Our Level Up series shares the strategies that help landscape and lawn care companies get to the next level.
Villani Landshapers, Inc., based in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, is not Gino Villani’s first business, but it is his first time entering the landscape industry.
While he always has had an entrepreneurial spirit, his background is in the food and beverage industry. He previously owned his own restaurants with a partner. Villani’s son, Paul, had taken up lawn mowing during high school and after Villani put out flyers at his restaurants, they experienced an influx of lawn maintenance customers.
The customer requests quickly evolved to if they could plant trees or build a retaining wall. Villani was tired of working seven days a week in the restaurant business, so he sold his companies to his partner.
“I knew nothing about landscaping, zero,” Villani says. “But I’m smart enough from running a business to find the people that can help. So basically, then I looked at my partner after it started to click and said, ‘I’m going to try this.’”
Now the company is at $18 million in annual revenue and has around 174 employees during the peak season. Villani believes they can get to $20 million this year if the snow season is good. They have a goal in the next six years to get to $30 million. He says they want to grow in their market and move into an adjoining market eventually.
Growing Pains
Villani Landshapers is a residential design/build company that also has a union and non-union bid build construction division. They also offer residential and commercial maintenance, lawn care and snow removal services. Villani says their main commercial customers include HOAs, hospitals, universities and Class A commercial properties. They started out servicing condos and apartments, but he says they are moving away from those.
“At one time, we had 8,000 $15,000-$20,000 contracts, now they’re $50,000 to $250,000 contracts in commercial maintenance,” Villani says.
Early on, the company grew very quickly, jumping from $185,000 in revenue in the first year to $800,000 by the second year. This continued for a number of years until they were able to get their growth under control by tracking their numbers more with an operating system.
As they’ve grown, Villani says they’ve dealt with the problem of having their overhead too high for their sales volume, and they’ve had to adjust their numbers, so their revenue is relative to their overhead as they hit different plateaus.
He says the ability to borrow and collect money can also be an issue with commercial work. Villani notes it’s easy to make an invoice, but it can be hard to collect at times. You need to have a decent amount of money available and use it wisely.
Villani says marketing was another challenge they had to deal with.
“Who do you market to?” Villani says. “Do you market yourself to feel good and hear yourself on the radio or on the TV commercial? Is that the best way to do it, or do you dial up the phone and do email blasts? What’s most effective for the money? Where do you get your most value?”
More recently, he says one of their main concerns has been growing their HR department. Rather than hiring someone from outside, they’ve brought an employee up from marketing into HR. They sent her to school and seminars to grow that department.
Keys to Success
Villani credits his business and finance background as one of his keys to success.
“What’s important at any size is really understanding your numbers and gathering the right data,” Villani says. “That’s huge. It’s the thing that you want to do the least, but it’s probably one of the most important.”
By knowing their numbers, they were able to determine what was good and bad growth. He says he learned a lot from his mentors and his father, who owned a public accounting firm. Villani says he recognizes what he is good at and what he isn’t good at, so he sought out experts in the industry to join him. One mentor he connected with was Frank Mariani, chairman of Mariani Landscape.
“He’s been a big inspiration to me,” Villani says.
Villani says their culture of treating employees right is another key to their growth. In the past, labor was a challenge, but once he learned people were his number one asset, recruiting hasn’t been such a struggle.
“I believe it’s the ability of our team to understand the employee,” Villani says. “I believe my employees are my number one asset 100 percent. We do right with them, then it will translate to the client, so the number one thing for me is the ability to make them feel like they’re part of the family, part of who we are and always have.”
A number of Villani’s Hispanic workforce from his restaurants went on to work for him in the landscape business as they liked the work.
“We recruit out of the restaurant business a lot because they’re service-minded people,” Villani says. “We love restaurant people and hospitality people.”
He adds that his faith has helped him bring out the best in his employees.
“I believe that faith that I have has really helped me grow in understanding who we are supposed to be as people,” Villani says.
Taking Care of Their Greatest Asset
One of the main ways Villani takes care of his employees is by investing in their training and development at all levels.
“The ones that want it and are receptive to it, do grow, and the ones that don’t just kind of fade away,” Villani says.
He has a leadership and self-development coach who works with his middle management team. He says in recent years he’s sent their management team to NALP’s Field Trip events to companies like Ruppert Landscape and R.P. Marzilli & Company.
“It’s really important to be able to build that strong team up there to lead the rest,” Villani says. “But at the same time, if the bottom core level of people is trained well, they’re indestructible, and the top can go a little bit awry if these people have been trained well.”
Villani Landshapers provides a 401(k) plan, paid holidays, and hosts several company picnics. The company also has financial advisors come to speak to the employees twice a year to build employee confidence and show how much they care.
“It’s really just loving and building on them,” Villani says. “Trying to get them where they want to be.”
Villani says providing their crews with new equipment is also a big retention factor.
“Our entire fleet of vehicles is no older than four years old,” Villani says. “Everything’s new and the same with our equipment. We lease most of our equipment and we’ll keep it all at most four years old.”
During the snow season, Villani Landshapers ramps up to 230 employees. The company’s strong culture earned them a ‘Best Place to Work In Snow & Ice’ by the Snow & Ice Management Association (SIMA) in 2022.
Villani says the key to maintaining their culture as they grow starts with him keeping his vision and standing true to it.
“You got to make sure that the people you continually grow and bring in your company fit that vision and if they don’t, unfortunately, they don’t stay,” Villani says.
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