Now that the busy spring is over, our Turnaround Tour winners have settled into the season and are getting a grasp on their numbers, managing workloads and getting rid of overhead. As The Harvesters, Bill Arman and Ed Laflamme, continue to work with them, they are seeing some good progress, but a lot of room for improvement.

Wade’s Lawn Service: Back to basics.

Last time we checked in:

Wade’s Lawn Service revamped their sales strategy and brought their fleet up to standards. They also ironed out some hiring issues by paying a few dollars more an hour, which has worked with recruitment and retention. The company also over-hired at the start of the season knowing there would be turnover, and co-owner Deborah Wade says they have enough workers and are happy with the staff.

“The amount we are paying them, they are fine and working here,” she says.

Latest update:

Wade’s must get back to basics when it comes to figuring out gross margins, and how much revenue is coming from maintenance and how much is coming from enhancements.

Deborah has hung a whiteboard in her office with all their employees’ names written on it. The board will also have the hours someone worked in maintenance and enhancements and is a straightforward way to keep track of how much time a worker spent in each area.

The workers will write the hours they spent on maintenance work and on enhancement work on their route sheets. Deborah can collect those and then transfer that information to the whiteboard.

“It’s going to help us see where we can tweak some things,” she says. “It’s going to help us get better systems in place as far as labor hours and who needs to be where and doing what. It’s just making sure we have people in the right box.”

Bill and Ed’s take:

Ed and Bill think the Wades are making money on jobs but no one is sure because there is no system to track it on a detailed scale. The whiteboard is a good place to start to find out where revenue and profits are produced. Once a daily revenue number can be established, then a more accurate budget can be built.

“We’re going to track them daily, and then weekly,” Bill says. “Then we’re going to get that weekly into a month. Then we are going to get the month into what we call the mini budget. Then we can have a trajectory to see where we are going with the financials both revenue and gross margins. That’s all we care about is revenue and gross margin.”

Bill and Ed would also like to change the way Wade’s bills for mowing. Instead of charging per mow and billing at the end of the month, they want to figure out how many mows they do in a season for a customer, and average that out on a monthly payment schedule. For example, if a company mows 30 times a year and charges $75 a mow, they can multiply those two numbers and then that by seven (if it’s a seven-month season), which would come out to about $321 a month.

“We are trying to get them to charge that at the beginning of the month, rather than wait until the end of the month, for cash flow,” Bill says. “That’s a big step for these guys and their customers.”

Vineland Landscaping: Identity crisis

Last time we checked in:

Vineland Landscaping was working on improving accounts receivable, and have moved some clients to pre-billed contracts so they will pay for maintenance services before they are performed, similar to what Ed and Bill want Wade’s to do. They also hired a virtual assistant as a friendly reminder for clients to pay. At 30 days, the client gets an email and at 60 days they get a call. The company discovered customers aren’t annoyed, but more embarrassed they haven’t paid yet, says Will Gruccio, president.

“We were always of the mindset that we don’t want to harass people because no one likes that,” he says. “At the end of the day, people are actually happy about it, which is really interesting, because I did not think that would be the case.”

Gruccio alerted close customers ahead of time that they would be contacted via email as a reminder so they weren’t offended. Over all, he was happy with the change.

“It still is a problem, but it’s better than where we were. I won’t think that it’s fully corrected until next year, but we’re in a better place,” he says.

Latest update:

Two major problems arose recently, the first of which was taking on too much work. Gruccio says he wouldn’t have been able to get the equipment or employees soon enough to maintain the quality of work Vineland wants to deliver.

One idea floating around was dropping some subcontract work Vineland was doing. But that may have meant damaging their reputation with the company they were working with. So instead of dropping the subcontracted work, they did something they never have before and subbed out maintenance work.

“We came up with the solution of subcontracting to a sub that we’re very close with and who understood the quality we have to have,” Gruccio says. “It’s a smaller, local company, and they’ve been wanting to work together, maybe at some point even have a partnership.”

While construction helps keep maintenance afloat, Gruccio and his partner D’Orazio need to decide if they want to keep it long term. Gruccio is passionate about maintenance while D’Orazio is passionate about construction work.

