Culture is the key to a company’s success

Culture… culture… culture… I say this in my best Jan Brady voice. Most have no idea who Jan Brady is, but that is beside the point. Culture is something that every successful business owner that I know, from the top down to the bottom, has beaten into my head. Culture seems to be the common denominator for every successful business in our great green industry.

So, what is culture? According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, culture is defined as the characteristic features of everyday existence (such as diversions or a way of life) shared by people in a place or time. This seems so simple. But I will shout from the mountaintops how complex creating culture is. Culture is one of the hardest things to build into a company. As I write this to you, it reminds me of how we built our culture at our company, Brunner’s Lawn and Services.

You may be asking yourself, “Who is this guy trying to talk to me about culture?” or, “This guy is not a big company. What does he know about culture building?” Those asking these inquisitive questions have legitimate concerns, but I have some answers to satisfy your angst.

First, my name is Gary Hardy. My two partners, Josh Brunner and Andrew Piner, and I have scaled a small-time push mowing company into a million-dollar professional ground maintenance company with no investors' help.

Granted, many companies have scaled their business much larger than ours in a shorter time. Still, we are building our company to stand the test of time without compromising our controlled interest.

Now for the answer to question two, “this guy is not a big company. What does he know about culture building?” You are not wrong; many companies generate more revenue than we do. While we don’t have the resources that some of our competition have, we have a unique group of leaders from all walks of life dedicated to their work.

These leaders believe in our mission of serving our team and our clients. It’s not about how big you are; in our world, it is about how well you treat the people you serve. Our way to shine is by providing a quality service from a team that actually enjoys what they do.

To concretely answer the question about my authority to speak about culture, I must say that I have been through it all. I have seen excellent and mediocre cultures and have been a part of the worst of cultures. As much as I hate to admit it, it took being the worst of cultures at our company to turn it into one of the best of cultures. We have had to start over with new team members because everyone left us for the reason that we were a crappy place to work. Over time, we have found that positive incremental changes have finally begun to impact our company significantly.

We noticed the irrefutable impact during this current 2024 season. We brought back nearly 90% of our team from the 2023 season. This is amazing, considering I have heard reports that there are four jobs for every job seeker. So, what changed from the years past to the present?

Our culture changed. Our team members returned not just because of their wages but because they felt comfortable and enjoyed their place of employment. Our culture shifted from one similar to a coin toss to one built on integrity, dependability and respect. This happened because I had to examine myself internally as a leader and become a humble CEO.

Humility had to be front and foremost in my mind at all times. I had to stop and think about who I was serving. Am I in this business for myself, or am I in this business for others? Do I want to build a legacy for my family, work until retirement, sell out or close the company down?

These were some of the questions that challenged me in 2019 when our company won a place in the Lawn & Landscape Turnaround Tour, where we received free consulting from the Harvest Group.

My answer was simple. I decided my why was to build a legacy, but not just for my family. I decided I wanted to build a legacy for my son, my partners Josh and Andy’s families, my niece and nephew who work in the company and everyone who works on our team now and in the future.

Winning this competition was a game-changer for myself and our entire team. Our company was about to be put in our place. The lessons about the culture that the great Bill Arman and Ed Laflamme from the Harvest Group taught our entire ownership would set us up for success in the future development of Brunner’s Lawn and Services. They may not have created our finished product, but with a wealth of knowledge, these two gentlemen helped us begin our journey.

What did we take away from the year of consulting regarding culture and building our team? We had to start over. We had to discard everything we had done before and rethink our actions. And just when we thought we had it, we had to do it all over again, two more times.

Finally, in 2023, our leadership team decided we needed to try to build this culture thing one more time. The third time, it just had to be the charm.

Step 1.

We had to structure our training program around the skills we thought were important. This sounds so easy, but I promise you it is not. As I said, this was our third different rendition over the last four years since building our first program. What did we do that was so different this time? We looked over what different industry trade groups, such as the National Association of Landscape Professionals and Professional Grounds Management Society, tested for their certifications and we simplified it.

