Why Mullin stopped residential services to focus on commercial work

Chase Mullin, founder and president of Mullin, based in Louisiana, says it was a long time coming in terms of the company’s decision to stop performing residential maintenance and design/build work at the start of 2025.

“Roughly 10 years ago, we realized we were in a position where we really kind of capped out the market that we’re in, which is the greater New Orleans area, in terms of residential work,” he explains.

“At that time, we were primarily design/build with a decent amount of residential maintenance. We had a bit of commercial services, but not many in our revenue mix.”

And 10 years ago, Mullin made the decision to slowly start shifting its focus toward commercial work. Mullin adds he favored this move more than attempting to open additional brands in markets outside of New Orleans.

“We believed it made more sense to try and grow the market segments we were in — in lieu of going to another market and opening up another residential branch,” he says. “So, with that, we put a fair amount of energy into growing commercial and keeping residential fairly plateaued. Outside of a COVID bump in residential revenue for a couple of years, we did a great job with that.”

But even despite the COVID boon in design/build work over the last few years, Mullin says he knew it was time to reevaluate the residential portion of the business.

“We took a really deep dive under the hood of our residential design/build last year,” he says. “We realized that outside of the divisional P&L, we were allocating a lot of resources to residential. There was a pretty large amount of marketing spend that went to residential, a large percentage of (administration), finance and accounting costs that were all necessary because of the residential business we were doing.

“We figured out that we were not making the margins that we thought we were making with residential,” Mullin adds.

But before making a rash decision, Mullin says he and his team carefully thought out what their next step should be. They even went as far as doing some forecasting for the year ahead with and without residential work incorporated into the budget.

Mullin says his team built three different budgets for 2025 to forecast what the year would look like with and without residential maintenance or design/build.

“We realized in creating those three variations the most appealing budget was the one without residential,” he says.

So, at the start of the year, Mullin says it was time to make the move. Instead of slowly turning away residential work and continuing to perform maintenance on a few, high-valued properties — Mullin says he wanted to get out of it all at once.

“We’ll take a little hit on the bottom line, but not really, and we’ll have that much more time and energy to put into the parts of the business we’ve seen experience tremendous growth and profitability,”he says. “On Jan. 6, we turned residential design/build off.”

Even though that choice wasn’t made lightly, Mullin notes it did mean losing a few valued team members.

“We made the really tough decision to lay off a few talented landscape architects and designers. We did our best to give them the softest landing that we could,” he adds.

Now, the company has about 220 employees but that will reach closer to 250 during peak season.

Selling off its residential maintenance contracts was the next step in the process. Mullin says because of the quality of their contracts — this didn’t take long at all.

“Our residential account package was about 50 super-high-end residential accounts that we really curated over an extended period of time,” he says. “They were highly desirable…What we did with residential maintenance, is we created a small, pretty simple marketing package and called a couple local, competitors of sorts and sent them that package and offered it to them. We got some really quick interest in it and made a deal almost immediately.”

Since making the switch in January, Mullin says his company has easily been moving onward and upward. His company went did about $23 million in revenue in 2024, and is projected to achieve about $27 million this year.

“The team’s morale and having everybody on the same page and rowing in the same direction has made us much more streamlined in our focus,” he says. “We’re two months in and we’re well ahead of target in terms of sales and revenue.”

Despite no longer having reoccurring residential contracts to fall back on, Mullin says he isn’t too worried as there has been an uptick lately in commercial construction — something he, and the industry, has been holding out hope for.

“To further my optimism, we’ve seen a lot of commercial construction jobs that were paused due to interest rates, high insurance and other factors… a lot of these jobs have started to move forward,” he notes.

While it’s great to see progress, and profitability, trending in the right direction, Mullin notes it was a fairly risky endeavor and recognizes all the hard work his team has put in over the years.

“I would say that over the last five years in particular, we’ve done some incredible residential jobs and put the feathers in our caps so to speak. We’ve built the coolest jobs and have checked all those boxes.

“Going from a company that was building and maintaining award-winning landscapes, to a company that gets any residential lead or phone call and declines it — it’s a very bold move,” he says. “We’re super optimistic for 2025 and already starting to build a pretty nice backlog for 2026.”

For anyone looking to make similar moves, Mullin suggests really looking into it thoroughly before just turning the faucet off in terms of residential work.

“We took our time, and budgeted and made certain that what we were doing was a well thought out decision,” he says. “It needs to be really thought out, to do it as a knee-jerk reaction would not be intelligent. You need to understand the overall impact it has on the business — not just short-term but long-term as well.”

Once a decision like this is made though, Mullin says leadership has to own it through the good, bad and the ugly.

“At Mullin, I’m really fortunate to have surrounded myself with a leadership team of really great and really smart people who care about the business as much as I do,” he says.

“However, part of my role, is to be the one who ultimately makes decisive decisions. For us, it was a really bold move to turn off residential, but I got their support and some guidance but ultimately said ‘OK team, we’re doing it.’”

Mullin acknowledges that moving away from residential design/build work and more into the commercial side of the industry, may make the company more appealing to private equity investment down the road.

However, he says he has no immediate plans to sell, rather he’s focused as a leader on doing what’s best for the business in the long-term.

“I’m trying to fill the CEO seat the best I can,” he says. “A big part in my role is trying to drive the most value with the business. To me, while I have no plans of an exit at all… why not put the energy into something that’s ultimately going to put the most value into the business? “At the end of the rainbow, whatever that may look like, I believe it’ll pay off not only for myself but the people on Team Mullin.”

The author is senior editor with Lawn & Landscape.