“The difference is in maintenance, theoretically, it’s systemized,” Gruccio says. “The business runs itself once you get it to a certain point, which we’re not at, but I can see how it can become systematic. In construction, it’s impossible to become systematic, because you constantly have material orders. You constantly have issues on jobs.”

But construction work is profitable for Vineland and it’s actually supporting the maintenance work while the duo improves their accounts receivable.

They’ve asked Bill and Ed to find a company they can visit to see how a construction and maintenance company should work.

“My partner is in charge of operations and we’re not as efficient as we should be,” Gruccio says. “He takes responsibility for that. I mean, he’s doing a great job, but we want to see what we can change to get where we need to be. For me, I want to see what a larger company what it looks like from their CEO’s perspective.”

Bill and Ed’s take:

Ed says Vineland panicked a bit in dealing with the “100 days of Hell” and the new work they booked. Ed describes the 100 days of Hell as the start of the season to the Fourth of July, when work settles down. Subbing out the work took place of possibly buying new equipment, which they may have only needed temporarily.

“You can’t just go run out and buys trucks for $50,000,” Ed says. “You only need it for six weeks. Go rent trucks”

After getting through the 100 days of Hell, Ed and Bill received the phone call about possibly dropping construction.

The Harvesters try to drive people to recurring revenue, which is why they admit they don’t like construction. “We are guilty of that,” Bill says. “We’ll always sort of pooh-pooh construction because we’ve seen them go way up and we’ve seen them go crash into the ground.”

But Vineland is making money off construction, and enough money to support the maintenance division, so Bill and Ed recommended Vineland continue doing it. And once the construction job is done, Vineland is doing a good job of getting the maintenance work on the job.

“If you are just doing construction for construction and there is no line to long-range maintenance, then it better be making you money,” Bill says. “Otherwise you are just wasting energy.”

Freedom Lawn & Landscapes: Making progress

Last time we checked in:

Heather and Jeremy Dirksen updated their fleet and replaced old non-profitable clients with new profitable ones. Overall, things were going well and Freedom Lawn & Landscapes continues to make good progress.

Latest update:

Heather and Jeremy Dirksen are operating Freedom on a big piece of land with a big shop, a small garage and a cabin that was about 1,200 square feet that they were using for an office. Since they didn’t need that much space, they moved their office to the garage, and have rented the cabin out saving about $1,500 a month.

“It was way more for what we needed for an office, but for its location, and for the garage that we got and the big shop, it was a good price,” Heather says.

Freedom also had a safety inspection performed after hearing how it helped a company that had a fatality.

“They were able to go back and show that he had done an inspection, they passed the inspection, and that they had done everything within their power to train the employees to prevent accidents like that that happened,” Heather says.

But it’s not all sunshine at Freedom – one of their oldest spray trucks broke down and Jeremy isn’t confident it’d be worth the cost to fix it, which means they may have to purchase another one.

“We haven’t decided a number. I mean, if it’s a couple grand, we might fix it, but if it’s any more than that, we probably won’t,” he says.

Bill and Ed’s take:

The company is in a great spot and heading in the right direction, but Bill and Ed would like to see Jeremy continue to delegate field work so he can work on bigger picture items.

“The problem is he gets swallowed up by it and it takes all his time up,” Ed says. “As he grows, he has to grow out of that. Then I’d like to see him run the operational part of it, but not be required to work in it. By next year he should be there.”

The transition from brothers to business partners wasn’t easy for the Pughs. In fact, two of the brothers came to blows in a conference room, which eventually led to family counseling (more on that later.).

But when their father suddenly passed away, leaving behind several flower shops in Memphis, they had to learn how to work together – or they would fall apart.

When Bill Pugh died in 1987, Mark, president and owner, was only 16, Tim, vice president and owner was 19 and Michael, chief financial officer was 22. The older Pughs helped deliver flowers for years. But Mark’s busy sports schedule didn’t allow him to work regular hours, so he landscaped around the neighborhood.

They had no idea they’d end up owning their father’s business, spinning off several companies or expanding throughout the region.

