With clients working from home and spending time in their backyard rather than the Bahamas, Laurie Broccolo noticed she fielded more questions this year.
COVID-19 might have kept people out of the office and away from vacation destinations, so Broccolo – the owner of Broccolo Tree & Lawn Care – found her customers were far more engaged than usual. Out in the field, they came out to talk to her employees during lunch. And back at their garden center, clients filtered in all day long rather than in the evenings.
And with that extra attention, every small detail became magnified, including their mulch.
“People were really interested, and they had the time,” she says. “They were working from home, and they needed those breaks. People are actually seeing their plants.”
To help those plants grow and to make garden colors pop, mulch and groundcovers are an essential factor for landscapers to consider. Here are some of the latest trends that industry experts have noticed.
Keeping it natural.
Bob Scott from Lowe’s Landscaping in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, says it should come as no surprise, but most of his clients are on “the organic train.”
Some raise concerns about the overall well-being of the environment. Others ask if there are chemicals in the mulch that’ll be bad for their kids, or how worried they should be if their dog eats some of the mulch. He estimates that roughly 75% of the mulch they put down for clients is natural, and from a retail end, customers buy it at an even higher rate.
“I think it all starts from a good place,” Scott says. “‘Hey, I never want to make my lawn or yard look a little better at the risk of my dog or kid getting sick.’ And now that it’s caught on, it’s becoming a trend.”
Scott says Lowe’s Landscaping – which has about 60 employees and earns roughly $4 million a year – is often selling its triple shred mulch for that very reason. And during the pandemic, they’ve received more calls for DIYers and saw a slight uptick in installation on the residential side, so he had more conversations with clients than ever about their desire to keep it green. Even their dyed products are made with a carbon dye, he says, to keep things as healthy as possible.
“The more natural, the more organic, the better,” Scott says. “That’s the overarching theme.”
“The plants are the stars. The mulch is just there to accent the plants.” Laurie Broccolo, owner of Broccolo Tree & Lawn Care
Broccolo says that in Rochester, New York, her company is pushing undyed, natural products as much as they can. It’s just a bit of an uphill battle.
“It’s interesting. Pretty much everybody likes the dyed black,” Broccolo says. “We do try and sell undyed, natural, as much as possible. We steer our clients that way. I can’t give in and buy any of the red.”
That dyed black and red is a trend that hasn’t gone away at all. Even for Scott, who sells largely natural mulch, the dyed black mulch is “far and away” his number-two seller.
Color it in.
Christopher Clark with Cut Above Landscaping in North Billerca, Massachusetts, says his company does just about every service a landscaper can offer.
With $750,000 in revenue last year and eight employees, 70% of Cut Above’s clientele comes from the residential side. Clark has seen customers start to buy the dyed products because of the curb appeal, though it’s a recent trend that hadn’t been prevalent in northern Massachusetts before.
“Personally, I like pure hemlock, but it’s almost hard to find. Everything’s color-enhanced nowadays. The black mulch has seemed to be newer in our area,” Clark says. “It’s just a different color. Sometimes, the color does make green grass pop a little more.”
Scott says some of his clients like that the dyed products tend to last a little longer and not disappear like some of the finer, more natural mulches. And Broccolo says people like the dyed products because it’s showy and contrasts nicely against the grass. While the brown mulch looks lovely, it doesn’t grab someone’s eye while driving past.
But Broccolo says this isn’t the way she thinks about it.
“The plants are the stars,” Broccolo says. “The mulch is just there to accent the plants.”
More than mulch.
Groundcovers and stone are another way to accent a landscape, though stone is more widely used in commercial applications, Broccolo says. She’s also seen some younger DIY gardeners in her area request stone as well.
But Clark says the value of low-maintenance stone like washstone or aggregates can’t be overlooked.
“Stone, depending on the type, can save a lot of money,” Clark says. “You don’t need to do it every year.”
Meanwhile, Broccolo has seen clients request pollinator plants or edibles to fill in spaces in their gardens. Scott says groundcovers like pachysandra or creeping myrtle help him transition many of his clients’ yards from lawn to the wooded areas nearby. Sweet woodruff and bugleherbs also remain popular.
With most of her clients home, Broccolo says they weren’t only asking questions – they were seeing areas of their lawns that weren’t doing well. With that, they wanted answers fast.
