[EDITOR’S NOTE: Each month Lawn & Landscape Online brings you profiles of industry professionals with unique businesses and services. The following profile is of Lifestyle Landscaping and is found exclusively at www.lawnandlandscape.com. – S.H.]
CLEVELAND – Most companies would not set up a lavish landscape worth $50,000 only to tear it down two weeks later. No customer, except perhaps a royal wedding planner, would ever dream of purchasing such an expensive, temporary landscape. Well, one company in northern Ohio sets up this type of landscape at least once a year and tears it down soon after. However, it is not built for a customer. Rather, it is set up at a local flower show to showcase the company’s abilities, while attracting potential customers and reminding existing customers what the company can do.
SHOWY DISPLAYS. Lifestyle Landscaping Inc., North Ridgeville, Ohio, creates full-blown indoor gardens each year at a local Cleveland flower show and sometimes other shows. The design, installation and maintenance company exhibits at the National Home & Garden Show each spring in the Cleveland I-X Center. Here the company designs complex plant and hardscape displays that take up to a week to set up. They are then torn down about eight days later when the show ends. Ed Koenig, sales manager/designer for Lifestyle, said there is no better way to show people what the company can do for them than by showing those people what the company can do under its own creative direction.
Koenig said the price tag for the company’s display at the National Home & Garden Show earlier this year would have been about $60,000 to $70,000 if the design had been done for a client. Only a complex and ornate landscape job could cost that much, and that is certainly what the company creates each year for the show. Past displays have included a variety of detailed, creative items, including full buildings, the façade of a historical home complete with an intricately-trimmed front porch, sandstone walkways and a stucco building. Recently, Lifestyle created a display that included a home on a rocky ridge with a waterfall that fell into a stream that then spilled into a pool. That mini-property also included stone bridges over the water features. The company adds many flowers, shrubs and even trees up to 40 feet tall to these displays. The displays have earned the company 1st Place honors at the National Home & Garden Show six years in a row.
Creating designs for flower shows requires extensive planning by the company. Koenig said the planting processes for the upcoming February 2001 show has already begun to make sure plant materials are ready by show time. He said Lifestyle will sometimes bring in flowering trees that have been pushed along to bloom in February. Starting in November of this year, Lifestyle will have an employee monitoring the plants for the February show on a daily basis. During the winter off-season, other employees will begin working on the buildings and other features for the upcoming show.
According to Koenig, the best part of exhibiting at the flower shows is the sense of teamwork that is developed while preparing for the shows. He said almost everyone at the company is involved in some part of the process. "Doing a show like that is the most incredible display of teamwork you could ever imagine," he said. The display team consists of 30 to 40 employees that all have a hand in making the show a success. Not only is teamwork promoted, but also the additional work allows the company to keep a few more year-round employees on staff.
ATTRACTING CUSTOMERS. Flower show exhibitions are Lifestyle’s primary means of advertising the business to the outside world, according to Koenig. The company obviously spends money on creating ornate displays, but Koenig said the company also purchases about $7,000 to $10,000 worth of flower show tickets each year to send to customers. Koenig values the benefits of meeting people face to face at the shows. Because the company caters to an upper end client base, customers are chosen carefully. "It gives you the opportunity to feel potential customers out and see if they’re a fit while you’re standing there talking to them rather than servicing people who are calling five names in a phone book to compare only by price," said Koenig.
The company does not spend any money on traditional advertising vehicles, such as newspaper, radio or television advertisements. Instead, the flower shows and referrals from customers – the company’s primary source of new business – serve as means of obtaining new accounts.
To survive as a predominantly referral-based company, Lifestyle usually maintains several properties in a selected area. For instance, the company has been working in a nearby Aurora, Ohio, neighborhood. The initial client in the neighborhood had an extensive landscaping project that took the company about two months to complete. With the company there for that extended period of time, several neighbors inquired about Lifestyle’s services. Also, the homeowners who had the initial project completed told neighbors how pleased they were. Currently, on the same street as the original job, Lifestyle has done work for about 12 other families and is in the process of doing designs for another four. "It’s those kinds of situations we run into an awful lot," said Koenig. "People just see what you’re doing first-hand and that turns into referrals from neighbors."
MAINTAINING CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIPS. Not only do referrals work for new business, the company’s customers also request new projects year in and year out. A customer may want her front lawn landscaped one year, the back yard done the next and a fountain installed the following year. "Recognizing that, about 90 percent of our advertising budget goes into making sure we keep our customers close. We have quite a client list that we’ve worked very hard for over the years. And we do everything we can to keep those people happy," said Koenig.