“I actually took a leave of absence from my job for a few months to help dad’s partner with some of dad’s responsibilities because I thought we were going to sell the business,” says Michael, who was managing a sporting goods store at the time. Instead, with their mom’s help, Tim, bought out their father’s business partner to keep the flower shops in the family.

“One day my brother’s driving a delivery van, the next day he’s the owner of the company,” Michael says. “The employees were twice our age; they’d known us since we were 10 or 12, and now we’re their bosses.

“To have that much responsibility all of a sudden in your early 20s was a challenge. We had no clue how to divide up our responsibilities – or even that we needed to. It took us years to figure out where we fit and how to respect each other.”

Merging ownership.

Although Tim and Michael shared a 10-by-10 office, they struggled to get on the same page. Tim might write a check without telling Michael, leading to an overdrawn account. Employees picked up on the discord, so if they didn’t get the answer they wanted from one brother, they’d go ask the other.

The Pughs worked long, hard hours – even refusing to pay themselves to ensure that employees got paid – but times were tough. When the Gulf War hit in the early 1990s, the economy contracted and the flower shop business shrank from six locations to three.

The brothers rebranded the business to stay top-of-mind in tough times. They worked with marketing consultant John Malmo, who suggested branding the name Pugh’s Flowers with a cute cartoon skunk – an unlikely icon that quickly caught on.

Meanwhile, Mark’s landscape business was booming. The acquisition of a small commercial maintenance company introduced him to yearly commercial contracts, which eventually became his sole focus as a full-service commercial maintenance contractor.

“One day my brother’s driving a delivery van, the next day he’s the owner of the company.” – Michael Pugh

When Mark saw the Pugh’s brand gaining traction, and his brothers saw the commercial landscape business growing, they realized they needed each other. “Subconsciously, we knew we could be better together than we could be on our own,” Mark says. “The draw for Tim and Michael was the rapid growth of the landscape company and the diversification that it brought.”

Michael knew there was no way to grow a retail flower shop the same way they could grow commercial lawn care, which brought in steady income year-round.

“What we brought to the lawn care side was top-of-mind awareness and name recognition, and the value of that branding was tremendous,” he says. “It gave the lawn care business instant credibility when people saw Pugh’s logo on the side of the truck because they’d seen the flower shops in town for years.”

The Pugh brothers merged ownership of their businesses in 1992. As part of the family brand, the landscaping company became Pugh’s Earthworks. Mark gave two-thirds ownership to his brothers and gained one-third ownership in Pugh’s Flowers.

Brawling brothers.

The problems that began brewing in a two-Pugh office started seething with three brothers on board.

“I was used to being autonomous and then when we merged, I had to be accountable to two partners,” Mark says. “All of a sudden to have somebody telling me what I should or shouldn’t be doing and questioning what I was doing was very difficult for me – which was very frustrating for them. So you can see where the lack of respect continued to build.”

For example, Mark would be in the field, he says, “and then all of a sudden I’d get a call from Michael about cash flow. He didn’t understand I’m covered in mud, knee-deep in a hole, fixing an irrigation head. It was the timeframes of how and when we interacted that really caused the strife – not so much what we were interacting about.”

Clashing schedules and unclear division of duties caused interruptions and frustrations all around.

“Part of the problem was that we didn’t have any boundaries set up – for ourselves or our employees,” Michael says. “I’d be in the middle of running payroll and somebody would come into my office and say, ‘Michael, you’ve got to come out here and help us.’ I couldn’t stop what I was doing, and they didn’t understand why. It caused Tim more problems because I’d make the employees mad, so that caused some friction.”

Although employees wanted the brothers to succeed, they started to worry.

“The employees could hear the screaming matches,” Michael says. “We had no private space to have a meeting; we were right there amongst employees, so there was no way to have a disagreement without people hearing about it.

“So it started to affect the employees: ‘Are they going to close the business? Are we going to have jobs?’ And that went against everything our dad wanted.”

It affected the family, too, because the brothers were reluctant to get together outside of work. They did it “for mom’s sake,” Mark says, “but didn’t enjoy it.”

Ultimately, the tension erupted when the feud got physical.

“When it finally came to blows, me and Michael were actually fixing to have a fist fight in our conference room,” Mark says. “That’s how bad it had gotten.

