Timely injury

Last time we checked in: New Visions has grown at a rapid rate, but co-owners Michael Mould and Tiffany Tucker had no idea how profitable their jobs were or how they were generating revenue. Mould also needs to get out of the field and focus on selling jobs instead of working on them at the Panama City, Florida-based company. 

Latest updates: Mould has struggled to remove himself from the manual labor aspect of the business, but an ankle injury has forced him to do just that and has left him with more time to work on the business instead of in the business. 

“It’s challenging because I feel a lot is at stake and if I have my hands in something, everything is OK,” he says. “But for me to have a better quality of life I have to be able to count on people.”

So, he has counted on a couple of longtime employees who are coming through for him on jobs like a recent hardscape project Mould couldn’t be on site to do. 

“The job didn’t go exactly how I wanted it to, but it got done,” he says. “We got paid and the guys learned something from it. Mistakes are going to be made from time to time, but if we grow through it, it’s worth it.” 

Mould has not advertised for his position, and he is hoping someone internally will step up, but a candidate reached out to them after seeing them featured in the Turnaround Tour and is coming in for an interview. 

Another big step the duo has taken is categorizing their profit centers to find out where they were strong and weak. 

“It’s dissecting out business, and going through every customer,” Mould says. “It’s a giant stepping stone. It may take some time to see where one’s strong suit is but knowing exactly the margin is very important.”
Tucker says anyone who wants to know their numbers needs to push through the initial pain and focus on the long-term payoff. 

“If we would have kept doing it the way we were doing it, in the end with the way we’re growing, it would have caused some major problems for us,” she says. 

While New Visions is still growing at a good clip – since December they’ve added $50,000 worth of maintenance work through word of mouth – the duo says they have a better control on it because they combed through their books. For the first time, they’ve had to turn down work and can validate doing so.

Now the company is turning their attention to improving their safety process through videos Mould obtained from the University of Georgia. “We’re going to start that next week when we get all the guys together,” Mould says. “Pick one of the topics like pruning since it’s spring.”