If there was a theme for 2019 at Landscape Design Concepts, it would have to revolve around expansion. Not necessarily a building expansion, but widening the net when it comes to customers they want to catch. The change helped the company grow 35% in 2019 to produce $29.2 million of revenue landing the Norwood, New Jersey-based company at No. 71 on the 2019 Top 100 list.
President Mike Pierro attributes the company’s success in 2019 to serving specifically more commercial clients.
“Before last year, we were selling primarily to corporate banks and other corporate buildings, like hospitals and medical buildings, Pierro says. “So, instead of just selling to those types of accounts, we started to sell to retail facilities,” he says. “If you turn on the news, you hear that retail is going down, but we found that that’s who was spending money on their properties, (and) in particular, high-end outdoor malls. So, we got very aggressive with selling to these luxury malls.”
Pierro adds one of their largest new clients is a large shopping mall operator. “That was extremely successful,” he says. “That really added to our growth.”
Providing more opportunities.
Pierro adds that expanding the business’s services also helped them to grow.
“We expanded on irrigation, outdoor kitchens for residential properties and we also started to sell more on flowers and plantings – so softscape,” he says. “We did them before, but we started to do more exquisite work. For example, instead of putting in your basic Begonias, we’ll do New Guineas or we’ll do interior landscaping with flowers.”
Pierro says he determined what services to expand on by looking at the data from previous years.
“Off of our sales from 2018, we saw there was room to grow in these areas,” he says. “We’ve been asked before about doing irrigation repairs and irrigation installations in 2018, but it was something we declined. We decided to sub it out and thought we didn’t have time to do it. Now, we incorporated an irrigation crew.”
Landscape Design Concepts President Mike Pierro says selling to retail facilities and expanding on existing services helped his company grow.
Photo courtesy of Landscape Design Concepts
According to Pierro, promoting the outdoor kitchens also made sense as the company already had a construction crew.
Even while expanding, Pierro says there were some services they chose to pass on providing.
“One service we didn’t expand on was chemicals,” he said. “We usually sub that out. The work we’re doing now is tedious enough, so to add new crews for chemical lawn work just wasn’t worth it for us.”
Despite the expansion, the Landscape Design Concepts team must still go out and sell the new services in order to see that increase in growth and revenue.
“Nobody really ever comes to us and says, ‘This is exactly what I want to do.’ It’s usually that they have an idea and then we have to sell our idea to them,” he says. “They have an idea, but they don’t know where exactly to put the money into their property.”
Easy steps to follow.
Pierro says that reaching out to a broader client base and expanding services are two things any business can do in order to grow.
“If you can, look into expanding both your service base and the regions that you service,” he says. “I’ve noticed that there are different markets for different regions. For example, in northern New Jersey, maintenance is a big spender for commercial and residential properties. Where in south New Jersey, there isn’t as much grass and the bigger factor there is hardscaping and softscaping.”
Pierro says that networking is another easy way to identify new clients. Some of the best advertising is word-of-mouth, and customers are often inclined to help their contractors find additional work if there’s a close relationship. Good recommendations spread, and can help you establish a good, local reputation.
“If you do residential clients currently, start to build closer relationships with them,” he says. “You’ll realize that they have connections within different institutions and can connect you with different people. One person can connect you with one person, who can connect you to three people.”
Making sure your team is filled with good leaders can also help, Pierro says.
“You need good foremen,” he says. “We have guys driving 100 miles to go service 10 properties. If they get a flat tire on the highway, they can’t be calling me and saying ‘Oh, we need a tire.’ You need a good foreman who can take initiative and knows their stuff. That’s why our problems get resolved.”
Paying those employees well goes hand in hand with having the best team possible.
“It all comes down to pay,” he says. “We’ve had great workers that wanted to leave, not because they didn’t like the job, but because they didn’t like the pay. As long as they’re vocal about that, I have no problem working through that. I noticed you can keep good help as long as you can pay them well.”
Built for better success
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The pitch: The new Cat 306 CR Mini Excavator marks Caterpillar’s entry in the six-ton class offering.
Delivers performance of up to 7,839 lbs. at a 9.8-feet radius. Enhanced uphill swing torque and increased cycle times provide greater productivity and efficiency.
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The pitch: Vermeer is expanding its line of mini skid-steers with the addition of the powerful and compact Vermeer CTX160 mini skid-steer.