“We grew up beating each other up, and then you get in a business setting and you have to figure out how to respect one another on that level. We realized that we needed counseling because we were going to destroy the business.”

Learning to share responsibility.

When fists started flying, Tim, who Mark says has always been the peacekeeper, suggested counseling. “We just needed a third-party mediator to listen and say, ‘Look, you don’t respect what he does; he doesn’t respect what you do, and if you can’t figure out how to respect one another, it’s not going to work,’” Mark says. “We just had to get over ourselves.”

It only took a couple of counseling sessions to straighten out. The counselor interviewed everyone individually and asked what they each like to do and what they gravitate toward in the business.

“It was pretty clear that I’m not a people person,” Michael says. “I’m an introvert. I like accounting and technology. Tim’s always been the people person in the family, and Mark’s always been the worker bee. When we figured out that everybody had a responsibility and a niche to fill, that was the turning point.”

It was a natural decision for Tim to take charge of Pugh’s Flowers, Mark to lead the landscape company and Michael to become chief financial officer of both. The counselor had them create an organizational chart to establish clear chains of command. Once they divided their responsibilities, they could defer to each other and focus on their strengths without fighting for control.

“By going through counseling, we found a way to respect one another, and having multiple businesses was key to that,” Mark says. “The three of us jointly own all of the businesses equally; they all operate separately. The separation and clear delineation of roles keeps us from killing one another. The three of us have very different skill sets. That’s a prime reason why we have been successful.”

The first change the counselor recommended was separate offices, so Michael relocated to another flower shop for a few years. “Everybody needs a private space,” he says.

“Especially when it’s a family business, it’s hard to share space 24/7. Part of our problem was when Tim and I got mad at each other, there was nowhere to go blow off steam except right there in front of him. When I moved my office, that smoothed things out.”

The counselor’s next recommendation was carving out time for regular communication. The Pughs set a weekly “brother meeting” to touch base, often having lunch away from the office before discussing business. Then, once a month (still to this day) the brothers have a longer meeting to review each company’s operations and finances.

About 15 years ago, the Pughs consolidated their businesses into one location in Memphis that serves as retail headquarters for the flower shops, with space behind the building to house landscaping and corporate offices located upstairs. The family businesses fill all but 4,000 square feet of the 20,000-square-foot building, and the 3 acres out back have doubled to 6 acres as they’ve bought out surrounding neighbors to accommodate growth. Each brother has his own office now – next door to each other.

As the brothers have matured and gained business experience, it’s become easier to make joint decisions. “The biggest thing we did is changed the way we interacted,” Mark says.

“We still have our moments, they’re just not as frequent or as heated as they used to be. There’s a shared commonality now that we can vocalize more than we could in the past.”

They still disagree – like when Mark wants a new truck but Michael wants to make sure they can afford it – but “that’s why it’s good there’s three of us,” Michael says, so there’s always a tiebreaker.

“We may argue, but when you get outvoted and the decision is made, once you leave the room you’re on board. We present it to employees as a unified front.”

As a result, communication and camaraderie have become central to Pugh’s company culture. They regularly provide donuts or pizza for the staff to show employees their appreciation.

They also have two-day managers’ retreats off-site for training, strategy sessions and socializing.

“It allows guys to interact with one another away from work, away from tension, in a fun environment, so that will carry over when they do get into tense moments,” Mark says.

“That’s one of the most important lessons we’ve learned – is the importance of communicating outside of work.”

Diversifying with spin-offs.

Once the Pughs learned to work together, their companies grew organically. They began spinning off separate businesses – creating value for customers and opportunity for employees.

The first spin-off, Lickety Split Couriers, grew out of the flower shops. The company had a delivery department with seven or eight trucks on the road each day delivering flowers.

When the economy took a turn in 2007, they filled that void by delivering other products. When the flower business picked back up and continued to grow, the brothers separated it into a courier service.

“We realized that we needed counseling because we were going to destroy the business.”– Mark Pugh

The next addition came a couple of years ago when Earthworks’ pest control division spun off into Rosie’s Pest Control.

“We’ve always looked at pest control because it’s a very good business with recurring income. We have such a large pool of clients that have pest control, so we’ve got a built-in customer base,” Mark says.

