L&L Conference Coverage: Inside NatureScapes

It was a working weekend for more than 200 attendees at the Lawn & Landscape Conference & Trade Show held in Atlanta March 5 – 7, but before taking notes during the weekend’s educational sessions the folks at NatureScapes, a commercial landscape maintenance company in Lilburn, Ga., helped several attendees get in a business-building mood.

To kick off the conference, NatureScapes’ President Rick Upchurch and Vice President Rick Barnes, along with several other company managers, led more than 50 attendees through NatureScapes’ 4-acre facility and shared several operations techniques that the 20-year-old company uses to run a successful business. Here are some of the highlights:

The walls of NatureScapes’ offices are lined with awards and recognition for the company’s hard work in the commercial landscape maintenance field, but Office Manager Susan Brown certainly doesn’t spend her days dusting picture frames. In fact, Brown and two other office employees currently are busy handling some changes in how certain office responsibilities are handled.

“Right now, we’re getting ready to outsource all of our payroll which will take the burden off of us in that respect,” Brown said, adding the company’s payroll manager is preparing to go on maternity leave, which, if payroll was left in-house, would leave only two people in the office to handle three people’s work. “With an outside firm handling payroll, a company doesn’t have to worry about what will happen if someone leaves and it also takes the burden off of us in terms of handling taxes, W-2 forms and everything that goes with that.”

Farther back in the offices crews prepare for their days and keep track of their work on a giant dry erase board that tracks maintenance accounts. The board is divided by crews, the properties they maintain each day and records budgeted vs. actual hours for each job.

As it stands, NatureScapes has 20 maintenance crews, two landscape crews to handle enhancements and other installations the company takes on, one floriculture crew and one irrigation service technician. NatureScapes’ specializes in multi-family and commercial properties and Upchurch mentioned that most of the company’s crews operate best with three crewmembers, though very large properties can call for as many as six workers to finish the work on schedule.

Also posted on the maintenance board are company efficiency ratings that NatureScapes’ crews work hard to keep in the 90-percent range. “We implemented Jack Mattingly’s efficiency scoring, which is based on three properties and measures time efficiency vs. quality,” Barnes explained. “Also, we’re assessed by a group called OLM – Ornamental Landscape Management – which is a quality control firm that measures efficiencies on properties they oversee.” Keeping efficiency vs. quality percentages high keeps NatureScapes in good favor with their clients and maintains the company’s reputation for high-quality work.

As a result of their hard work and commitment to quality, NatureScapes currently has 150 maintenance clients throughout the metro Atlanta area. These properties are plotted with pushpins on a 4-foot by 6-foot map that is also kept in the back office area and helps with routing. The properties are geographically organized and color-coded by account manager.

Of course, no crew can perform proper maintenance without the right equipment, which brought the tour to NatureScapes’ highly organized shop. Four large areas of the shop floor are divided into six sections with yellow striping. Each crew has its own section for storing equipment and each crew’s equipment is color-coded for easy identification. Because NatureScapes’ operates on a four-day workweek, equipment is usually only parked in the shop on Thursday evenings so it isn’t left out over the weekend. During the week, however, crews will wash all equipment and sharpen blades at the end of every day, replace the equipment on their trailers, fuel up their trucks onsite and park in the yard for the evening. This allows crews to get moving more quickly in the mornings, rather than spend several minutes cleaning and accounting for equipment.

For the most part, all crews are assigned the same equipment including, walk-behind mowers, string trimmers, weed eaters, blowers, backpack sprayers and a water cooler. Any additional tools that are needed for specific jobs may be signed out from the equipment supply and chemical dispensary where tools like rakes, shovels, chainsaws and trimmer line are kept, along with certain seed and chemical mixes. This area of the shop usually is kept locked, except in the mornings when foremen sign out necessary tools.

Another separate section of the shop houses tools and equipment for NatureScapes’ in-house mechanic. Equipment is checked regularly for preventive maintenance and a dry-erase board provides a place to track equipment mileage and future service dates.

Also in the shop is an extensive information area where crews can learn about job openings, OSHA compliance notifications, company policies or keep up with NatureScapes’ daily round of Safety Bingo. All information in this area is posted in both English and Spanish because a more than 80 percent of NatureScapes’ employees hail from El Salvador.

Crew foremen also pick up their truck keys in this area, fill out daily time sheets and clock their crews in and out. Additionally, the countertop in the information area is equipped with several AC outlets so employees can plug in their cell phones overnight or on the weekends.

NatureScapes’ shop feeds directly into the company’s yard where vehicles are cleaned parked. The yard also is home to the company’s three on-site fuel tanks, a large debris collection area, retention pond, shade houses for soon-to-be-installed plant materials, and a six-station cleaning area for equipment. Though the cleaning area is still a work-in-progress, when it’s finished each station will be equipped with water and air so crews can quickly clean debris from mowers and other equipment at the end of each day.

Also accessible from the yard is NatureScapes’ separate chemical division, Simply Green. Within the last year, Simply Green took on NatureScapes’ more than 300 lawn care accounts, which currently covers 400 turf acres. Because the lawn care season in the company’s area usually runs from the third week of January to the first week of December, lawn care manager Mark Moskwiak noted that residential accounts usually receive six or seven applications and commercial properties will receive five.

“We’re really challenged by the number of turf types we have in this area,” Moskwaik said. “We have fescue, Zoysia, Bermuda and some centipede down here, so not only is there no all-around good turf type, but there are a lot of split lawns.” To solve this problem, Moskwaik says the company educates clients on the procedure of eradicating one type of turf in the lawn and renovating the property to leave the lawn with a single, dominant turf type.

In terms of equipment, Simply Green usually makes applications from spray trucks, backpack sprayers or push spreaders. Because many of the company’s clients are homeowners’ associations, ride-on spreaders and other equipment often is too big for the job. At the same time, cleaning and filling large spray trucks is a breeze with the Simply Green’s built-in rinse pad and several-thousand-gallon water tanks. Because the rinse pad is graded away from the rest of NatureScapes’ equipment yard, lawn care technicians can rinse their trucks without worrying that pesticides will drain into the rest of the property and the retention pond. The trucks are cleaned with fresh water stored in a 3,300-gallon tank and rinse water is collected in an 1800-gallon tank. The best part is that none of the water is wasted. Simply Green has found that spray trucks can be filled with 10-percent rinsate water and 90 percent fresh water without any detriment to the application.

After an impressive and detailed tour through NatureScapes’ facility, attendees took advantage of some question-and-answer time with Upchurch and other company managers. With networking high on many attendees’ lists of conference priorities, the NatureSacpes facility tour allowed contractors to share and glean new ideas from a company with 20 years of experience and get the Lawn & Landscape Conference and Trade Show off on the right foot.

The author is associate editor of Lawn & Landscape magazine and can be reached at lspiers@lawnandlandscape.com.