Rocco Fiore Jr. is sharing a milestone with his company: 60 years.
The business, Rocco Fiore and Sons, was a seed his father, Rocco Sr. started, which has continued to see steady growth after decades of nurturing. Rocco Jr., now in charge of cultivating the company, respects the company’s history as he works to make sure it grows at an ideal pace.
|
|
Rocco Jr. was an infant when his father started the company, but when he was old enough, he and his brother Steve started out as laborers for the family business, working summers for the landscape maintenance, design, construction and nursery business in Libertyville, about 40 miles north of Chicago. There were no blowers, string trimmers or mowers as they’re known today.
“In larger areas, tractors were used,” Rocco says. “Plants were dug, balled and burlapped all by hand. There were no tree spades and if the area was tight, trees were removed by adding soil, then tipping and rolling the tree, foot by foot.”
Designs were hand-drawn on brown butcher paper, he adds.
Sixty years ago, hiring a lawn care company to maintain a yard was considered a luxury. Some of the company’s first clients included A.C. Nielsen, the A.B. Dick estate and Frederick Miller III, heir to Miller Brewing Co.
“That changed as homeowners got involved and tried to balance their time and spend more time with the family,” Fiore says. “Residential maintenance business grew and around here, people rarely maintain their own properties anymore. It has flourished.”
The company’s 15-mile service radius is in an affluent community, so the company continues to cater to mainly upscale design/build and maintenance clients.
There are three divisions in the maintenance department and three maintenance managers to handle the more than 800 accounts. The maintenance managers – Terry Culver, Dale Berthlein and cousin Michael Fiore – manage together as a team. Rocco’s Bachelor’s degree in business administration, along with Stephen’s Bachelor’s degree in landscape architecture, makes them a well-rounded management team.
"Finding and retaining clients isn’t really a challenge," Rocco says. "Finding and training employees to maintain those accounts with our standard of quality is the tough part. Those are major challenges because you have so much work. In order to provide service you have to have employees who know and understand our standards of quality.”
A challenge he faces is nurturing and mentoring up-and-coming new employees.
|
|
“That’s harder than getting customers,” he says.
The company’s workforce gets a boost from H-2B employees. About a third of the employees come from the guest worker program, most of them familiar faces.
“We’ve had 98 percent of our returning workers since 1974 when I took over,” he says. “We’re like family.”
Fiore finds the continuity of the guest workers to be a great help in keeping service consistent.
“We couldn’t train a workforce this size every 1-2 years,” he says. “The returning guest workers are familiar with the customers and their properties. They know what to do and they know what is expected of them.”
So far, he has gotten all the employees he’s requested from the program each year. But with the uncertainties surrounding the expiration of the returning worker exemption and other reported problems with unfulfilled requests for workers, Fiore encourages employers to be active in rallying for industry issues.
“We want to do it legally,” he says. “It’s a win-win situation.”
After the mowers have been stowed away and the guest workers have gone home, Fiore retains a staff of 75 people for the winter.
“We plan for the following season, performing a cost analysis of all jobs. Project managers look at what they did to see if there was constantly accurate bidding or if we mismanaged outside,” Rocco says. “We are constantly reviewing our process so we can continue to provide exceptional quality service to our clients.”
Rocco has learned that no matter how much analysis and tweaking is done, it’s a new ball game once spring comes around. He has been in the business for 36 years, but he still is surprised by the hiccups that arise.
“In the Midwest, it can be cold, chilly and rainy one night and in 48 hours, it’s 70 degrees and we won’t have enough phone lines to answer all the calls,” he says. “It has happened a few times.”
Fiore works to control what he can. He tries to keep growth in check at about 6 to 10 percent per year. But as the company continues to grow, Fiore is finding he needs a larger space to house all the employees and equipment – a jump from when his father operated the company out of his backyard.
When Rocco graduated from college in 1970, his father purchased five acres of land, which is where the company is now. They’ve added surrounding properties, and five expansions later, the company now sits on 18 acres as well as an additional 60 acres of nursery stock at another site, which is strictly for their own use.
“If we didn’t have 18 acres I don’t know what I’d do,” he says, guessing, “we’d probably have branches all around.”
But Rocco would rather find a way to expand than let the company be stagnant.
‘It’s not good for the business or our employees,” he says.
As a result, he’s moving the administrative team to a separate, 8,000-square-foot office building in January. A 9,000-square-foot maintenance office and storage facility is being built on the current site.
Rocco is confident with the direction the company is going, but once in a while, “I scratch my head and think, how much more can we expand without affecting our company's standards?”