“To keep costs down, we started it within our landscape company, using Earthworks employees, but once we built enough clientele, we split it out.”

Before spinning off the company, the Pughs met with their long-time marketing advisor John Malmo to conceptualize the pest control brand. They came up with an image of Rosie the Riveter and the tagline, “Women declare war on bugs!” Most of the techs are women, at least on the residential side, because most of their residential pest control clients are women.

The Pugh brothers share ownership of these two newer companies with key employees who have grown with each division. “As we’ve expanded and diversified, we’ve tried to promote from within because we want (employees) to have opportunities to own their own business, too,” Michael says.

“We’re always looking for opportunities because we want to keep the people we have,” Mark says. “We’ve got to innovate and grow and create opportunities for younger guys to be able to come up through the ranks. The addition of this (pest control) business allowed us to offer ownership to some key employees in our landscape company.”

Growing strong.

Since spinning off as Rosie’s, the pest control business has doubled in size. Pugh’s Earthworks – the largest company in the family – grew by $1 million in 2015 (a 10-12 percent growth) but saw a relatively flat 2016. This was buffered by record profitability in both the courier business (which grew 15 percent last year) and the flower shops (which grew 4 percent last year, following 8 percent growth in 2015).

Eventually, Mark wants to spin off a chemical division, but for now the Pugh brothers are focused on growing their existing companies. The company has almost 250 total employees, 200 of which work for the landscaping business. Earthworks has six locations (in Memphis, Nashville, and Jackson, Tennessee; Jackson and Southaven, Missouri; and Little Rock, Arkansas) and Rosie’s has potential to expand into all the same markets. “The scale is tremendous because we can open up Rosie’s Pest Control in every landscaping office as an add-on,” Mark says.

Pugh’s Flowers has doubled in size over the last decade as other flower shops consolidate. With three shops in Memphis, and a recently acquired fourth location in Southaven, the flower shop’s long-term growth strategy will include more acquisitions. Meanwhile, as customers of the courier business start requesting deliveries outside of the city – like from Memphis to Little Rock – the Pughs are looking to expand across the region.

“The growth potential of the businesses is huge,” Mark says. “All of the markets we’re in can still grow and we’ve identified other markets within our regional footprint where we want to go. There’s (lots of) opportunity, and we’re not just looking at it (in terms of) one specific location; it’s about capitalizing on our regional presence.”

Some landscape contractors want pristine properties that are meticulously maintained. But James Sottilo would rather see landscapes full of life – being enjoyed by people, pollinators, beneficial pests and, most importantly, all the right soil microbes.

“There’s nothing worse than perfectly crisp hedges and quiet green lawns. And there’s nothing better than seeing a kid walk into a landscape and be mesmerized by bees buzzing or butterflies flying. That’s the exciting part; that’s a living landscape,” says Sottilo, who founded Ecological Landscape Management (ELM) in 2010. “We’re looking to build a thriving ecology on these landscapes, not make them sterile environments.”

With that focus, ELM offers organic lawn, shrub and plant maintenance services that reduce input requirements over time. By focusing on each site’s health from the soil up, Sottilo and his team build strong foundations for more sustainable landscapes.

Organic origins.

Sottilo entered the field in high school, spending spring and summer breaks working for a tree care company his friend’s father owned. After studying horticulture in college, Sottilo worked for several companies, initially as an arborist.

In the early ’90s, the company where he worked began focusing on integrated pest management and plant health care, so Sottilo started thinking about ways to reduce chemical inputs. But then, a personal health scare made him get serious about organic living.

“In the mid-90s, I was diagnosed with a bizarre bone cancer. I was one of only 10 people in the world with that specific cancer,” says Sottilo, who has completely recovered since a surgery replaced his upper jaw with prosthetics 21 years ago. “Looking at me now, you’d never know what I went through, but that really pushed me to find more organic ways of working with the landscape to minimize inputs. I made a decision to live a healthier, more holistic lifestyle.”

That cemented Sottilo’s focus on sustainable landscaping. As plant health care manager, Sottilo helped the company adopt an organic approach during the 90s – then grew the division by 25-30 percent annually.