“We’re always recommending assertive plants that will fit in pretty quickly, like low-growing shrubs, natives, pollinator plants, even perennial geraniums,” she says. “They grow tall enough to keep the weeds out, and they grow fast enough to fill in the holes.”
Back to school
The Top 100 - The Top 100 • No. 43 Chenmark
To set themselves apart from competition, Chenmark employees are investing in classes to learn more about all sides of the business.
Chenmark employees have enrolled in several types of educational opportunities.
Photos courtesy of Mainely Grass
Palmer Higgins and his team at Chenmark have invested heavily in education, though they’re finding opportunities in unconventional ways.
There are plenty of differences between the green and hospitality industries, but one thing that remains the same is a focus on satisfying the clients. Roughly 60 Chenmark employees enrolled in the Ritz-Carlton training program to find out what sets them apart from other hotel chains nationwide. Hint: It’s not just luxury suites or skyline views seen from the windows.
“If you’re focused on customer service, you’re focused on the wrong thing. You should be focused on customer excellence,” Higgins says. “Everyone does customer service, but if you really want to differentiate, you need to shoot for legendary.”
Chenmark ranked No. 43 on the 2021 Top 100 list, earning $50 million in revenue from 2020. For Higgins – a partner at Chenmark and the CEO of Mainely Grass, one of Chenmark’s several companies – constantly learning about the green industry specifically is essential. Before Chenmark partnered with Mainely Grass, he was a chief operating officer at a company that created Spanish and French textbooks.
But even for employees who have always worked in the green industry, Higgins says educational opportunities are important. The big takeaway from the Ritz-Carlton program was that they needed to raise the bar.
“You’re not just checking a box to resolve a situation – that’s table stakes. That’s not bad, but that’s not good enough,” he says. “What more can I do? What more can we do as a company to go above and beyond?”
Higgins also saw 51 employees enroll in a turf management course at the University of Massachusetts. Higgins was one of them, and his employees asked him frequently how he was doing. They were all in it together, but they wanted to see if Higgins could earn an A.
“I don’t think it wasn’t competitiveness in the sense of trying to do better than other people,” Higgins says, “but among my management team and I, we certainly had an internal competition.”
Due to COVID-19, the classes were held remotely, one of the silver linings of operating amidst a pandemic. Before this year, the drive out to Amherst – where the classes were held at a UMass campus – discouraged many of the employees from enrolling in the class. Only a handful of employees would take the course before the pandemic, but having the ability to log in and learn helped make it more accessible.
Of course, it wasn’t just accessibility that intrigued the employees: Mainely Grass paid for course enrollment and offered a $1,500 bonus for anyone who completed the course, plus an extra $2 per hour for anyone who earned an A grade.
“If you’re focused on customer service, you’re focused on the wrong thing. You should be focused on customer excellence.” Palmer Higgins, CEO, Mainely Grass
It certainly wasn’t an easy A. Higgins says the course was a time investment, as it was four classes a week, and each class required roughly three hours of video review outside of class time. Then, once in the class each week, it required an hour-long Q&A discussion on the reviewed material. They also took roughly four quizzes a week.
“The hardest class specifically was probably plant pathology,” Higgins says, joking that there are too many Greek words. “That’s getting pretty technical into plant disease and mechanisms in which they infect hosts and spread.”
Higgins says paying for the courses wasn’t an issue for the company despite the pandemic. He added that he was proud to say that no Chenmark companies furloughed or laid off any employees due to COVID-19.
In the future, he says Chenmark will continue to invest in employee education. They’re developing an internal training program, and while they’re not sure if they’ll go back to the UMass classes should they be in person rather than virtual, Higgins says they’ll seek out education opportunities regardless.
“At a high level, education is something that I’m going to continue to back pretty strongly, whether it’s another crack at turf management or diving into pest control,” Higgins says.
Building better connections
Features - Design/Build
A solid relationship between hardscaping companies and landscape architects and designers can help bring in more work and benefit both parties.
Blue Claw Associates was able to surpass $2.5 million in its second year by focusing on forming long-term partnerships with independent landscape architects and designers.
Images courtesy of Blue Claw Associates
In 2006, Ian McCarthy sold his maintenance company on Cape Cod in order to invest in a professional basketball team. Fast forward to 2016: After living in Canada for six years, McCarthy found himself out of the sports industry and back on Cape Cod.
So, McCarthy went crabbing with a former friend who owned a landscaping company. That friend was looking for senior management within his company and encouraged McCarthy to get back into the industry.
