Is your landscape company looking to grow and scale? Learn from Landscape Workshop, based in Birmingham, Alabama, how they go about effectively scaling up at NALP’s annual Field Trip on June 11-12, 2024.
Landscape Workshop has doubled their size in the past five years through organic and acquisitive growth. They are on track to earn $140 million in annual revenue this year. The company specializes in commercial maintenance and commercial installation services.
“We are proud of the culture and overall success of our business,” says J.T. Price, CEO of Landscape Workshop. “Our approach is to be open about both our achievements and setbacks, and we eagerly anticipate exchanging stories of triumph and valuable learning experiences with other companies.”
Marty Grunder, CEO of Grunder Landscaping Co. and The Grow Group, will host this Field Trip and lead attendees through an interactive company facility tour and education sessions across two days. Some of these sessions include diving into how mission, vision and core values have allowed Landscape Workshop to scale up and the metrics that the company monitors.
“We will share our metrics on both operational and financial metrics with actual numbers and where we think we have the opportunity to improve,” Price says.
Price says it is important for them to deliver consistent quality at a reasonable margin. He says measuring metrics, like client retention, job profitability, labor efficiency and more, is the only way they can make sure they are delivering this to clients.
“We think about our business in a long-term way, and you have to be both profitable and provide a great product to have a sustainable business,” Price says. “We’re certainly not perfect and are working to further develop and understand our data so we have even more transparency into crew behavior to make sure we are balancing efficiency and quality. We track both the performance metrics we care about – e.g. labor efficiency and customer satisfaction – as well as the behaviors that drive those outcomes – e.g. compliance to the plan for each property, idle time and unwarranted stops.”
Landscape Workshop maintains consistent quality by regularly meeting with their field employees and providing continuing education sessions and training, so their team knows what is expected of them.
Price says some of his company’s strengths include a clear performance culture, investing in top talent and understanding their data.
Part of Landscape Workshop’s performance culture is the aim to be the ‘Lead Dog’ in everything they do. Price says this started when they began sharing financial and customer satisfaction results at all levels of the company, and creating financial incentives for their managers to differentiate between high and low performers.
“We have worked to cultivate a lasting company culture centered on merit rather than politics,” Price says. “We are completely transparent about how individuals, branches, and the company as a whole are performing, with numbers to back it up. All managers receive two written reviews a year. We’ve grown rapidly so high performers advance quickly.”
Landscape Workshop has 1,400 employees during the peak season across 26 locations. Price says attracting and retaining good employees is one of the industry’s greatest challenges, but they’ve tackled this by leveraging a combination of recruiting tactics, strategic compensation plans, and by focusing on building a performance-driven culture that celebrates and rewards high performers.
“Our team members are drawn to LW because we prioritize their personal and professional development by investing in them and offering opportunities for growth,” Price says. “If you perform at a high level here, you have huge opportunities. We have regional VPs who were account managers five years ago and general managers who were leading a crew eight years ago.”
On the other end of the spectrum, Landscape Workshop does not tolerate low performance.
“The first step is to acknowledge the performance problem and try to identify the root cause,” Price says. “If the root cause is a people issue, we start by coaching the employee on what’s going wrong and making sure they understand the behavior that we want. If a team member cares and wants to learn, we can generally get the performance where we need it to be. If not, the low-performing employee leaves the company.”
The company is constantly seeking candid feedback from their clients so they can discover areas for improvement. Around 10 years ago, they started sending out their biannual Net Promoter Score surveys to clients.
“This feedback is analyzed by branch and account managers, allowing us to acknowledge our strengths and address any criticisms,” Price says. “This process has led to significant advancements and satisfaction/transparency over the years.”
Landscape Workshop also gives their general managers autonomy to run their businesses as long as they do so within the company’s values and basic operational guidelines.
“This is always a balance,” Price says. “We want our P&L owners to act like owners and run their businesses to create value. At the same time, we need to make sure we are using our systems the same way in every branch and that our customers can trust us to deliver consistent, quality service everywhere we serve them.”
Registration for Field Trip includes education, a hotel reception on Tuesday evening, breakfast and lunch on Wednesday and transportation between Landscape Workshop and the hotel.
A separate ticketed reception event will take place at Vulcan Park & Museum Arena on the evening of June 11, 2024. Attendees will have the chance to savor Dreamland BBQ, sip cocktails and witness Birmingham’s iconic symbol and the world’s largest cast iron statue, Vulcan. They will have time to explore the park’s landscapes with members of the Landscape Workshop management team, Marty Grunder, and other industry leaders.
Spots are limited so register for the NALP Field Trip today. If you can’t attend this Field Trip, don’t miss the Sebert Field Trip in September later this year.
