Like thousands of kids bent on raising money for college, Christopher Wagner dipped into his savings in 1989 to buy two lawn mowers, a couple of power trimmers and a trailer he built from a Menards kit. With an ancient pickup to haul the equipment around, he started a lawn-mowing service with a high-school buddy.
But unlike most of those thousands, who regard lawn maintenance as a short-term source of pocket money, Wagner proceeded to turn his little business into a lucrative career.
Wagner is founder of Superior/Design Landscapes, a Corcoran, Minn. company that has morphed from a lawn-maintenance service into a landscape design and construction outfit that generated $1.3 million in 2003 revenue.
"When I was a little kid, I loved playing in the sandbox," Wagner says. "This is like a bigger sandbox, only with bigger toys." The toys include five dump trucks, three pickups, five skid loaders, nine trailers and an expensive wood chipper that's up for sale following the first loss in the company's history.
The good news is that he identified the problem – a good portion of which was named Christopher Wagner – and succeeded in returning the company to record profits.
SLOW START, NEW DOUBTS. A bit of background: When Wagner started, he saw the business as an adjunct to his role as a full-time student, a notion that lasted less than a year.
"College was boring, and the business was interesting and challenging," he says. So, for five years he spent only the winter trimesters at Normandale Community College. It was a decision that did not impress his businessman father, Robert.
"You're driving a piece-of-crap pickup, you've no money, you're working all the time and you're barely in school," the elder Wagner complains. "What the heck are you thinking?"
He had a point. In the first two years, the business barely squeezed out a profit. And by 1994, with revenue at less than $50,000, Wagner was having his own doubts.
"I thought, 'Do I want to do this the rest of my life?' " Wagner says. So he returned to college full-time to study business with the idea of maybe becoming a stockbroker. He graduated in 1996 with an answer to that question: "I figured out I didn't want to spend my life in an office."
By that time Wagner had built sales to $100,000 with the addition of landscaping projects and a focus on high-end residential clients who were willing to pay a little extra for his guarantee of satisfaction and instant response to complaints. There were a few elements missing, however.
"I wanted to add several areas of landscape construction – outdoor lighting, paver patios, sidewalks and driveways and a variety of stonework, ponds and water features," Wagner says. "But I had absolutely no experience installing them."
So in 1998 he invited Ryan Nelson, who had a small contractor business, to become a minority partner. Together they built 1999 sales to $500,000, much of it from landscaping, but a significant share also generated by lawn maintenance and tree-trimming.
All of this spelled the need for more space. In 2000, Wagner borrowed $650,000 from the State Bank of Loretto and bought a Corcoran landscaping contractor with 20 acres of land and an office building. Considering that the loan exceeded Wagner's annual revenue, you've got to wonder why the bank was willing to fund him.
"Because he was a high-energy guy at the top of his game," says Brad Meier, then president of the Loretto bank and now CEO of First Commercial Bank in Bloomington. "He had solid financials and a real vision."
Still, Wagner's vision blurred a bit. Suddenly bent on rapid growth, Wagner began taking on low-margin, cookie-cutter landscape projects, a move that hoisted employment from 10 to 25 people. By 2001, sales had soared to $1.7 million – and the company's first loss approached $100,000.
DROPPING THE BALL. "We got caught up in our own success," Wagner says. "We thought we could do everything in every landscaping category. But we were dropping the ball on the details."
Client calls were not being returned promptly and replacement of faulty plants took six to eight weeks instead of two. Worse, bidding estimates were off the mark and logistics fell apart, leaving crews waiting for materials at job sites.
Wagner accepts blame for the problems, acknowledging "control-freak tendencies" that kept him too busy for the design, estimating and client contacts at which he excelled. So he swallowed hard and let his foremen make more job-site decisions. And he turned over the logistics of scheduling job-site deliveries to an office manager.
More important, he dropped low-end landscape projects, agreed to sell the lawn-maintenance business to a former employee and discontinued tree-trimming. His $24,000 wood-chipper is up for sale.
The upshot: 2002 sales dropped 26 percent to $1.26 million, but profits returned to nearly the $100,000 level. And in 2003, with sales up just 5.5 percent, profits almost doubled to nearly $200,000.
One other bonus: He's only working six days a week now.
"For me, a day off is huge," Wagner says. "Life is good."