McCarthy went to work for him and oversaw the company’s construction department until it was sold about a year later.
Around that same time, McCarthy, who was always close to his employees from his previous company, decided to host a homecoming of sorts to catch up with his old friends.
Ian McCarthy says his business showcases its work on social media, particularly Instagram, to connect with local landscape architects.
“I had a reunion at my house with all my former employees that were living in the area,” he says. “They were showing me pictures of stone walls and things they were building, and I thought to myself, ‘Wow. The quality is just incredible.’ And they kept urging me to start the company again.”
All of this led McCarthy to start Blue Claw Associates in 2018. He now serves as the company’s president.
“We started with two employees and started with reaching out to landscape architects and sending them flyers,” he says. “I built a website that had my old portfolio on it. I also did a job at my parents’ house to get the company going. I got a referral for a job here and there, so it was really by word of mouth at the beginning, but I was making contacts with landscape architects.”
Get in front of them.
As more and more projects came in, McCarthy continued to hire employees who worked with him in the past.
Then, Blue Claw landed its big break with a $2 million project on Nantucket Island from a well-known landscape architect.
“I hired some of the masons I used to have working for me. In fact, some of them left companies they’d been with almost 13 years to come back. I took that very seriously,” he says. “We used that project as a way to hire people, but we also were publicizing it on social media. When you’re working for one landscape architect, it gives you corporate credibility with others at their level. It started to open doors for us.”
In order to find landscape architects and designers to partner with, McCarthy says it was up to him to be proactive and seek them out.
“Initially, I designed a color mailer with lots of imagery on it. And then I wrote cover letters and actually mailed them out to them,” he says. “And then, I did a mass email. I spent painstaking time going to their websites, going to their LinkedIn pages and finding all their contact information. I even built a database for it all.”
McCarthy says keeping an eye out for new construction homes is another way to find partnerships.
McCarthy says staying in constant contact with the architect on the pace of a project is also key to forming a lasting partnership.
“I just went looking for projects,” he says. “If you see a house under construction, you pull over and find out who the builder is. You ask the builder if there’s an opportunity to bid on it and if there’s a landscape architect involved. Then you contact the landscape architect and say, ‘I’m speaking with the builder at this project, and they said you are in charge of picking the contractor. I just wanted to introduce myself and can I send you my portfolio?’”
Social media also turned out to be a wonderful way for McCarthy to find people to partner with.
“Being able to post things on Instagram and finding landscape architects in my area and following them, inevitably they’re going to follow you back because you’re in their industry,” McCarthy says. “And then they follow your work, so in a few months when you go to reach out to them, they say, ‘Oh I know your work’ or ‘I’ve seen your projects.’ It makes that warm introduction much more feasible.”
“When you’re working for one landscape architect, it gives you corporate credibility with others at their level.” Ian McCarthy, president of Blue Claw Associates
McCarthy suggests identifying the architects and designers you want to work with and then follow everyone they follow on social platforms. He says this will get you on their radar and help you see what they’re looking for in a contractor.
“We try and attack it from all different angles,” McCarthy says of finding collaborators. “But, once we do a job with them, then we consider that we’re in a partnership with them going forward.”
Perks of the partnership.
In the past four years, Blue Claw Associates has established relationships with a core group of about a dozen landscape architects and designers.
“For us, it’s a much better model, because we’re just maintaining that relationship with the architect,” McCarthy says. “We always make them look good to their client.”
McCarthy adds the process is pretty simple.
“So, they’ll design a project for a homeowner…and once the design is done, the client asks who will install it and they say, ‘I’ve got a great company I work with called Blue Claw Associates.’ Most of the time I get a job… I’ve never met the homeowner until maybe halfway through the job.”
McCarthy says having these partnerships also allows his company to weed out more undesirable prospects who, unbeknownst to you, may just be gathering quotes from a multitude of businesses.
“If someone’s already spent between $5,000 to $50,000 on a design, they’re invested in doing the project,” he says. “Coming through this avenue, it lets you know they’re really going to do the project rather than someone who’s calling around and getting 10 prices.”
By working with various architects and designers, McCarthy says things don’t tend to get stale, either.
“It’s almost like getting a present every time a new plan comes,” he says. “You want to open it up and see if this one has an infinity pool, or really cool outdoor kitchen or fireplace. It makes it much more interesting than being a company who sells the same thing over and over again. We get to do all sorts of exciting things.”
