Smart strategies for sustainable company growth in landscaping

Growth is great — but to achieve significant company growth, business owners have to keep a few things in mind.

At Lawn & Landscape’s Business Builders Summit in Nashville, the “Dos and Don’ts of a Growing Company” panel discussed just this and how companies can take things to the next level.

Panelists included John Puryear, owner and CEO of Puryear Farms; Bruce Moore Jr., president and CEO of Eastern Land Management; Niwar Nasim, president of Nasim Landscape; and Mark Tomko, founder and president of Valor Landscape.

“I’m a firm believer in growth, but not at all costs,” Puryear says. “If growth costs you reputation — that’s the time to pump the brakes. Like Warren Buffet says, ‘If you make a mistake that costs me money, I’ll be forgiving, but if you make a mistake that costs me reputation, I’ll be brutal.’”

Retention is a reason for success

That’s why all the panelists say the biggest key to growth is retention — of customers and employees.

For Moore Jr., that means the sky is not always the limit. Company growth needs to be careful and calculated, with a few indicators of if things are trending in the right direction.

“We’re pretty conservative in the way we grow,” he admits. “We’re passionate about client and employee retention, and when those things start to flip, something is going on in the operation. You’ve got to make sure you’re maintaining that focus while you’re scaling and growing.

“It’s all about team,” Moore Jr. adds. “We manage with three lanes — team, clients and assets. We try to keep it as simple as possible and have happy faces in each lane.”

Nasim agrees, saying his employees’ wellbeing and commitment has been what’s fueled his company’s growth lately.

“We’ve been known to be a very nurturing company,” Nasim says. “Our people feel like they’re part of a family and respected. I’m proud of that and it’s something we can brag about.”

And to thank them for that, Nasim notes the business must continue expanding in order for those employees to flourish.

“We have a very young leadership team, and I know they’re going to have expectations to grow,” he says. “There’s an expectation for myself to create opportunities for them, and I know I have to be more open-minded.”

Nasim adds that a potential acquisition on the horizon for Nasim Landscape could create a ton of opportunities for its existing team and those coming on board in the future.

Puryear adds that what goes hand in hand with retention is recruitment — another key focus for growth.

At this company, recruitment traditionally happens through current employees recommending friends and family, which is great, but you have to be mindful of who is a right fit and who is not — otherwise you can stunt the growing process.

“The No. 1 source to bring people in is word-of-mouth from people we’ve hired,” Puryear says. “But one bad hire can have a multiplier effect, and one bad hire can become four or five bad hires.”

Work on work/life balance

When the right crews are onboard, Puryear and the other panelists agree that giving them a quality work/life balance helps keep them energized and excited — therefore fueling company growth.

“Our No. 1 goal and core value is family,” Puryear says. “Making sure we create a good balance between work and home is essential. We won’t take a job that’s too far away because I want my people home for dinner or able to attend their kids’ soccer games.”

Moore Jr. mentions how Eastern Land Management stays on the pulse of what employees are looking for throughout the year and encourages them to suggest solutions to make their lives easier.

“Listen to your people,” he says. “Ask them what they want in a company. Something we do on an annual basis is have town hall meetings at each of our branches. We’re doing a lot of different things for our employees.”

Tomko takes pleasure in knowing his staff enjoys what they do and looks forward to coming to work.

“We have fun — there’s no reason to go to work if you don’t have fun,” Tomko says. “If they’re going to be with us for two-thirds of their day, there’s no reason they shouldn’t be having fun.”

While work/life balance is essential for employee satisfaction, it’s equally important for leadership, too.

“If you want to have work/life balance as an owner, then you have to build an incredible management team,” Tomko says.

Moore Jr. adds that delegation is also a part of that balance.

“You’ve got to be able to delegate,” Moore Jr. says. “When we started to scale and bring on team members, it created a better work/life balance for me. It’s been really helpful to me in not getting burnt out while still moving the company forward.”

It may be cliché for a reason, but it boils down to communication for Nasim — communication with his team and with his family.

“Communication is one of the biggest challenges in our businesses,” Nasim says. “I’ve had to learn how to really communicate because it’s a rollercoaster. I find that the amount of attention I give back home and to my family allows me to be the best leader I can at work.”

Be an open book

Communication can mean a lot of things to a lot of people, but for the majority of these panelists, it means full transparency within the whole company.

“Trust your people. We’re a completely open-book company,” Puryear says of showing every one of the 120 employees in the company the P&L.

“For the general population of the company, we do it twice a year,” he explains. “We do a mid-year report with rolling budget projections to show them where we’ll end up for the year, and then we do an end-of-year State of the Company…at that time, we release the profit sharing and payout the profit sharing… you can’t have a profit-sharing system unless you have a completely transparent process.”

Puryear notes that some of it can be a little more high-level thinking that employees might have trouble understanding, so they try to make it as digestible as possible with graphs and easy to process information.

Tomko agrees and says he has a similar approach.

“We have classes to teach them how to read a P&L and what does it mean,” Tomko says. “We share our financials on the 15th of the month with everybody…You could go to any person in our organization and ask them, ‘What we’d do in April and what are we projected to do in May?’ and they know. Every single person knows financially what’s expected of them. We hide nothing — we’re 100% open book.”

Is M&A a ‘yes’ or ‘no?’

Finally, M&A was a hot topic at the Business Builders Summit, and is around the industry, so panelists were asked if they saw M&A as a “do” or a “don’t” for fueling company growth.

For Moore Jr., that may be on the horizon someday, but he’s not ready to let his foot off the gas in terms of growing his company organically.

“We’re definitely open to bringing in other companies who make sense culturally,” he says. “But we’re really focused on building our business organically. As people say, I still have that fire in my belly.”

Nasim shares similar sentiments.

“Our growth has been all organic and we plan on continuing that over the next two or three years,” Nasim notes. “Currently, it’s not in the plans but I wouldn’t rule it out either.”

Tomko, who sold a previous company he owned to private equity and did not love the experience, also doesn’t anticipate selling any time soon.

“We love competing with private equity,” Tomko jokes. “But we learned a lot…We know they’re bringing sophistication and some talent.”

For Puryear, his main focus is making sure his employees’ children and even grandchildren want to come to work at Puryear Farms in the future.

“We have one whole wall (in the office) of second-generation employees,” Puryear says. “And I love that wall. I’ve already marked off a third wall for third-generation employees.”

The author is senior editor with Lawn & Landscape magazine.