Everyone has bad days, but in 2005, Tommy Herren had reached a pinnacle of exhaustion and frustration in his landscaping business, Landscape Werks. He was officially burnt out.
“I was fed up with all there was about landscaping and employees,” he says. “It was a day when I just came home and thought I wanted to quit. Everyone has one in their career.”
Soul-searching ensued. Herren’s problem was staffing and, as a result, he didn’t believe he was serving his residential maintenance and landscaping clients as well as he should have been. “I faced a dilemma that many landscape companies face – the price you pay for not having quality people,” says Herren of his five-employee firm, which was grossing about $250,000 at the time. “I couldn’t get where I wanted to go. I was running really hard just to keep things together.”
| CONTRACTOR FILE |
The Lighting Geek Revenue: 2008 (projected) $800,000 - $1 million 2007 $600,000 2006 $250,000 Employees: Year-round 2 Seasonal 1 Service Breakdown: Landscape lighting 100% Client Breakdown: Residential 80% Commercial 20% Contact Details: 4821 Clydebank Way |
What Herren ultimately recognized was he wasn’t happy. He considered throwing in the towel, but one issue lingered: He loved landscape lighting.
That night he decided there was no reason he couldn’t focus on lighting full-time. “I got up the next day and fired everybody,” Herren says. It was September, and after disbanding the company, Herren rode out the year picking up landscape and lighting side jobs while mulling over his future in low-voltage lighting.
A GEEK IS BORN. That winter, Herren shared a booth with another professional at a Sacramento home and garden show. Tired, with a fading voice at the end of a long day of giving his sales pitch, Herren began simplifying what he does: “I finally just started saying, ‘I get excited about lighting. I’m a lighting geek.’”
The off-the-cuff comment seemed to work. “People could somehow relate to that,” Herren says. “I went home, peeled the old sticker off my truck and asked the sign company to come up with a logo for The Lighting Geek.”
A self-described “student of marketing,” Herren’s strategy was to build a marketing plan so strong that if anyone thought about landscape lighting, his name would come up first. He understood this would take a significant investment. “Most companies don’t understand the power of marketing and don’t market enough,” he says. “In the beginning I invested a lot in my marketing plan. For the first year, everything I made, to the tune of about $60,000, I put into marketing.”
CRAFTING AN IMAGE. Step one was creating an image and branding it, Herren says. “I wanted a return on investment in my marketing, but I also just wanted to get my name out there.”
A name like The Lighting Geek lends itself to getting noticed and being remembered, Herren explains. “It’s an unusual combination of being funny and being serious at the same time,” he says. “That’s what I like about it. It’s goofy and over the top, but by the same token, people see geeks as experts.”
One way Herren plays up his firm’s expertise is through its uniforms. He and his two employees dress in SWAT gear. “We do live demos for our customers and we want to be tech-y,” he says of the in-home demonstrations the company conducts for prospective clients. “It’s the whole Ghostbusters look. We want them to understand that we have a sense of humor, but we’re really serious when we get down to business.”
The SWAT gear concept came about a year ago when Herren was seeking a practical alternative to the electrician’s tool bag he used during lighting demos. He had a tough time keeping track of his equipment during the nighttime demos so he sought a solution in a police gear store. He picked up a sample tactical uniform, which features a vest and pants or shorts with various pouches and tool mounts. Herren liked the idea of having all of his tools close at hand. Plus, the gear could serve two purposes – the practical side of keeping track of tools and the technical, geeky aspect of the company’s image.
The uniforms include embroidered shirts, tactical shorts or pants, vests and thigh mounts, which hold tools including a voltammeter, an assortment of wire cutters, lasers for pointing in the dark and general utility tools.
Herren’s glasses round out his geek image, and so does the fact that he’s a “shameless promoter” of his business, going as far as signing autographs at home shows. “I do it with a humor about me in a way that everybody has to laugh,” he says.
TWEAKING HIS ADS. Aside from image-crafting efforts, one way Herren markets his business is through traditional print media in local home improvement magazines. At the suggestion of a client who is part of The Lighting Geek’s target demographic – households with combined income of $150,000 or more – Herren tweaked his ads’ messages and saw great results.