Sottilo later partnered with the owner of that company to run a sustainable landscaping firm in the Hamptons from 2001 until 2009, where he honed his expertise in soil management. When the recession struck their high-end residential clients, Sottilo gravitated back into urban landscapes and started his own company.

“When I opened Ecological Landscape Management in 2010, the goal was to understand how to optimize the urban landscape,” he says. “A lot of these public projects were built on waterfronts, so fertilizers and pesticides were not allowed. So the question was: How do we build a better ecology without the use of any inputs, or only with organic inputs? It forced us to understand the foundation by looking at soil from a different point of view.”

From compost to consultant.

ELM begins by carefully analyzing a site’s soil profile. Then, based on the nutrients needed to support the plant palette (which is usually determined by the architect or designer), Sottilo concocts a customized compost tea for each landscape.

ELM spends eight months adding specific food sources to each project’s compost pile to build the ideal microbial balance. For example, “compost piles for Memorial Park in Houston are going to be grown out with rudbeckia on them, because rudbeckia are incredible mycorrhizal colonizers. So, when they add the compost to the soil, it already has the exact microbial components we want,” Sottilo says. “There’s more of a science to it than just throwing fertilizer on a landscape.”

With this approach to manipulating soil nutrients, ELM reports an average plant loss of half a percent – compared to the industry average of 8 percent. The firm carefully tracks microbial increase over time so clients can see results, in the landscape and in the metrics.

During restoration of Central Park’s Grand Army Plaza, for example, project delays kept nursery stock above ground too long before planting, and the newly installed London Plane trees showed signs of stress. Sottilo’s soil tests revealed low microbial carbon and nitrogen content and weak mycorrhizal colonization rates. He prescribed a sorghum cover crop to break up compacted soil while releasing carbon and producing mycorrhizal spores. Within six months, the microbial biomass grew 67 percent while mycorrhizal colonization rate increased from 6 to 14 percent.

Sometimes, ELM’s role is concentrated during the capital phase of a project. Other times, the firm may provide ongoing maintenance – including organic soil amendment applications, soil moisture management programs, pruning or other services. ELM also releases beneficial pests like lacewings, ladybugs, scale destroyers and predator mites to combat pests and disease naturally.

Compost teas composed the bulk of ELM’s work when the firm first started. Then the firm transitioned from services into sustainability consulting, with a focus on “increasing the acclimation of the landscape and the overall ecology of the site.” Sottilo says consulting now constitutes a quarter of his business, and he plans to keep growing in that direction.

Uncommon collaboration.

To influence a site’s ecology from the ground up, ELM has to get involved in large-scale landscape projects early on – which requires constant collaboration with other firms. Over time, Sottilo has built a reputation and relationship with other landscape contractors, landscape architects and property managers. As these partners have grown and expanded across the country, they’ve taken ELM with them.

“They see the value, not just in our service but also in our creative ideas for making projects more sustainable,” Sottilo says. “They bring us in on the front end of projects and integrate us into the overall process, so we’re part of the design or engineering team’s presentation to project owners.”

To build on ELM’s experience, Sottilo also pulls independent experts into projects. He may involve a soil scientist, agronomist or mycologist specialized in mycorrhizal fungi – like the one who recommended rudbeckia for Memorial Park.

“We’re bringing in perspectives outside the traditional landscape realm to figure out the best way to approach projects,” Sottilo says.

This kind of collaboration isn’t common in the industry, and Sottilo doesn’t want local contractors to feel threatened – he wants to partner with them.

“I wish there was more peer collaboration in the industry,” Sottilo says. “The most important thing is for everyone to understand their niche, because nobody can be an expert in everything. Collaborating with a team of experts provides a better end product, and also gives project owners more confidence that you’re looking out for the best interests of the project more than your own personal best interests.”

Sustainable growth.

Partnerships have expanded ELM’s reach beyond its headquarters in Smithtown, New York. The firm works on high-profile projects coast to coast, including Central Park, Harvard Business School and the St. Louis Gateway Arch. ELM’s business is 60 percent commercial work, 30 percent government and municipal, and 10 percent high-end residential.

