Building back up

What sets design/build services apart from traditional maintenance?

Well, if you ask the staff at Open Envelope Studio in Austin, Texas, it’s the meticulous, conscientious nature of the work.

“With design/build the attention to detail is so important,” says Blake Shaw, the company’s project manager. “With maintenance you can say, ‘Sorry we missed that — we’ll get that next time we visit.’ I can’t have the homeowner or client wondering why something got missed or tell them we’ll get to it. I’m going to solve that problem right then and there. You have to deal with everything as it happens.”

Post-Covid crash

While performing these types of services are no small feat, design/build business owners say a recent slowdown in work has made it even harder.

“We’re on par with last year,” reports Nathan Filip, president of Premier Outdoor Environments in Elmhurst, Illinois. “We definitely have to work more to get the sale. It’s not like the COVID times when people were handing you blank checks just to get on your schedule.

“It’s gone back to pre-COVID times,” he adds. “The work is still there; we haven’t seen a decline in projects or anything.”

Scott Parker, owner of the New Jersey-based Parker Landscape Design says the COVID boon in design/build work really spiked their revenue the past few years, so now it’s about setting their sights on more achievable numbers. In 2024, the company garnered about $2.6 million in revenue.

“It’s been extremely good. Although there have been swings up and down. Each year, we fluctuate with our revenue. COVID skewed things for us where we were hitting such high revenue levels that we had to get used to coming back down to reality again with our normal revenue levels,” he says.

“I don’t think we’ll ever see something that powerful again. However, more people are staying at home just because the price of travel right now is pretty ridiculous.”

Like most other companies, Angelica Norton, owner of Open Envelope Studios, says her business was extremely busy in the early 2020s. Nowadays, they’re feeling the aftereffects.

Norton notes their backlog isn’t as jam-packed as it’s been in years prior, adding that they should have anywhere from four to 10 projects in the pipeline but not this year.

“It’s unusual,” she says.

Drumming up the work

Norton says this slowdown has caused her to rethink her company’s marketing and advertising strategies.

“We have never paid for advertising or marketing — it’s always been word of mouth,” she says. “So that’s on my mind to figure out how to do that and still be authentic and get the same kinds of clients we’ve always gotten.

“We don’t want to be finding people who don’t appreciate us or who treat us a different way. There’s a level of respect for the corner of the market we’re in.”

She adds that participating in local project tours has always been a way to find prospective clients.

“We usually do one or two tours a year,” Norton says. “The tours are of an existing project and so people go and look at five to 10 projects on this tour to meet the designers and the builders to try and get a sense of whether or not they want to work with them. That usually gets us one to two projects.”

While Parker admits his New Jersey market is saturated with competition — there’s a few things he does to set himself apart from the rest.

“Our market is extremely competitive,” he says. “There are a tremendous amount of contractors out there and we happen to be pretty unique, with some competitive advantages most do not have. As the owner, I deal with every customer before the job, during a job and even post project. We have a same-day return phone call policy as well that also helps us.”

In addition to providing superior customer service, Parker says expanding their service offerings has also helped keep business coming in.

“We’re pretty diversified with the services we offer, which is especially helpful during a recession,” he says. “We do services like drainage work that tends to be somewhat recession-proof.”

Though Parker acknowledges there’s both pros and cons to offering more services.

“The good would be that some people want to use one company to do everything, and the bad would be that a lot of contractors get involved in everything and try to be the ‘jack of all trades.’ They try to take on too much and don’t really have the expertise… that can lead to customer service and quality declining,” he says.

Filip adds he’s enticing customers to move forward on projects by providing additional help with securing funding.

“We’re looking into different financing options as well for people who want to do the project but don’t necessarily have the cash upfront to do so,” he says. “It’s hit or miss. Some people take full advantage of it.”

Norton says as the warmer weather unfolds, she expects the phones to start ringing more.

“I’m hoping that as the weather changes and we get into spring, that’s when we see things picking up and people want to be in the sunshine and be outside,” she says. “I feel like it changes brain chemistry, and it gives them the urge to do something in their yard. I’m hoping there’s some of that that naturally picks up again.”

Going slow and steady

As the design/build work becomes harder to come by, some companies are making the cautious decision to curb growth and stay the course.

Parker says that’s his plan. As his company reaches it’s 75th anniversary, and he celebrates a milestone birthday, expanding simply isn’t on his radar.

“We don’t want our customer service experience to slip so we are not growing our company anymore,” he says. “I’m turning 50 this year. The older I get, the money is less important to me than really making our customers extremely happy and giving them a phenomenal, finished product.”

Norton says Open Envelope Studios is also putting the pause on growth.

“We actually shrunk over the last couple of years intentionally down to six,” she says. “We’ve been up to about 14 but we feel like this is the sweet spot of four designers, our office manager and our project manager.”

The company, which did about $2 million in revenue in 2024, relies on subcontractors. But those subcontractors are also feeling the pinch related to the scarcity of projects.

“For a lot of the subcontractors I work with, it’s been a little slower and they’re not booking up their calendar like they have in the previous years. But they are staying busy,” Shaw says.

“It’s that time before the next contract when they’re just waiting and you have to get through that downtime when the phone doesn’t ring.”

Norton says that makes them eager to get to work, even if it means lowering bids.

“They are hungrier for work, so they are willing to be more competitive with pricing,” she says.

“In turn, we’re also trying to arbitrarily lower our quotes and estimates to entice someone to move forward. We just did that with one of our biggest projects we’re moving to construction…before the meeting it was $460,000 so we slashed $50,000 just to make sure we got this project.”

Too many unknowns

Another point of contention in the design/build world is all the unknowns concerning government regulations, the economy and impending tariffs.

“It seems like the tariffs aren’t really affecting our market yet,” Filip says. “I’m not too worried about it. I think a lot of the products and materials we use and sell are domestically made. I don’t foresee it being an issue, but you never know.”

Filip says he’s sure the recent state of the economy contributes greatly to the hesitancy he’s facing from prospective clients. It’s a sad but true fact that prices aren’t going down anytime soon, he says.

“The economy and inflation just go back to us having to work a little bit harder to get the sale,” he says.

“Prices on average rose 5- to 10% over last year, and that’s been the trend over the last few years. Stuff definitely costs a lot more than it did a few years ago, and that’s why it’s a little harder to get the sale.”

Despite the uncertainty, Parker says he’s upbeat and sure that things will turn around soon.

“We’re very optimistic,” he says. “I do have a lot of contractor friends who are pretty pessimistic and thinking all doom and gloom, but I’m still pretty optimistic. I think it’s going to be a good year.

“I think there will be further inflation, and it may be somewhat rocky due to the future regulation changes happening right now with the government and our country but overall, I think it’s going to be extremely positive — some short-term pain for long-term gains,” Parker adds.

Every time a new administration enters the white house, Norton says it impacts business. This time she says they felt the effects right away.

“Right after the election, there was a freeze on grants and funding across the board — no funding was going to anybody,” she says.

“One of our client’s their business relies on these grants. They had to cut 25% of their project because they just didn’t know if their business would get funded. So, it was an immediate loss for us. Clients get gun-shy when stuff like that happens.”

The author is senior editor with Lawn & Landscape.