Lawn & Landscape magazine sat down with the owner/operators of four small landscaping business at the GIE show in Tampa, Fla. in November 2001. They each talked about the challenges they faced in years past as well as goals they hope to accomplish in the future.
| AT THE TABLE |
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The following transcript is a continuation from the article found in the January issue of Lawn & Landscape magazine and is the first of two online installments of the conversation.
Lawn & Landscape: One of the challenges a lot of the small businesses have, especially when they grow, is the owner's role in the company. Each of you are used to juggling so many balls at once - how do you handle that and decide when to hand off each of the balls to your employees? When do you decide that it's not your "ball" anymore?
Jeff Bowen: I am handing them off right now. I started that process this year. We are just trying to get to the point where things are working well and we continue to build a good team and good camaraderie.
Brent Flory: My responsibilities are a lot different now than they were last year because I have had to back track an awful lot. Instead of working on the company, I'm kind of working for it again. I assign responsibilities to those who are learning and then I am overseeing the project to make sure that it goes ok. The bad side of it is all of those hours that I'm putting out there. But, I delegate everything that I possibly can to give my employees an opportunity to prove themselves. Yes, they're going to make some mistakes. In fact, if they don't make some mistakes they probably aren't doing enough.
Joe Goetz: We have an office manager who does quite a few things - she does accounts payable and receivable but also fields all of the sales calls for irrigation and landscaping. We have a very good garden center manager who also really helps the landscape architect; they all touch base pretty good. Then one of the first guys that I hired, he was just out of college, is the operations manager, so he gets the three crews going for landscaping. It seems to work real well that way. When you talk about keeping all of the balls in the air, I really rely on those folks to do those things.
L&L: You have each gotten your businesses to the point where they are pretty stable. What have been the keys to making it to the point that you guys have? Why did your businesses work?
BF: I've got a little different approach on it that everyone else has. This is a little bit personal, but before I got into the ag business, I went broke. I went completely bottoms up but I didn't file for bankruptcy - I worked my way out through getting into the ag business. So, that has made me too conservative, which slowed my growth down. But what I did learn was how to operate on cash. There was a long time before I got to where I could borrow money. Even now, I have a nice little line of credit, but I cash flow my business without a line of credit. Now that I look back, I see that my growth has been slow, but that's what helped me to survive when things really got tough a few times. I don't know if that would be the same for everybody else, but I know that there were times that if I didn't have the type of background to work on some of those tough seasons I wouldn't have made it or I would have had an outrageous amount of debt.
Maurice Dowell: We know our customer niche. We are high-end residential and we know our customer and we know our market niche. With us being full service, it's hard for another company to take one of our customers. We target that niche and we work it and we milk it for everything that it is worth. That has been one of our solid points. Our office is located within a high-end area, so the people know who we are and the name recognition is right there.
We have also developed good people to come in and we are looking for more of them to run the operation to allow my wife and myself to do other things. I know that we could go this distance a whole lot faster but we have looked at our priorities and we are following our game plan.
Our growth has been slow enough that we were able to finance the majority of it internally, so I don't owe a lot of money. We are talking receivables - after 60 days we don't work for you, we just flat out don't work. I don't play, there is no way I am going to extend my line of credit to support our customers when I am paying my guys and my vendors.
JB: I think there have been three keys to our success. First, values have played a big role - knowing where you want the company to go. Second would be my wife. She supported me by leaving a $50,000 a year job to go out with nothing. And lastly, the people, the people I've surrounded myself with. I'm working on the business and I'm working in the business. I truly tell everybody that I am there support to them. You need something and I'm here for you. It's easy to sell or market work, but you need to have the people that understand what you're looking to accomplish out there. I guess I have done a good job in showing them this is the right way, this is the wrong way, here's our way - and they have succeeded and they are all successful.
Visit Lawn & Landscape Online tomorrow for more of the roundtable conversation from the 2001 GIE Show.