COVER STORY: Sustainable Practices

Andy Blanchford, owner of Blanchford Landscape Contractors (BLC) in Bozeman, Mont., lives in one of the most attractive places in the country.
 
He isn’t a native of the area (he grew up on a Pennsylvania farm), which is why he appreciates the beauty and 100-mile proximity to Yellowstone National Park so much. It’s also why he’s committed to protecting it.
 
Several years ago Blanchford joined the Yellowstone Business Partnership, a sort of chamber of commerce for businesses in the greater Yellowstone community. “The organization’s mission really spoke to me,” he says. “Its primary reason for existence is to create a sustainable future for the Yellowstone region. If we don’t preserve that amenity, then we might not have such a great place to live and work anymore.”
 
More than two years ago, Blanchford signed up for the group’s pilot UnCommon Sense initiative – a sustainability training and peer support program. BLC and a group of other local businesses attended five group sessions over a two-year period where they looked at their practices, identified opportunities for improvement, made changes and measured results.
 
BLC graduated from the program last October. Despite a tough early 2008 because of weather-related troubles and difficulty staying fully staffed, the outcome of the UnCommon Sense program has been exciting for Blanchford and his firm. Results include reducing natural gas use, improving employee retention and creating a responsible purchasing model.
 
Coupled with a good team in place and a focus on efficiency, BLC’s sustainability efforts have positioned the firm for growth.

Sustainability’s Key. Though Blanchford had a working list of sustainability initiatives he wanted to tackle for some time, making time to implement them was difficult due to the firm’s seasonality – with about 90 percent of its revenue occurring during the eight-month work season. The UnCommon Sense program was a great opportunity to analyze his company’s day-to-day operations and stay on track in making sustainable changes and measuring the results.
 
Early in the program, BLC created a sustainability mission and vision  to outline how the company could make a difference. Key areas included energy (office and transportation), water (irrigation technology and plant choice) and purchasing (vendor locations and packaging). “The great thing was the program challenges us in these areas all in the framework of operating a business,” Blanchford says. “Because if it’s not profitable, it’s not sustainable, and if you’re not profitable you’re not in business.”
 
In terms of energy, BLC reduced its use of natural gas by 40 percent by installing a timed thermostat and turning the heat down at night. Blanchford also established a corporate average fuel economy goal. “We want to be at 18 miles per gallon by 2010, which is going to require getting rid of our fuel hog trucks and getting more efficient ones,” he says, adding that he’s also considering putting managers in “right-size” vehicles – possibly hybrid cars, like Toyota Priuses.
 
BLC also experimented with a carbon offset program, but eliminated this initiative because Blanchford is still on the fence about offsets. “People who are very passionate about sustainability believe it’s the right thing to do, but I still don’t know how I feel about it,” he says. BLC tried offering offsets in its garden services division. Essentially, the company calculated the greenhouse gas emissions created by driving to the client’s site, and gave the customer the option to pay for that offset as a line item on its invoice. “It had a 10-percent rate of acceptance, but I began feeling like it wasn’t doing a lot, so I stopped it,” Blanchford says, noting the calculations, done through www.carbonfund.org, included driving only and did not consider power-equipment use.
 
BLC also implemented a carpool incentive program for its employees. This program reduces energy consumption and frees up space in the company’s crowded parking lot. Employees who carpool earn a $10 gas card each week. “That’s made it so we can promote sustainability and not have to expand our parking lot at the same time,” Blanchford says. 
 
Water use is another area where Blanchford feels he – and all landscape contractors – can make a difference. By encouraging weather-based irrigation controllers, installing rain sensors and drip irrigation, contractors help clients save water. Reducing clients’ water needs is another tactic. BLC achieves this by using more drought-tolerant plants, giving clients “right-size lawns” for their needs and xeriscaping when appropriate. 
 
On the purchasing side, the ability to source organic fertilizer at a reasonable price has been one of the greatest results of the sustainability program, Blanchford says. BLC tried to do so for five years, but couldn’t justify the costs. Because of UnCommon Sense’s responsible purchasing module, Blanchford reopened the lines of communication with his vendor, who was able to source an organic fertilizer brand that made business sense for BLC. Pesticide use, Blanchford says, is one of the most difficult areas the industry will face when it comes to making sustainable choices. “I don’t think it’s a black and white issue – there’s a lot of middle ground,” he says. “Our policy is we prefer to use IPM; we don’t have a stance that says we never use chemicals because there’s a lot of gray area. Is using RoundUp to kill some weeds less sustainable than making an additional trip with gas-powered equipment and mowing or trimming it? We all have to make our own choices and decide what’s making a difference or not.”
 
The sustainability initiative also saved Blanchford a lot of money in landfill tipping fees. Before the program, most of what BLC dumped at the landfill was fill dirt mixed with concrete, wood scraps and other vegetative materials. Now, employees separate those materials prior to dumping so they can be chipped for landscaping or reused during construction. Not only is BLC recycling, it saw a 37-percent reduction in tipping fees from 2006 to 2007.
 
