Building Business

Wade Walden, co-owner, Second Nature Lawn Care, Nashville, Tenn., once read that incorporating under one name and doing business under another name is a wise move, which is why the company is officially called Terra Firma dba Second Nature Lawn Care. “This way you can use your incorporated name to start other companies besides your core company,” he says.

And that’s precisely what Walden and his partner Steve White did two years ago when they started All American Lawn Care under Terra Firma as a means to win back past customers and gain some of their competitors’ customers.

Here’s how it worked. The target client list for All American was generated from Second Nature’s customer cancellation database. “Our company has been around so long that we have thousands of records in our computer – something like 180,000 homes with lawn measurements included,” Walden says. “So we sent letters to them pushing a competitively priced liquid weed-and-feed service. It was all liquid, all about low price and a very bare bones service. All American had no overhead because it operated out of the same building as Second Nature so we were able to price competitively. And we even used different trucks for the service to keep it separate from Second Nature.”

All American grew to 680 customers in two years. Then, last year, Walden and White sold All American to Second Nature for $1. They sent a letter to All American’s customers saying they merged with Second Nature and switched them over to Second Nature’s granular program, giving them a small price increase. “We lost less than 10 percent of those clients,” Walden says, adding that this also helped tighten Second Nature’s routes. “Now those clients will be priced in our bottom 30 percent until we can increase the price slowly each year and get them back on track to where they need to be as Second Nature customers.”

The strategy was so successful at building business that they plan to do it again in the future. “It’s an opportunity producer, give customers the illusion that there were five competitors in the market when we really made up two of them.”