landscaper probably isn’t going to undertake this initiative but I think in the long run it’s green, it’s going to save money over the gas you’re purchasing,” he says.