It’s common for landscape businesses to grow by word of mouth alone up until a certain point. Eventually, things stall, and they turn to advertising to keep the leads flowing in. However, this hasn’t been the case for Myatt Landscaping & Construction, based in Fuquay-Varina, North Carolina.
Over the past 32 years, the company has grown almost entirely organically, with a limited advertising budget.
Currently, 60% of Myatt’s business comes from referrals and the other 40% is from people seeing them on a job site.
The secret to their success isn’t rocket science. Scott Myatt, president of Myatt Landscaping & Construction, says the quality of their jobs is what has helped them stand out.
“That’s what people see,” Myatt says. “When you drive by and see something, that’s the first thing that you want to talk about is what you see.”
Generating Referrals
Myatt recommends other landscape companies make quality work and customer service their top priority if they want to increase their referrals.
“The clients who you’re working for will give you recommendations if you do a really good job,” Myatt says.
Myatt explains that providing quality can show up in little choices such as where they source their plant material.
“We’re going to go to a nursery that grows a nice, really full, tight, really well-grown plant,” Myatt says. “We’re going to pay twice as much as what somebody else could go buy, one that’s got holes in it and not filled out really well. Everything that we have to buy for this job has got to be the highest quality that we can possibly buy.”
As for what superior customer service looks like, Myatt says one example is how they are fairly lenient with clients when it comes to replacing plants, even if it’s out of the one-year warranty.
“That’s how I would rather spend our money versus advertising because I think it gives our clients something tangible, that’s really good, and it reinforces them saying that ‘Hey, we really like doing business with Myatt,’ and they’re going to be that much more willing to share our name with someone else.”
Myatt notes that for years they didn’t ask their clients for Google reviews after completing an installation job or working on a maintenance account, but they have begun collecting these now.
“Asking for it is pretty easy,” Myatt says. “Some people get nervous to ask for it, but if you did a good job and the job looks great, as soon as you finish, just ask. The clients typically would be very happy, and if you’ve done a good job and you’ve given them great customer service, they’ll be glad to do it for you.”
Another way Myatt stays top of mind with their customer base is by converting 97% of their installation clients into maintenance customers.
“We literally want them to stay with us forever,” Myatt says. “To prove that point, I’ve still got the original residential maintenance client we started with. She’s still a client of ours. She’s been with us 27 years.”
Myatt says they’ve found their referral leads close easier as well.
Scaling a Strong Reputation
Myatt notes it took anywhere from five to seven years in the beginning for the company to get traction and become a known name in the community that people would recommend.
When you’re starting out, you’re heavily involved in ensuring quality, consistency and customer service are all being executed, but as you grow, there is the risk of slipping away from this standard. Myatt says they were able to avoid this drift by promoting laborers into higher positions.
“They kept hearing those same things and doing it what we call ‘the Myatt Way,’ and then that’s all we would talk about is how we were going to do things,” Myatt says. “We’re going to have keep the consistency the same on the different jobs as we get bigger, and then we’ve kept those people, and then they’ve moved up through the company, so then they get to turn around and teach the laborers and the crew leaders that stuff because we’ve really taken people from entry-level labor on up to divisional managers.”
Myatt says that employee retention is everything when it comes to building a strong company brand people want to hire.
“If you’re not laser-focused on retention, you’re going to have to repeat and retrain this with everybody that comes through, and to be honest with you, I don’t know how you do that,” Myatt says.
Myatt says if you don’t have a team who shares the same values as you and puts quality work and customer service first, you will struggle to grow purely from word of mouth.
“Everybody’s just got to be thinking in that way, especially the leaders of a company,” Myatt says. “Everybody’s got to be rowing in the same direction, as they say. That’s what we’ve done, and it’s been amazing.”
Growth Plans for the Future
Myatt says relying on word of mouth hasn’t constrained their growth at all. It’s just at a slower pace than they prefer. He adds they can maintain at their current size by simply focusing on providing the best customer service and quality work.
“That’s what we continue to do even as we’ve gotten larger; we continue to do that, and we continue to grow,” Myatt says. “We’re just growing at a slower pace now than what I really want so I’m hoping to speed that up a little bit with this new business developer.”
The company recently hired their first business developer and gave him specific ideas and instructions on where they want to focus to bring in new clients and support growth.
Myatt says they don’t invest any money in advertising aside from last year when they spent $20,000 total over six months retooling their website for AIO and SEO.
“I didn’t see any change whatsoever, and so we stopped,” Myatt says. “That’s the first time we had ever done that in 32 years, and I won’t be doing it again. We just didn’t see an uptick in leads coming from that.”
While Myatt is looking to accelerate their growth, they remain focused on the basics: performing quality work, taking care of customers and retaining a team capable of executing consistently.