“It’s more of an attitude shift than anything,” Herren says of his new ad campaign, which started about 18 months ago. “Instead of selling a service, I became an artist. Instead of talking about fixtures, I started talking about what I was going to do with them.”
Before the strategy shift, Herren’s ads were “busy” and told customers what services The Lighting Geek provided in a bullet-point format, and touched on technique and effects like “uplighting” and “downlighting.”
The client who helped Herren redraft his message made him realize that his target customers don’t want to be educated about landscape lighting. They want their homes to be beautifully illuminated – and they’re not really concerned with how it’s done.
Since the change, Herren’s ads feature dramatic photos that show rather than tell. “It’s a picture of what I can do vs. ‘This is how I do it,’” he says. “Without saying it, the message is ‘If this is what you’re after, we need to talk.’”
The changes have helped his two-year old business take off, Herren says. His average job has increased from $3,000-$5,000 to around $15,000. “The level of client has gone way up,” he says. “The ‘shopping’ has tapered off. As time has gone on, I’m getting calls from people who just want me to do their lighting.”
Though Herren says his marketing plan does an excellent job of prequalifying customers, resulting in a 95-percent closing rate, not everyone is ready to buy. “I prequalify heavily on the phone,” Herren says. “I ask what they’re looking to have accomplished with lighting and I don’t hide what I charge. I’ll ask if they have any idea what professionally installed lighting costs.”
Herren also describes his company as one that’s “tenacious about customer satisfaction,” and he sees that as an extension of marketing.
“To me, marketing is what everyone says about you when you’re done with the job,” he says. “As most people see it, marketing is what gets people to call you. But we want to make our customers so happy that they want to tell 100 people how awesome we are.”
A major part of that, Herren believes, is staffing. A company’s employees reflect its image – from the quality of their work down to the way they interact with customers, and so Herren has learned to be selective. “I’m picky about what they wear, I’m picky about the fact that they can speak clearly,” he says. He even pays for employees’ haircuts. “I want them to have reasonable haircuts, so I pay for them.”
In the landscape business, Herren learned the hard way that reliable, quality employees can make or break a company. When he was ready to hire his first employees for The Lighting Geek this past winter, he knew he had to change his tactics. “I had been finding employees the same way for 25 years and expecting different results,” Herren says of traditional newspaper ads and employee referrals.
Those methods never yielded great results, so this time he put an ad on Craigslist – the free online classified ad community. But it wasn’t just any “help wanted” ad. In no uncertain terms, it spelled out Herren’s expectations. “I am sick and tired of people who come late, don’t show up, don’t call and who are not engaged at work. I don’t want to hear reasons why people didn’t do what they said they would do. Definitely no drugs, DUIs, etc. If you are not looking for long-term employment, don’t waste my time. I am picky about who represents my company, but I take care of those who get the job done…” The listing also included the fact that Herren sought a candidate who was good with his or her hands, was willing to do hard work and – most importantly – someone who was willing to learn a craft. He spelled out the pay scale, too – starting at $9-$10 per hour with the potential to earn $20 an hour plus bonuses – and he said there would be homework.
He received 200 resumes in six hours. About a quarter of them were good. Herren quickly weeded out those who sent him an e-mail asking “where do I send my resume” instead of just sending it along in the first place and he nixed resumes from male candidates that came from female e-mail addresses. “At first I thought it was strange that half the people who sent me resumes had female names. I wasn’t opposed to hiring a woman at all, but soon I realized they were coming from Jane@yahoo.com, but the applicant’s name was Michael. If you can’t get your own Hotmail account for god sakes, how lame can you be?”
In January, Herren hired two employees from the Craigslist post, both of whom work for him today. And, as promised, there is homework. He assigns his employees sections from lighting text books, typically after they run into issues in the field. They follow up with discussions at work.
“It balances in-the-field and classroom training so that it all makes sense,” Herren says.
These days, “Life is good,” is Herren’s mantra. And he’d like to add one more employee this year. “We’re really doing well with two guys,” he says. “With three plus myself, we could do $1 million this year.” The Lighting Geek has come a long way from “running really hard just to keep things together.” PLD