Because Blue Claw Associates doesn’t offer design work, McCarthy says these relationships are mutually beneficial.
“It gives us the opportunity, when clients call us, we can refer them to one of our partners,” he says. “So now we’re giving them business, and that strengthens our bond. It’s a symbiotic partnership.”
And while those partnerships grow, so does the trust between the two parties.
“Along the way, if they get comfortable with our crews and our quality of work, that’s less time they have to babysit our project,” McCarthy says. “They can go out and find their next client.”
Nurture the connection.
Once relationships with architects and designers are established, fostering them is brought to the forefront of things.
“That’s the secret sauce – you can get in the door with them, but you can lose them really quickly,” McCarthy says. “In the beginning, if you don’t execute the job properly then that’ll be your last opportunity with them.”
Besides producing high-quality work, McCarthy says it all comes down to respect. For instance, if problems do arise during a job, McCarthy says it’s important to respond as a unified front with the architect as opposed to playing the blame game.
“If I find mistakes they’ve made, I usually just say, ‘Don’t worry about it’ or ‘I’ll fix it’ without exposing them,” he says. “Where, if we weren’t in that long-term relationship with them, a typical contractor might say, ‘That’s the architect’s fault – not my fault.’ But we never want to put that blame on them because we want the long-term relationship.”
“(This work is) much more interesting than being a company who sells the same thing over and over again. We get to do all sorts of exciting things.” Ian McCarthy, president of Blue Claw Associates
Knowing how to talk the talk also helps foster those relationships. “It’s really a recipe to our success to speak the language they speak and put their fears aside that we’re not going to compete with them in any way,” McCarthy says.
McCarthy says he learned how landscape architects communicate and their way of doing things by getting involved with a business developer early on.
“I worked side-by-side with him, and I watched him, and I learned how he talked,” he says. “I learned what they’re looking for, how they speak and all that. It was valuable at the time and I didn’t even realize it.”
Nowadays, McCarthy says the best thing he can do to build up his relationships with architects and designers is be readily available to them.
“It’s about being responsive, doing quality work and making sure you are proactively communicating,” he says. “One thing for me is that I always try and answer the phone. Or if I can’t, I try to call them right back or I text them. That’s something that’s missed in our industry. There are a lot of landscapers who say, ‘Oh I’m busy. I’m not answering the phone.’”
McCarthy says he has so many partnerships that it can be overwhelming at times, but there are still a few big fish he has his eye on and is hoping to work with soon.
“In any market you have companies that are looked at as higher-end, and it’s the same thing with architecture and design,” he says. “We try and take care of the ones that started with us first, but there are some that have a prestige about them that we’ve been trying to get involved with and then they finally respond, so you don’t want to turn them down.”
Focusing on these relationships has truly allowed Blue Claw Associates to grow dramatically since its inception.
“We ended up doing $2.5 million in our second year,” McCarthy says. “We had gone from two mason crews just on the Cape to having a third mason crew and now having a softscape install and landscape crew. Going into 2021, we’re up to three landscape install crews, five mason crews and a maintenance crew on the Cape. And then a landscape crew, maintenance crew and mason crew on the island. So, we’re starting off the season with 12 crews. We’re also projected in the $5 million range.”
The Top 100 Commemorative Poster
The Top 100 - Cover Story: The Top 100 • Commemorative Poster
To view Lawn & Landscape's Top 100 commemorative poster, sponsored by Kohler, click the image below.
Editor’s note: A company inadvertently submitted 2019 revenue and did not submit 2020 revenue until after the print issue went to press. This error affected rankings 22-33 in the print edition but has been fixed on this online version of the list.
Weed whackers
Features - Lawn Care
These post-emergent herbicides will help you target problem weeds with more success.
The pitch: Ideal for use on residential and commercial turf areas, SpeedZone EW controls more than 90+ tough broadleaf weeds. It is labeled for use in the most common turfgrass species.
A visual response within 24 hours; weed death in 7-14 days.
The pitch: With products like Celsius WG, Tribute Total and Revolver, LCOs have the ability to effectively address difficult targets, timing and turf types.
Celsius WG is effective on hard-to-control weeds and offers an application window without high temperature limitations.
Tribute Total controls many annual and perennial grassy weeds – including dallisgrass – as well as sedges and kyllinga.
Revolver works faster in warmer temperatures – and offers control of Poa annua in warm-season turf as well as Goosegrass control and dallisgrass suppression.