Features a rated operating capacity of 1,600 pounds, 16.7 gallons per minute of auxiliary hydraulic flow and a width of 42 inches.
The CTX160 provides high lifting capabilities while remaining compact and nimble to operate. This mini skid-steer can handle jobs such as moving heavy material, working ground-engaging attachments and efficiently maneuvering in congested operating conditions.
The Vermeer CTX160 is sized for challenging landscaping, hardscaping, rental, utility and general construction work.
The pitch: Powered by the versatile, all-season Steiner 450 tractor, the Steiner slip scoop tractor attachment does the heavy lifting for you, making small excavation projects, landscaping and yard or farm projects effortless.
The hydraulic operation makes lifting loose material and yard debris easy.
The optional scarifier wear edge breaks up hard material in preparation for removal or grading.
It comes in two available widths, 48-inch and 52-inch, so you can get the right tool for the job.
The pitch: The smallest track loader in the Takeuchi lineup, the TL6R is perfect for the landscaping space with its ability to get into tight areas.
The Takeuchi TL6R Compact Track Loader (CTL) is an agile, compact machine that is easy to transport. The TL6R is ideal for customers in the agricultural, general contracting, landscaping and rental industries.
Powered by a Kubota 2.4-liter, 65.2 horsepower engine, the TL6R features a radial lift loader design with a maximum lift height of 9 feet, 6.4 inches, and a rated operating capacity of 1,841 pounds. Additionally, the TL6 has a width of 5 feet and a height of 6 feet, 5.8 inches.
The TL6 features a newly designed cabin with an overhead 5.7-inch color multi-information display and backlit rocker switches that control a variety of machine functions.
Takeuchi Fleet Management telematics system is standard and provides a variety of data points including machine health and condition, run time and machine location.
Whether it’s a new company starting out or a well-established one looking to streamline operations, mower attachments can help with efficiency.
Companies don’t have to buy the biggest, most expensive attachments to improve that efficiency, according to Pete McNamara, general manager of Dependable Lawn Care in Blue Island, Illinois, and Ryan Panarese, landscape & snow manager with Constantine Property Management, in Loudonville, New York.
Variety is the spice of life.
McNamara says his inventory includes mulching kits and some other useful tools, including a tow-behind aerator, power rake, catchers, fertilizer spreaders and a tow-behind spraying attachment for pesticide control.
“Most of the implementations we have are attachments for a walk-behind machine where a person could stand on it,” he says. “A lot of the other attachments are for mulching – things you would put on the deck itself to mulch the grass in the summertime.”
Constantine Property Management also utilizes mulching kits quite a bit.
Photo courtesy of Constantine Property Management
“All of my machines have mulching kits and striping kits on them,” Panarese says. “On our bigger machines, we have a dethatching rake and blower buggy.”
When it comes to choosing an attachment, McNamara says adaptability is key.
“It all depends on how inventive you want to get,” he says. “The more versatile you can be with one piece of equipment, is the way you want to go.”
Getting work done faster is an added benefit of having the attachments on hand.
“It saves us from having to get additional pieces, but it also saves hours,” Panarese says, adding he has a blower attachment to save time on a job. “I don’t have to have a guy out there pushing a push blower.”
“The more versatile you can be with one piece of equipment, is the way you want to go.” Pete McNamara, GM, Dependable Lawn Care
Seasonal supplies.
Panarese says his rake attachments comes in handy for spring cleanups.
“It gets all the organic material that settles in the grass from the winter,” he says. “It gives the lawn a nice, clean appearance.”
McNamara says a catcher and attachments for towing can also be good seasonal tools.
“Obviously, your catcher is another main attachment,” he says. “Basically, it’s what we mostly implement in the springtime. We’re in a suburb of Chicago, so obviously the grass growth changes. In the springtime, the grass has a lot of growth versus the summer when growth is a little more dormant. There’s no way to mulch anything when the grass is wet. It’s just not practical.”
Dependable Lawn Care uses wheel attachments as well.
“We’ve experimented with different types of wheels too,” he says. “They’re making all different kinds to lessen the impact on the turf.”
Photo courtesy of Grasshopper
Eyeing future buys.
Panarese says he’s looking to add more attachments to his fleet.
