Steve Glover and Drew St. John know what it feels like to compete against large regional and national landscape firms. Glover was president of L&L Landscape Services, Sunnyvale, Calif., until he sold that business to TruGreen-ChemLawn, while St. John most recently worked for Hillenmeyer Nurseries, Lexington, Ky., after owning his own business in Mississippi. Now the pair heads up a team trying to help strong companies compete on a higher level then ever before the The Symbiot Business Group.
“The one thing that so many of the successful landscape companies still lack is national visibility and strength in purchasing and marketing,” observed St. John, vice president of development. Symbiot plans to fix that by creating a national network of landscape firms that will use Symbiot’s products and services to boost their sales and control their costs, thereby positioning themselves to service national customers.
“I’ve talked to several contractors who have lost clients who were satisfied and wanted the contractor to move into a new market so the client could work with just one provider,” St. John explained. “If the contractor couldn’t do this, then they lost the contract. Our plan would create a nationwide network of contractors who could work together to serve a client’s needs.”
Initially, Symbiot is targeting some of the leading landscape companies in major metropolitan markets and talking to them about the plan. Symbiot held its first such meeting earlier this month in Utah, and 12 of the 14 contractors invited to attend have already signed up, according to St. John. And signing up comes with a real commitment – an annual fee of “several thousand dollars,” St. John added. A second meeting will be held Friday, May 3, in Atlanta, and more than two dozen contractors are expected to attend.
What do these companies get for their money? Symbiot is currently working with a major national retailer to create an opportunity for the network to handle the landscape maintenance, parking lot sweeping and snow removal for all of its locations across the country. If this deal is finalized, Symbiot members would each handle the contract for the client’s properties in their area, paying Symbiot a 2 percent fee for managing the contract. “Symbiot’s role is to act as a 'facilitator' and not as a contractor in these relationships,” explained St. John.
St. John acknowledges that Symbiot is taking an approach that is unique to the landscape industry, but he’s convinced it can work. “I don’t know why this was never done before in our industry, but it has been done successfully in other industries,” he maintained. “One example is the independent office furniture and supplies industry. When these companies had Office Max move into town, they needed something that let them play on that field. Office Furniture USA allows them to buy on a national basis by pooling their purchasing and keep their costs competitive even if their own volume isn’t that high.”
Symbiot has already had initial conversations with industry suppliers about arranging purchasing programs for Symbiot members, and he expects their interest to grow significantly as the group grows in size to as many as 50 firms. “We’ll probably limit the group to the first 50 that sign up because once we get beyond that there will be too much market overlap and we want to give our members exclusivity in their area,” St. John pointed out.
And while the group’s focus is on large landscape firms right now because of the financial investment required and the importance of every member firm being able to deliver quality work, Symbiot has plans to open its offerings up to smaller companies or those located in smaller markets as well.
“There will be a whole other network, called the Symbiot affiliates, and these will be companies in secondary markets that can really use purchasing agreements to their advantage and use something to differentiate themselves from the competition,” St. John explained. “The information that we gather through benchmarking and networking will filter down, and so will the sales responsibility if we have a property in the area to maintain.”
The author is Editor of Lawn & Landscape magazine and can be reached at bwest@gie.net