Invigorated by enhancements

The employee moved out of state with his fiancée, and now Hardy, and president Josh Brunner, have to adjust. They promoted an up-and-coming employee into that role and are training him now while Hardy is in the middle of interviews to fill a couple of other open spots.

While the resignation has caused for some stress, Hardy is overall happy where the company stands at this point of the year.

“I’m feeling really good about how the year’s gone,” he says. “I’m not cashflow strapped right now. We bought a newer truck and I’m in position to buy another newer truck. Businesswise we’re about 15 percent higher sales than we were this time last year.”

That increase occurred with no extra labor, which had helped the bottom line, but is obviously a lot more work for everyone. Brunner is now back in the field mowing, but Hardy says it’s still better than last year.

“I would say out of a month, Josh is in the field full time, maybe a week and a half,” Hardy says. “So it’s still better than last year. Last year he was every day.”

One place where Brunner’s has struggled is with weather – a couple of really dry weeks hurt the revenue a little. But, thanks to monthly billing of mowing, the pain hasn’t been as bad as it could have been.

In Dayton, Hardy says customers should get about 28-30 cuts, so Hardy bills based on 24 cuts.

“If I do under 24 cuts, I credit them for snow,” he says. “If I do over, I bill them. Unless it’s a biweekly property. Very few properties go under 26 cuts a year.”

Hardy said the company had a record month for revenue in July thanks to selling enhancements and plant installations. Hardy has been doing inspections on properties with clients, and point out areas where Brunner’s can help.

While doing an inspection with his largest maintenance client, it came up that Brunner’s did plant installations, which the client never knew. As soon as the client found out Brunner’s could do that type of work, they were because they also maintain the plants.

Hardy has based how hard he would try and upsell based on the client.

“If I know that they’re already budget strapped, I didn’t give them a proposal because some people just, they don’t like you sell them stuff,” he says. “So, what I did is in their quality control report I say ‘we did find some of this stuff. If you’d like the proposal on this, we can provide it for you.’”

That approach has stretched the season for the company.

“I have never had a full-time landscaping crew working full-time landscaping in September, and now I’ll have a full-time landscaping crew working until probably mid to late October,” he says.

Harvesters’ Take.

The two partners of Brunner’s, Josh and Gary, continue to guide their company to higher sales and profits over the previous year. One solid reason for their success is the inspection of their clients properties and creating enhancement proposals.

They stopped using some temp workers from the spring and cut overtime in half by making sure they had the right crews with the right equipment on each of their jobs.

Their jobs are doing well from a financial standpoint. Their overall gross margin goal for the year is 50 percent and so far their enhancement sales for the month of June was over 65 percent and the landscape maintenance department for the month of June was at 52 percent.