“We are certainly looking into buying an aerator,” he says. “I’ve got to rent it now. Some of the lawns we have now are pretty big in square footage and using one of those little walk-behind ones is like bringing a spoon to the beach.”
McNamara says that as a landscape maintenance company, he doesn’t need too many attachments.
“What we use here is just to improve upon what the machine is meant to do – mow,” he says. “Up here, you don’t have too much more time to do anything other than mow.”
Do your due diligence.
Panarese and McNamara suggest companies just starting out consider how attachments could help them better provide services.
“The ability to identify what you want to do as far as services will dictate what attachments you could use,” McNamara says. “For a smaller crew, you’re all about volume.”
Panarese says for the companies with smaller crews, the attachments will be a major time saver.
“If it can go on the machine and it costs less than $1,000, by all means, certainly get it. It’ll pay for itself fairly quickly. It’s also not another motorized piece of equipment that you have to store and service,” he says. “Especially for these smaller businesses where it’s just a one-person operation, they don’t need to walk for 14 hours a day. They need to be as efficient as possible.”
Another piece of advice both men have is to do your research before purchasing anything.
“Do your homework and research the piece of equipment,” he says. “Different manufacturers have different things. You might buy a $400 attachment that isn’t feasible for the piece of equipment you have.”
“I look at a couple of things,” Panarese says. “I might think this will be a great piece of equipment to have right this second for a particular job. But once it’s over, did it pay for itself already? Or do I have to sell more to justify having it? Should I just rent it? If it costs me $500 a month to rent and $5,000 to buy, and I need to rent it three to four times a year, then I need to purchase it.”
Our official 2020 Top 100 list
Top 100 - The Top 100 | Commemorative Poster
Click here to see our commemorative poster and where your company landed.
In the past, Paul Welborn would have taken the lead on assembling his company’s career ladder. But not this year, as Welborn continues to learn to delegate at Lawn & Pest Solutions in New Albany, Ms. He’s put his managers on the lawn side of the business in charge of creating the steps a technician has to take to climb the ladder.
“A year ago, I would have put a lot of the information together and had them look at it and see what they thought,” he says. “Now they're building out that information and I'm giving my feedback, which is the way it should be.”
Welborn has learned through the process that his managers are more than capable of taking on the responsibility, and saves him the headache of one more task.
He says they always had the ladder in their minds and operated as if it was official, but never had it in writing.
“It's sort of the way we did it anyway,” he says. “But the value in it now, it's putting it on a piece of paper and being able to put it in front of a guy and say, ‘Here's your path. Okay, here's the things you need today.’ Maybe we were pushing them towards some of these things, but it wasn't a formal, ‘Here's your plan, here's a way you can attack this and continue to move up in the company.’”
Paul Welborn continues to delegate as he works with the Harvesters.
Allowing managers to assemble the career ladder has provided Welborn teaching moments. Technicians will have to take 7-10 tests to move to a new level. The tests are taken via training software the company uses.
The managers were in charge of formulating the questions technicians would have to answer to pass a test. One manager was asking entry-level technicians for knowledge that a technician who’s been there a year and a half would know. So, that manager was asked to create tests for the more advanced levels. And now that the lawn side has a foundation for a career ladder, Welborn wants to build one out for the structural pest side of the business.
“We've brought the pest manager in and he’s going to start giving some feedback of, ‘Okay, we can tweak this to better fit pest’ and make everything match up for their job responsibilities, versus a lawn tech,” Welborn says.
Sales challenge.
Right now, Lawn & Pest Solutions is 80% lawn care and 20% structural pest, but Welborn would like to grow the pest side. For 2020, they have mapped out a sales challenge where they will focus on growing one segment of that division a quarter – perimeter pest in first quarter, termite in the second quarter, mosquito third quarter, and then back to perimeter pest in the fall.
Since they started mapping out the contest in the first quarter, the pest challenge wasn’t too much of a priority, which was a good thing.
“Luckily (we didn’t have a) real strong contest in place for first quarter because our weather here has been rainy and very uncooperative,” he says. “So, our customer interaction or upsell ability has been very limited in the first quarter of this year.”
Harvesters’ take.
Paul is faced with several key challenges not the least of which has been the weather in February. Rain, and more rain, has affected their production goal drastically from a goal of $116,000 down to $18,000 for the month.
