The rules of success: How company culture drives growth

When new team members join Center Cut Landscape Management, they are given a business card — and it has nothing to do with their name, position and mobile number. It’s not a card to give away, not a point of contact for clients or prospects. It’s a card to keep.

One side bears a pinwheel of ribbons, each connected, each listing one of the company’s five core values. The other lists 11 rules of success — “behaviors to obtain growth for all,” it reads.

The wallet-sized card format is intentional so team members can carry these culture-creating messages with them. It’s not just a token or an orientation handout. “These are the principles I have lived by my whole life,” says Reza Taba, CEO and co-founder of the Las Vegas-based commercial maintenance and design/build firm he runs with COO and Managing Partner, Matthew Quispe.

At its core: open communication, respectability, adaptability, creative solutions and high standards. The rules are habits, ranging from showing up with a “yes” attitude, never saying, “that’s not my job,” and working as efficiently as the strongest person on the team.

At surface level, a skeptic could write off these values as things your elementary principal preached on morning announcements. But at Center Cut, the expectations go much deeper and touch every aspect of the operation. Put into practice, they raise leaders from within, allow the business to scale substantially, and attract more people who act and work like they own it.

“Often, when people say, ‘We have a strong culture,’ others immediately think maybe there’s a pool table in the corner — maybe people are playing basketball and there are lots of after-work events,” Taba says.

“Have fun!” is one of the 11 rules of success, but it’s not about rolling out extras that aren’t tied to the company’s purpose as an operation focused on standards.

The ultimate value, however, is respectability.

And this is exactly how clients view Center Cut, evidenced by its growth: $3 million in sales in 2019 has blossomed into 175 employees and almost $17 million in revenue.

The culture keeps scale personal.

“I know everyone in the field by name, and you may not even know I’m the owner because I walk around, greet everyone. I know team members personally,” Taba says.

All set to scale

Taba and Quispe met as architecture students in Las Vegas, pursuing degrees during the economic fallout in 2008. Casinos weren’t popping out of the ground, nor were internships in their area of study. They began working at a landscape maintenance business, eventually running it as if they were branch managers.

This was their first exposure to recurring income.

Taba grew up in hospitality before college, bringing these customer service and team management skills to Center Cut. Meanwhile, Quispe was in a property management position overseeing 1 million-plus square feet of Class A commercial real estate.

The combination meshed into a client-centered, operationally optimized resume, passion for hands-on work with visual results, and connections — enough to seed routes for several crews before trucks pulled out for the very first route.

Quispe says, “In the few months before we officially opened, we started reaching out to clients we knew from property management, and they were so excited that we had started a business and wanted to know when we were opening the doors. They said, ‘I’m going to move our contract over to you.’”

They really did. And the momentum continued. “We were securing contracts, negotiating and because they had partnered with us at the previous landscape company or we knew them through property management, there was trust,” Taba says.

During COVID-19, rather than cutting costs, raising prices and losing people, Center Cut did the opposite. “We gave our people raises, and while a lot of competitors were scaling back, that left property managers who let like their landscapers weren’t cutting it,” Taba says.

Rather than layoffs, Center Cut reassigned talent. Office staff “switched seats” to the field for client service calls, visiting all properties to act as owners’ eyes and ears. “We gave them reports of what we’d find such as electricity issues, graffiti, a broken window or anything that felt unusual,” Taba says. “We became more of a presence, and this really helped our business.”

During lockdown from March to June 2020, Center Cut doubled its growth, escalating in capacity, customers and revenue by the end of the year. Because Center Cut’s volume had expanded exponentially, economies at scale were in play to continue profitability, attractive wages and even more growth.

Center Cut had landed on a formula for success.

Rather than amassing more work, spreading crews thin — paying overtime, triggering burnout — the company took a think-ahead approach to hiring and equipping crews. Taba and Quispe wanted to avoid the “sell-then-man-up” tact. It’s hard on everyone and quality erodes. That would be against Center Cut’s pillar values.

“Before we’d have a full route for a truck, rather than overloading another route, we’d start a crew and send team members to different properties to give them extra attention,” Quispe says. “Otherwise, when you overload a route, you don’t have enough hours to maintain the quality you promised.”

Cutting margins and pumping up profit for the sake of jamming up routes to say yes to more customers just isn’t their style.

“We sold those hours to the client — they deserve to have that time or more,” Quispe says.

Building momentum

Center Cut applies the same philosophy to expanding service lines. After accruing team members and spreading the talent to enhancement jobs until a full commercial maintenance crew was in play, Center Cut began fielding inquiries for landscape renovations in five-figure range.

Then came some high-visibility projects. Word travels and the asks get larger. The City of Boulder heard about Center Cut and reached out for a 2-acre turf conversion into native park land. The scope included 300 boulders, each about 17 tons and the size of an SUV.

All the while, Center Cut had been socking away reserves, putting capital back into the business — “we sacrificed to grow,” Quispe says — and this allowed the company to submit big bids. Not that they should have and were warned by peers not to, but healthy risk backed by their formula for success paved yet another inroad.

They were upfront. “They asked us what was the biggest construction job we had done so far and we were honest,” Taba says. “They said, ‘We like you guys. We like your culture. We want to work with you.’”

This ties into the creatives solutions core value. Center Cut needed to hire 20 more team members to manage this heavy load. They needed to ramp up during the bidding process, knowing they might not win the job.

“We told our account managers to go to their clients and say, ‘Hey, you know that enhancement project you wanted to do next year? If you do it this year, we’ll give you a discount,’” Taba says. This switched wait-and-see to immediate labor hours and utilization of staff.

Center Cut completed the giant job with referrals to follow. The construction division is still in its infancy in Center Cut terms, given the maintenance service line’s rocket growth.

Quispe and Taba expect to finish 2025 with continued growth, and the construction division is still evolving. Taba says, “We can’t say that it has fully taken off — it’s been about a year and a half in the making — but the number of big breaks is helping scale this division.”

People first

Many companies’ barrier to growth is not selling jobs; it’s acquiring talent. But on any given day, about six Center Cut candidates drop into the office to apply for a position. “We’ve never really struggled to find people,” says Taba, relating a polar opposite perspective from many industry professionals.

Hiring great, hard-working employees isn’t a struggle — and he’s talking about field technicians.

The company pays above average compared to their market’s wage, and word of mouth is key. “Our people want to bring their friends and family here — other people they’ve worked within the field,” Taba says.

Another anomaly: “We have a backlog of people we can hire at any time if we need to,” Taba says.

How? Quispe says, “While many rely on H-2B or high turnover labor, we’ve grown a legal, year-round workforce by hiring individuals without landscaping experience and training them through our internal programs.”

Taba adds, “Experience can be taught. Personality cannot be taught. We hire for personality.”

Taba’s hospitality background informs Center Cut’s talent recruiting and retention strategies. “Everything I’ve learned from the hospitality industry has in some way translated to this business,” he says.

Both also apply a property management perspective to customer service. “We have a two-hour response time rule,” Quispe says. “If a client calls the office or reaches out to one of our team members in the field, they don’t have to reply with an answer — but they have to get back to those costs and let them know we’re working on it.”

Meanwhile, Quispe and Taba continue working on the business, developing a workplace they’re proud to own. “We have so many success stories of people who have found career pathways here, and for us, the growth of the company and our people is the biggest reward,” Taba says.

The author is a freelance writer based in Ohio.