To maintain those customer relationships, Lifestyle sends out mailings during the year to educate its customers about the company’s services, personnel and plans for the upcoming season. Koenig said the company sends out "generic stuffers" with bills, but also sends out a few customized mailers at key times of the year.
Lifestyle sends out a spring newsletter that explains what types of projects need done in early spring, describes the company’s new hires who will be working on the customers’ properties and provides information about setting up contracts for the upcoming season.
Lifestyle then sends out a more complex mailing in fall that allows the company to flex its creative muscles to make a statement to its customers. Originally designed as a promotional piece to remind people bulb-planting season was coming, this mailing is sent right before Labor Day and has evolved into a major marketing device. Koenig said the fall newsletter essentially serves as a reminder to clients that the company is there to fulfill their needs. He explained that this newsletter gives clients an extra push to call about a project they’ve been thinking about having done but just haven’t called about.
To make the fall newsletter more entertaining and potentially more effective, Lifestyle has showcased its creative capabilities in the mailing. Last year the newsletter was formatted to appear like a movie or Broadway play premiere announcement. The literature featured a marquis showing "Bulbs" as the name of the production with spotlights highlighting it. The terminology in the newsletter described the company’s services while using several Broadway and movie premiere references. The kit also included a pair of mock tickets and some popcorn seeds.
Attempting to top last year’s fall newsletter, Koenig said this year’s will be set up like a gourmet restaurant menu. "Our clients appreciate it because it gives us the opportunity to exercise some creativity, which is more the style of what we do in the field. It’s not a cookie cutter presentation," he said.
Gauging the effectiveness of the company’s newsletters is easy as Koenig described one project that resulted directly from a former client being reminded about the company. He said the company’s policy of sending mailers to both current and past customers has paid off in maintaining relationships and generating new business. "I had a client that I hadn’t heard from in over eight years. They called us and that letter inspired the first phase of a $50,000 to $60,000 project."
Starting last year, the company also sent a year-end newsletter that included holiday information, updates about company developments and coloring pages for kids. Koenig said Lifestyle will probably continue to send this newsletter, as it is one more opportunity to get the company’s name out to its customers.
GROWTH. Lifestyle currently performs from 250 to 300 projects per year with about 10 percent of those coming from the same customers. The company offers a complete array of design, hardscape, installation and plant, property and lawn maintenance services to its base of 90 percent residential and 10 percent commercial customers. The company does not specifically target commercial jobs as its commercial client list consists of mostly businesses owned by current residential customers.
The company expects 2000 revenues to be about $2.6 million, which is right in line with its growth of 15 percent for the past five years. Koenig expects that growth to continue at an even higher pace over the next five years as company hopes to be up to $4 million in five years. To facilitate that growth, the company added a sales person earlier this year and expects some of the current staff to move into sales positions in the near future. Koenig said the company may also add one more outside sales position soon to keep the growth initiative moving forward. The planned new sales hires will almost double the company’s existing sales staff.
About 55 employees, 20 of which are year-round, make up Lifestyle’s workforce. Because the profession is often associated with seasonal labor, Koenig said keeping more employees working year round has not been a major issue. He said employees hired for part-time work often expect to be unemployed for a period of time. That workforce includes college students who work during the summer and other school breaks as well as Hispanic labor.
This summer is the first that Lifestyle has worked with temporary Hispanic laborers, and it was not planned. A local competing company hired an excess of Hispanic employees for the season. The employees were getting upset that there was not enough work to keep them all working a large number of hours each week. To satisfy those laborers’ desire for more hours, the competing firm contacted Lifestyle about hiring some of them. Lifestyle decided to hire two of the Hispanic employees, and Koenig is happy that decision was made. "Those guys would work 22 hours a day if they could," he said. He said the two employees are so happy at Lifestyle that they expect to come back next season and possibly bring some additional laborers.
In order to increase the number of year-round employees, Koenig said Lifestyle is in the process of adding more services to its repertoire, such as additional lighting services, irrigation installation and developing winter income opportunities. Koenig explained that the upcoming winter season will be the first that the company is offering plowing services. A winter project taskforce also met recently to come up with more ideas for winter revenue-generating work. The past few winter seasons have been fairly mild in northern Ohio, so the company was able to keep some seasonal employees working on tasks that would otherwise be postponed until spring. However, opportunities like that are rare. To keep more laborers employed year round, the winter taskforce will pursue several of the ideas generated at the meeting. "Our message to employees is, ‘We are not offering jobs. We want to be able to offer a career as well.’ And we want our employees to contribute in trying to come up with some of the ideas to make us grow," said Koenig.
For more information about Lifestyle Landscaping Inc. visit the company’s web site at www.lifestylelandscaping.com.
The author is Internet Editor of Lawn & Landscape Online.
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