This has put quite a dent into their overall sales goal of $2 million. The team will have to hustle to get caught up and we believe this team will do just that. We will follow this team very closely as they make up this temporary setback.
Another key front is with people. In our last Harvesters’ Take, we shared that Paul had executed our retention game plan Perfectly with a key player and they have decided to remain on board! After deciding that the pay rate was probably too low for this high-skilled position, Paul made an adjustment but that was still lower than the offer they had received. After considering everything, this person stayed on board for two reasons:
• Culture: Lawn and Pest has an excellent culture! People feel engaged, challenged and part of a team that has strong core values and an excellent team atmosphere.
• Location: Yes, location! The excellent job opportunity this person received was a considerable drive to work each day while the Lawn and Pest location was very close. This was discovered during our meeting to learn why they were leaving. Once it was brought to their attention that they would spend more than an hour more per day driving to their new job, they agreed that a better work life balance was worth staying at Lawn and Pest.
• Lesson: Don’t undervalue the location of where you are based.
Making headway
By Kim Lux
Frank Leloia Jr. says he feels his business, Custom Landscaping and Lawn Care, in East Brunswick, N.J., is improving.
Since the team’s initial meeting with the Harvesters in December 2019, Leloia says they’ve already made a number of changes.
“The biggest factor that we’ve worked on so far has been HR-related issues,” he says. “Harvester Steve (Cesare) has been working with our operations manager, Syril, to make sure we are fully compliant.”
Leloia says the company has performed a full I-9 audit, looked into EPLI insurance and restructured the company handbook.
The business has also done some hiring recently, which will help streamline operations and allow the company to better delegate tasks.
“We hired an operations manager just for our residential lawn care,” Leloia says. “That went along with our strategy to organize more internally. We feel this will make us stronger. Our retention and our recruiting should increase.”
Frank Leloia Jr., left, has spent the early months trying to sign more commercial clients.
Before the new hire, three employees were contributing to heading up the department.
“Now, with the hire we are more streamlined. We’ve essentially decluttered our organization chart,” Leloia says.
Along with the behind-the-scenes upgrades, Custom Landscaping has been striving to grow its commercial customer base.
“We’re out there chasing commercial accounts,” he says. “We’re very proud to say that we just got our sixth new commercial account. I think we should increase revenue by half-a-million dollars contractually.
“We’ve talked a lot with (the Harvesters) about how we can have better sales presentations put together,” he adds, “so that when we’re meeting with commercial clients, we want to be able to wow them and set ourselves ahead of the competition.”
To improve their presentations, the company has been holding mock sales pitches.
“Now we’re quicker on our feet,” Leloia says. “We’ve also been preparing more and our no longer just giving estimates. We’re more transparent in our contracts and we’re looking into incorporating some unique, video presentations, too.”
One of the goals set by the Harvesters was for Custom to have a 50-50 blend of residential and commercial accounts by 2022.
“Obviously it takes work, but the main thing they taught us is to have a target and identify what we want. At that point, we were able to focus on what we wanted and go get it.”
Leloia says to get to the 50-50 split, Bill and Ed urged Custom Landscaping to review its residential accounts and eliminate those that aren’t profitable.
“They wanted us to cut back a little on our residential accounts,” he says. “We haven’t cut back as much as they have wanted us to, but we’ve trimmed the edges of our less dense areas in order to make our denser areas more profitable.”
Harvesters’ take.
Frank and his team are going after more commercial work and leveling off on their residential work as we have agreed upon from our original Harvester visit. This will require a significant change in their mindset and what has been done here over several decades…. Frank is all in.
In order to take advantage of this market it will require some tune ups, changes and key action items if they are to be successful, here are some key points:
• Editing of Non-Desirable Residential Work: This will require a review and ranking of accounts coupled with some professional termination notices.
• Keep the Keeper Residential: The primary focus here will be to keep a dense route location to best serve the customer and to be most efficient.
• Learning How to Say No: Get a very clear selection criteria in place and know when to say no both with residential and commercial work.
• Build Killer Proposals: Build a proposal format that is more relational and less transactional and deals with solving their pains vs. selling and telling them how great we are…
• Estimating: Get a more formal estimating process in place using the Harvesters’ triangulation method: Crew Hours per Visit - Hours Per Task – Production Method – Compare to Similar Jobs
• Hire and Commercial Business Developer: Keep on the hunt full time with a business developer that is committed full time for selling commercial work.
