GIE Today: GIE Attendees Tour Local Facilities

Nearly 500 attendees of the Green Industry Expo (GIE) took to the streets of Charlotte, N.C., at 1 p.m., Wednesday, to tour Husqsvarna and two local landscape contractors – Countryside Landscaping and HighGrove Partners.

One of the nine tour buses, en route to its last stop at HighGrove Partners, suffered a tire blowout on Interstate 85, but that didn’t end their tour. After about 20 minutes stranded on the side of the road, they were rescued by a limousine and van that shuttled them to their host facilities.

Darrel Corvin, account manager for Clark Landscaping and Lawn Care, Rustburg, Va., was on that bus and sums up the experience with a smile. “This is just like a Monday at the shop,” he says. “We were late for the first stop, we made the second one, and now we’re sitting here on the side of the road.” 

Transportation problems aside, the group of landscape professionals gained valuable knowledge.

HUSQVARNA. At Husqvarna, tour groups were greeted by David Zerfoss, company president, who gave a brief company history. Husqvarna was founded as a musket factory in 1689 and went on to manufacture bicycles, motorcycles, sewing machines and other products before becoming the outdoor power equipment manufacturer it is today. Zerfoss says Husqvarna currently builds more than 50 percent of outdoor power equipment in the world and he expects the commercial market to experience double-digit growth for at least the next 10 years.

Zerfoss then offered attendees some advice he says can benefit any business without monetary investment. He urged attendees to stop thinking about their businesses as an endless cycle of incremental improvements that compare the past to the present. Zerfoss says a better way to think about business is to first think into the future to declare new possibilities and goals. From there, he urged business owners to think in the present and take actions based upon the possibilities the future holds.

“Too often we get locked in the past,” he says. “When we step into the future and look at the possibilities, our whole life changes.”

After touring the company’s state-of-the-art corporate offices, visitors were given access to Husqvarna’s warehouse where Michael Thorn, production manager, led a tour of the chainsaw assembly line.

Coming from Husqvarna, Sweden, Thorn explained that in Swedish, the word “husqvarna” means mill house. The company got its name because the power for the company’s first factory in Sweden came from a mill.

Several thousand miles from Sweden, the Charlotte facility is the North American headquarters for all handheld units and has shipped out more than 990,000 units so far in 2004. Fifty employees build trimmers, blowers, chainsaws and accessories at the facility. The chainsaw line alone produces 1,800 saws per day or one saw every 20 seconds, Thorn says.

Power heads are manufactured in Sweden and the chains and blades are purchased from Oregon Cutting Systems, Thorn says. The main reasons the saws aren’t fully assembled in Sweden is to reduce shipping costs and so the company can use domestic vendors for the chains and bars.

To assure quality, all engines are test run in Sweden before shipping. After assembly, 2.5 percent of saws are started and checked. Charlotte also is home to the company’s field test groups, which are quality checkpoints for Husqvarna’s factories around the world. According to Thorn, field test groups “run products for 400 hours or more to find problems before units hit the field.”

COUNTRYSIDE LANDSCAPING. After the tour attendees visited  Countryside Landscaping’s 12-acre headquarters. The site consists of a nursery and a 14,000-square-foot building that contains a 2,500-square-foot office and a six-bay garage.

Countryside Landscaping is a success story in that, as Todd Witherspoon, vice president of sales, says, it grew to its current size from a 750-square-foot building on one acre in just 10 years. Countryside is now a $10-million-per-year company employing 117 people, 150 at peak season. Witherspoon added that Tony Pope, the company’s owner is contemplating opening another facility on the south side of Charlotte to shorten travel times for crews working in that area.

Countryside Landscaping performs landscaping installations, maintenance, grading, irrigation and property enhancements with 60 percent of its business coming from commercial properties and 40 percent from residential developments.
Sam Putnam, Countryside’s vice president of operations, explained the ins and outs of getting the company's crews on the road. He requires crews to be at their first jobs of the day by 7 a.m.

“We want to get to that first job before we get stuck in traffic,” he says.
Putnam also says Countryside has found that by having crews load for the next day’s work on the previous night, they save time and money.

“We load at night before we go home because it takes the guys about half the time to load the trucks when they’re ready to go home, rather than in the morning when they’re just getting started for the day,” he says.

To ensure the crews maintain a high level of work quality, Putnam says quality training is held every Monday morning.

A quality inspector checks all jobs and photographs them, good and bad, to use as examples in these sessions.

Jason Farland, vice president of operations, and Kim Howard, purchasing manager, took tour groups through Countryside’s nursery, which will have served 1,600 houses in 2004.

Howard says the company goes through 5 million square feet of sod and 2,400 trees per year as well as 1,000 shrubs each week.

They say a trend is beginning to emerge in the landscape business – upgraded landscape packages for new homes. Farland says that similar to homeowners who upgrade kitchen and bathroom packages in their new homes, some home-builder customers are starting to allow customer options with their landscape work.

HIGHGROVE PARTNERS. To round out the day's tour, the group made a final stop at Highgrove Partners' N.C. branch. HighGrove Partners is a landscape contractor offering design and build services and property maintenance in Charlotte and Atlanta. Tom Gaddy, sales representative, says the Charlotte location, in its fifth year, is a $16 million business with more than 225 employees. HighGrove’s business is 70 percent commercial and 30 percent high-end residential.

David Evans, head of accounting, gave visitors a glimpse into the company’s open-book management style based on Jack Stack’s book, The Great Game of Business.
Under this management style, all employees are aware of all the company’s financials, and Evans says the change to this technique in January of 2004, “has affected our company on every level.”

Mondays and Tuesdays of every week are information-gathering days, during which all crews and managers fill out reports that help Evans put together his financial reports, including visual charts and graphs for easier interpretation by Spanish-speaking employees. On Wednesdays, “the great huddle” takes place. All employees sit down and go over the reports. This way, all employees know how much money is coming into the company and they know where it is spent.

“People aren’t surprised when they aren’t getting bonuses,” Evans says. “They can see it well ahead of time. It helps to control overtime and it helps to get them to treat the equipment better. They know what all the costs are.”

Greg Nelson, fleet manager, and Jim Nelson, equipment manager, explains other ways they have been able to keep their 105 vehicles and other equipment in tip-top shape.
First, the company purchases the best equipment on the market. Then, to extend the life of the equipment, they use synthetic motor oils, which increases time between oil changes and saves on service expenses. They also keep extensive equipment logs detailing miles driven, oil changes and everything down to truck condition. “When they know we’re looking for scratches on a vehicle, they’re going to think twice about leaning a shovel on it,” Greg says.

Through this attention to detail, HighGrove is able to expect its large equipment to last eight to 10 years. Greg says that after five to six years, equipment is relegated to backup status to keep it on the road another four. If a mower or other piece of equipment shows signs of trouble, it’s parted out to supply what the Nelson’s affectionately call the "bone yard." Using this method, HighGrove is able to save money by gathering parts from it’s own existing equipment.

Zak Campbell, director of training and recruiting, outlined Highgrove’s training program. A matrix board in the office names each employee, and dots designate each employee’s certification level in various areas. While much training is done prior to the season, HighGrove continues training into the season with Saturday demo days, which allow employees to increase their certifications throughout the year.

Employees are paid for this training only on every other Saturday, which Campbell says is not just done as an expense control. “You really see who your leaders are on those off Saturdays,” he says.

When it was all said and done, the four-and-a-half- hour tour provided a great educational opportunity to those who attended. “It was great to get other people’s perspectives and insight into the other companies and their services,” says Jill Tockacz from The Bruce Company of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

The author is Contributing Editor of GIE Today.