The sustainability training yielded another surprising result: improved employee retention. The employee-retention rate improved by 40 percent over a two-year period, as employees have begun to take pride in the company’s efforts.

GROWING GETS TOUGH. Like all businesses, Blanchford Landscape Contractors has experienced some bumps in the road. One tough time in particular was between the $500,000 and $1 million revenue mark, which took place between 2000 and 2003, the year the company hit $1.5 million, nearly doubling in size.
 
“It wasn’t just my company anymore,” Blanchford says. “It went from being a business operated in my head to one with systems, processes and procedures that other people could operate. That was a real challenge.”
    
What it took to get over the hump, Blanchford says, was getting the right team in place. Attracting and retaining employees has always been difficult because of BLC’s short season. “Usually, we’re done by November 1,” he says. “Keeping people coming back when you can only offer seven months of employment is pretty difficult.”
       
As a result, BLC experienced high turnover and hired the type of employees who weren’t interested in accountability, decision making and taking ownership. “As we began growing and needed people to make decisions and take ownership over parts of the company, it just wasn’t working,” he says. “It came to a head at the end of ’05 and early ’06. I had to turn over most of the company.” Only four employees remained out of a staff of eight year-round and as many as 30 seasonal employees.
 
Blanchford describes his new hires as more managerial-minded and results-driven then the previous staff who wanted to be told what to do, where to do it and how to do it.
 
Hiring this type of staff required Blanchford to commit to three more year-round salaries, but some changes are worth the expense, he says. Letting so many employees go is a tough decision, Blanchford says, but his only regret is not doing it sooner.  “One of the things I hate most is to have to disappoint someone and have that confrontational conversation,” he says. “But I should have done it about six weeks earlier. I kept hoping things would change, but they weren’t going to. Instead of telling myself they were good people, I needed to be looking at whether they were creating results or not. A wise person once said, ‘It’s better to have an open position than to wish you did.’”
 
Another effort that has stemmed from Blanchford’s ability to “get the right people on the bus,” is a refined budgeting process.
 
Before, Blanchford would set the budget, and the division managers would take a look at it and then set it aside. Now, the company has an office manager/bookkeeper who drives the budgeting process with input from Blanchford and every manager. “It’s now zero-based to some degree, so we’re looking at everything each year and making sure we’re not just increasing based on the previous year,” he says.

LEAN LEARNING. The ever-increasing cost of doing business is a challenge for BLC. For example, the 1 to 2 percent local unemployment rate has driven labor cost up 25 percent in the last year, despite a decrease in the quality of the applicants. In 2007, BLC took part in a consultant-driven lean management training program – an initiative designed to eliminate waste and become more efficient. 
 
“The cost of things are going up, but we can only raise our prices so high and keep it palatable for customers,” Blanchford says. “That bites into margins, but with lean management, we have another way to drive profit to the bottom line.”
 
Though keeping up the lean program has been challenging due to short staffing, the philosophies have translated into some practical changes at BLC.
 
The company has improved its material handling processes with the help of a part-time yard manager.
 
Previously, there was no synergy in how BLC’s divisions ordered materials, Blanchford says. The garden services manager may order plant material from one place, while the landscape division manager may be bringing it in from somewhere else. Now, the division managers submit material lists to the yard manager who coordinates with the plant wholesaler to deliver as much as possible in one trip. “We also have a materials request from on a clipboard in our office now,” Blanchford says. It seems simple, but having a process in place for reordering tree stakes, for example, ensures that an installation crew won’t run out of the items and have to make an extra stop to purchase them on the way to a job. Now, everyone at the company knows the process and the person to contact for reordering supplies. “We’ve definitely taken some of the lean tools and have been able to implement them,” Blanchford says.
 
Lean principles also have prompted a new training program. Rather than a weekly Tuesday morning session, BLC is applying lean management’s “gemba” principle to training. This mind-set, named for a Japanese term that means “the place where the truth can be found,” outlines the benefits of having managers in the field where the work is conducted to understand quality issues as they arise. “Gemba says you should put your eyes on the work and see what’s actually taking place vs. just looking at profit and loss statements and saying ‘I wonder what’s happening here,’” Blanchford says.
 
Blanchford and his two project managers conduct in-field training once a week. In addition to reducing the need for separate training sessions, which weigh heavily on the indirect labor budget, in-field training keeps the managers in touch with what’s going on in the field. “It really opens up the lines of communication,” Blanchford says.
 
Green and lean, BLC is poised for future growth despite some challenges so far this year. For example, June 18 was the first full work week of the 2008 season due to a snowy and rainy spring. Despite this, Blanchford remains optimistic, knowing that internally, he’s preparing his company the best way he can. He says: “We have the structure to do some great growth.”  PLD