We identified all the tasks that we needed different Brunner team members to know and assigned pay levels and check-offs for them to obtain. Some of those tasks included proper job sequencing, proper operation of different types of walk-behind or stand-on zero-turn mowers and weed identification. These are just three important tasks but there are way more than I have space to list.

We also are phasing in the requirement for our production leaders to become a Certified Grounds Technician which will eventually lead to a requirement of becoming a Certified Grounds Manager Technician.

These certifications are tested through the Professional Grounds Management Society. We are trying to build a team that wants to continue their education, but most importantly, we are creating a team that wants to grow our company.

Creating more training opportunities for your leadership staff is important for a small company.

Again, this seems so elementary. I promise you it’s not. Until our current training curriculum was implemented, no one on our team would buy into any training program we tried to implement. I don’t think our prior curriculums were terrible; they just weren’t well received by our staff at that time.

My team and I put a lot of time and effort into them, but ultimately, they were not built for our company. We built them for what we thought we wanted Brunner’s to be, not what Brunner’s needed to be. Our current training program is simple and to the point. With the help of our entire leadership staff, we have built a program that will create industry leaders who will ultimately stay leaders at our company. As we used to say in the military, “You train like you fight.”

Step 2.

The next big lesson we learned was you must have a growth chart to let people know where they are going.

That growth chart has to include year-round work. You have to provide your team with year-round work or the goal of promotion to a position that offers year-round work.

At our company, the position that guarantees year-round work is entry level team leader. Our growth chart looks like the following:

Being in an industry dependent on snow that usually doesn’t fall, winter-time revenue is scarce. We had to find a way to keep the promise of guaranteeing our team part-time employment over the winter months. Our solution was a statistics-based seasonal snow contract.

With the help of a snow industry-specific coach, we were able to generate contract terms for our clients that would help our company with the revenue stream and keep more than half of our team on all winter long.

These contracts have allowed us to keep more than just our team leaders employed over the slower months; we have been able to keep hard-working team members part-time as well.

Although some of our entry-level staff are still laid off, we invite them to assist in snow removal and any training we may have over the winter.

Now that we have revenue all winter, we can show our team a path forward with Brunner’s Lawn and Services and in the green industry. Our team knows that the leadership and, most importantly, the ownership cares about them.

Step 3.

Once we had the team squared away and set up to grow, we had to shift our focus to our clients. We had to figure out how to sell these new snow contracts to our client base without taking advantage of them. We had to figure out how to cash in on the trust we had built with our clients over the last 13 years of business. As an ownership team, we had to find a balance. Our culture and our financial health depended on it.

To help create the snow contracts based on statistics, we subscribed to a meteorologist-ran site that gives our company all the snow statistics for different cities in our area. With the data from this site, we generated a product that covered snow remediation.

Based on the data, the product is priced as a monthly payment, but there is a twist. If it snows under 12 inches, we give back a predetermined credit per inch under 12 inches. On the flip side, if it snows more than 30 inches, we get to bill the same predetermined amount as the credit for each inch over 30. The data that we use is based on 10 years of snowfall.

Our clients may have to pay money whether it snows or not, but they know that when the great white death of snow falls, Brunner’s has them covered.

This method of snow billing allows our company to generate the revenue needed to retain our top talent and train the up-and-comers. It also allows us to show the younger entry-level team members that there is a track to full-time work while ensuring that our client portfolio is well taken care of during a snow event.

This season, we truly are seeing the benefits of our hard work. We are seeing a team of grounds maintenance professionals who love their jobs and place of employment. We are witnessing before our very eyes the results of perseverance and a goal to create a people-focused culture.

We are noticing that we are gaining a new level of respect among our clients and their peers. Our team lives by our core values of integrity, dependability and respect.

Build your culture and you will reap the same benefits; you just have to have patience.

The author is co-owner of Brunner’s Lawn and Services.