It all starts with the leader in each organization. Frank is doing great and understands the importance of having a better balance of market types. Change is hard, especially if a business has been doing it one way for a long time. Frank has surrounded himself with good people and that is always a good start for the path of success.
Next take, we want to share how Frank got a top flight CFO on board at a most reasonable cost.
Remaining calm
By Jimmy Miller
David Hawkins Jr. says his employees are doing everything they can to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus.
Of course, he adds that these measures are all things they should’ve been doing anyway: wiping down trucks at the end of the day, creating wash stations around the company yard and washing hands before lunchtime. But there’s only so much he can do to prevent the spread of germs and fear at his own company – clients are going to be equally concerned about the virus as well.
To this point, Hawkins Jr. says he hasn’t lost much business yet, which is a positive. He says his company has many long-standing relationships with clients that are handled differently now to maintain physical distance. No handshakes or hugs; just service and quick conversation.
“We just talked to them and we’re taking everything that we can do,” Hawkins Jr. says. “We want to keep our people safe. We’re one big family and try to do the right thing, which is not panic.”
David Hawkins Jr., left, says a mild winter allowed for a head start on spring maintenance.
Photo courtesy of Hawkins Landscaping
Among the chaos caused by COVID-19, one thing’s remained constant: Harvester Ed and Bill call Hawkins Jr. and the Hawkins Landscaping crew, based in Frederick, Md., every three weeks to catch up on the progress made on the team’s objectives. They’ve had plenty of time to focus on big-picture stuff given that it was a mild winter, though that presents a variety of problems on its own. With $60,000 worth of salt still in storage, it’s taking up space where seed and fertilizer usually goes. Plus, it resulted in less business over the winter than usual.
“But that’s part of the animal that you deal with when you do when you do snow removal,” Hawkins Jr. says. “It seems it’s either feast or famine.”
They never took any days off over the winter though, and Hawkins Jr. says they got a head start on spring maintenance work since the weather was so mild. They also did some hardscaping work, and some of the clients they have for snow work ended up giving the go-ahead for more work this spring. Plus, through word-of-mouth advertising with the clients they already have, Hawkins Jr. says they’ve landed some extra accounts like a nursing home recently.
The word-of-mouth helps because he says their prices are probably higher than some of the larger competitors in the area, but referrals ensure that potential clients know Hawkins Landscaping will spend more time on the little details.
“That way we didn’t have to bid it out,” Hawkins Jr. says. “That’s worked out pretty good, and we’ve got a couple others like that in the works.”
Now they’re working through creating a mini budget and identifying 200 possible clients over time. Hawkins Jr. says it’s been a while since they’ve looked at the bigger problems like pricing out new materials properly because usually, with so much going on, they just buy the first ones they find right at last minute.
“That’s one of my problems. You get busy, and we stay busy year-round, so we don’t watch our numbers as good as we can,” Hawkins Jr. says. “Traditionally, when we first started, we would work on equipment, but as the business evolved, we ran out of that time. Now we might be even busier over the winters than in the spring.”
Harvesters’ take.
It’s been a year of very little snow for the Hawkins team, but that has allowed them to work more on the company than in it. In a good snow year there is plenty of cash coming in for the spring, but this is not happening this season, so it’s been all hands on deck selling work and working on the urgent items in their playbook.
As of this writing, they are in full production with cleanups beginning and design build work underway. At this point, they have a solid backlog of work priced at our 50% gross margin goal. We talked about morphing over into more commercial maintenance work but this has been slow, in that they prefer to be selective in the accounts they go after. They are working with Harvester Ed’s Be 2@200 Campaign, which should bear fruit later in the year. One thing for sure: They don’t want to do any HOAs.
From a financial standpoint, Kristi Hawkins is working on setting up the Harvest Mini Budget so she will be able to see at a click, what the gross margins are each month, for each department. This will really help (in real time) in making sure their estimating, pricing and efficiency is on track. Carol Hawkins is working on their field-to-office paper flow to better track the work. She is also reviewing what was purchased last year to see if there is a way to be more strategic and save money. D2 an D3, that’s father and son, are working to improve their proposal process to be sure their estimates are more accurate.
So, all in all it looks like a good start and we will monitor their progress along the way.
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