“At any given time, we’ll have anywhere from four to eight projects going on out of state,” says Sottilo, who travels every couple weeks, visiting each site about once a month.

With annual revenue near $1.4 million, ELM maintains about 12 percent annual growth and 24 percent profit margins with only seven employees. Sottilo says the movement to green up urban spaces will continue to catapult the firm’s growth.

“In high-end public and commercial campuses, sustainability is the primary driving force over project design. The residential market wants it too, but there’s still a learning curve until the maintenance industry can provide organic landscaping beautifully and affordably,” says Sottilo, noting that ELM is working to develop residential programs that offer sustainable landscape management at the right price. “As science continues to move forward at a rapid pace, the materials will become available to maintain that aesthetic at a lower cost. It will only be a couple of years before it’s all in place.”

The topic of pollinators in lawn care is one of the most fascinating I have encountered in my career. Each time I think I have my arms around the subject, another unexpected twist or turn will come my way and smash all of my preconceived notions of how we care for lawns, interact with our customers, and act as good stewards of the environment.

Pollinators like the honeybee and bumblebee have been having a tough time of it in the past few years. If it’s not colony collapse disorder causing entire hives of honeybees to disappear suddenly, it’s the varroa mite, poor nutrition or pesticide exposure that ails them. The challenges to commercial beekeeping, those hives that travel across the nation pollinating everything from almonds in California to blueberries in Maine, have seeped into the native bee populations, affecting them as well.

The bulk of the problem lies outside of professional lawn care, as we are only responsible for a tiny fraction of the pesticides used in agriculture and we have no need to employ commercial pollinators in our industry.

That said, we come under intense scrutiny for our use of all pesticides, not just insecticides, because we tend to be the ‘low-hanging fruit’ for those environmental activists who feel the need to do something when confronted with a crisis. New laws and regulations are passed, usually targeting the very people who use pesticides responsibly and ignoring completely those who have no training at all.

As we start the new lawn care season, it’s a good idea to pause for a moment to consider the products we use and how we use them. By reviewing some simple principles, we can provide our customers with the results they expect and enhance pollinator safety, too.

Know your enemy.

Understand the weeds, insects and diseases that infest your lawns, their life cycles and the best management practices for controlling them. Have a working knowledge of cultural practices that can be employed to reduce the need for pesticides. Know what products will control best while impacting least. For instance, knowing that preventive grub controls have a definite window of time for application is not only essential for good control, it helps you to avoid applying when there’s no chance of success.

Eradication is not an option.

A solid best management practice is to understand the number of insects the lawn can tolerate without damage being apparent. Consider that a healthy, well-managed lawn can tolerate up to eight to 15 Japanese beetle grubs per square foot successfully. Even with a well-executed insecticide application, not every insect will be controlled. However, eradication should never be your goal, but rather it should be managing the insect population below the damage threshold.

Keep them separate.

Insecticides kill insects and honeybees are insects. That simple arithmetic should always be in the back of your head as you formulate your lawn care program. When you do decide an insecticide application is the best course of action, your awareness of pollinators in your environment will go a long way towards protecting them – keep the pesticides over here and the pollinators over there.

In lawn settings, turf grasses do not require pollinators for reproduction, but many lawn weeds do. Controlling flowering weeds prior to an insecticide application will keep pollinators from being attracted to the lawn. Another good strategy is to mow off weed flowers prior to an insecticide application.

The formulation of the insecticide has an impact as well. When sprayed on the lawn surface, insecticides are right on the leaf surface where pollinators can incidentally encounter them. Using a granular formulation, such as a fertilizer/insecticide combination product, allows the insecticide to fall quickly to the soil surface out of reach of pollinators. As always, read and follow the label directions to the letter, including passing along to the customer any information and instructions, such as watering the product in after application.

“Bee” the expert.

These days, almost every turf grass conference has at least one session devoted to the issue of pollinators. Cooperative extension services nationwide have online resources available on turf grass management that are indispensable. Pesticide manufacturers have developed literature that serves to educate both you and your customers on the safe use products.

The National Association of Landscape Professionals has training and resources available. Another fantastic resource is industry message boards where you can interact with your peers, asking questions and offering advice.