Jennifer Chaplin

CEO, Botanica Landscapes, Yuba City, California

Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic, Botanica Landscapes has seen a boom in design/build projects. Now, a few years removed from the shutdowns, CEO Jennifer Chaplin says she thinks that trend is here to stay. In fact, it’s helping the business reach about $4 million annually in revenue.

“For us, this year is going well,” she says. “When COVID hit, our residential construction portion of the business really increased and it has pretty much stayed at that point. We are booked three months out for appointments. That’s just scheduling a visit.”

Chaplin, who has been CEO of the 40-year-old business for a few years now, says that while having all this work is great, the most challenging aspect can be managing customers’ expectations.

“We have customers that we’re doing installation or maintenance for that’ve been our customer for over 30 years,” she explains. “And they want us to do it the same way we’ve always done it. So, we work with them on that. Then, we have other customers who are brand-new to us and come into it with brand-new ideas and things that they’ve seen on Pinterest or something like that.

“Some of them have very grandiose ideas,” she adds. “They don’t know it but what they want a quote on is a concrete planter that costs $4,000. And their budget is $3,000 for the whole renovation.”

Chaplin says as social media and other technology continues to be more of a mainstay in people’s lives, it can be harder to bring them back to reality.

“That’s something we’ve really been working with people a lot on — they just don’t know. They just know what looks nice to them, but they don’t have any concept of how much things actually cost or how difficult it is to install,” she says.

Also, when it comes to their customers, Chaplin admits she thought they’d be a little more upset about a recent price increase than they were.

“We’ve raised our wages of our employees and therefore we raised the rates for our customers. We implemented an annual 3% increase,” she says. “I was curious when we did that how much pushback we’d get from people, but we really didn’t get hardly any. I had a couple of people ask where I came up with that number, and I told them the Consumer Price Index and then they were O.K. with that.

“We had some other customers who were not thrilled we were raising their rates, but then we went and talked to them and explained that one of the reasons why was because we were paying our employees more,” Chaplin adds. “Once they learned that was why we were raising our rates, they were happy about it. It’s because they’re happy with the crew members who work on their homes.”

Despite the recent price increase, Chaplin says Botanica isn’t even looking to grow — but rather improve profitability.

“That’s what I’ve been working on are systems and efficiencies and things like that,” she says. “It’s difficult to try and change a company culture in a company that’s been around for this long. There’s not pushback, but sometimes I think people don’t really believe the changes are going to happen…now that I’ve been CEO for a few years they clearly know that I mean what I say, and I say what I mean, and we’ve enforced change. People have been more onboard.”

Dave LaFore

President, Colorado Green Pros, Sheridan, Colorado

Servicing more than 300 commercial locations, Dave LaFore says changing his business model years ago and relying on technology will help his company reach over $3.5 million in revenue this year.

“I have a group of subcontractors and partners that’ve been the same group of people since 2012,” he says. “Back before that I had about 50 employees, 30 trucks and was the typical landscape operation.”

In addition to his subcontractors, LaFore explains he has two employees in-house helping to manage everything.

“We’re a highly automated operation and we’re using a lot of technology,” he says.

Colorado Green Pros utilizes a mobile phone-based app that has crews uploading photos and recordings out in the field.

“I give my corporate clients an account and they can see basically a live feed,” he says. “They can see everything in that feed and what’s going on at that property. It’s a real good tool for engaging the clients.”

Engagement and communication are some things LaFore says can be difficult in the commercial realm.

“Because they’re corporate clients, they aren’t at the property while the crews are there. They might be in New York or Chicago or somewhere else managing hundreds of properties across the country. The technology helps connect everybody,” LaFore says.

Another aspect of the app is accountability for his subcontracting partners.

“Instead of doing paper timesheets, they record everything in our mobile app,” he explains, “which is also available in Spanish. That’s huge and it’s a big impediment of technology these days because most of it is built only for English speakers.”

LaFore adds Colorado Green Pros has had to deal with its fair share of material costs rising and other expenses going up.

“One of the challenges is insurance,” he says. “If you’re in the snow removal business, the insurance costs are just horrendous. Our insurance costs have doubled within the last two years. And all the people I’m talking to in the business are just feeling that same pressure.”

LaFore notes higher costs for pipe, parts, fertilizer and other materials have caused him to make some major changes in pricing.

“Before COVID, we didn’t do many price increases, and the ones we did were few and far between,” he says. “But these last couple of years we’ve had to do some substantial price increases just to cover costs.”

Thankfully, LaFore notes that the reception to these price increases has been rather positive.

“A couple of clients made the comment that they knew this was coming,” he says. “Because they’re getting price increases from all their vendors and not just their landscapers.”

Craig Duttarer

VP of operations, Superscapes, Carrollton, Texas

Last year was when Superscapes really felt like they were coming out of the pandemic lag, Craig Duttarer says. The company achieved $39 million in revenue. With 350 employees, the company hopes to reach the $50 million mark in 2023.

While he’s confident they will reach this goal, Duttarer says this year hasn’t been without its problems.

“In the landscaping industry, we’re always dealing with some sort of drama,” he says. “One of the biggest challenges we’ve had in 2023, and a lot of the drama, has been around environmental factors like too much rain, or it’s too cold, or there’s a shortage of a certain plant or tree that we have to overcome.”

Duttarer says he’s been in the industry for decades and never experienced the kind of chaos that a lack of available sod caused this year.

“This year is the first time in 25 years that I’ve ever experienced not being able to get sod from our sod farms,” he says. “That’s a critical element to complete a project — you have to have sod.”

According to Duttarer, the problems all started back at the end of 2022 when another “Texas Freeze” wreaked havoc.

“Because of the freeze that happened in December, there were quite a few sod farmers that lost crops,” he says. “We’re talking 500-800 acres that they had to till over because it died. And then we had an excessive amount of rain in March and April. So, they were getting hit with all these rain showers where they couldn’t cut viable sod. A lot of projects were impacted by that in the months of May and June.”

There wasn’t anything they could do about the unexpected interruption, Duttarer explains, though they did start widening their circle of suppliers.

“We had to wait it out,” he says. “We did find one supplier who was in a different area of Texas, and we brokered a deal. We pre-bought 100 pallets of sod just to get us over the hump. It was like 30 truckloads of sod.”

While too much rain was an issue this year, Duttarer notes that almost every year his market deals with some type of drought and watering restrictions.

He says this summer’s high temperatures have caused more of the same.

“They haven’t fully gone to any dramatic decreases in water usage on new construction yet,” he says. “That’s always something to be mindful of because some municipalities will start to shut off water and water is critical to our installation process.”

But despite the curveballs of Mother Nature, Duttarer says growth has been steady at Superscapes and the company hasn’t had to do anything out of the ordinary to expand.

“We’re kind of a woodchuck company — you know…how much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could,” he says. “We do what we do best and try not to get fancy with incorporating something new into our business. We do what we know and chuck as much wood as we can.”

Cody Rindlisbacher

Owner of CPR Services, Riverton, Utah

Cody Rindlisbacher has been in the green industry mowing lawns since he was 11 years old. Now, after starting CPR Services eight years ago, it’s him and a small team of five employees working around the clock.

“It’s been busy,” he says. “All the contractors I know — everyone’s been loaded with work. Everything is still booming and there’s been a lot of commercial landscape projects, though the residential market has slowed down a little bit.”

Rindlisbacher says the company is expected to do over $310,000 this year if all goes well. Though, he says most of his struggles currently stem from a lack of labor.

“We cannot find people who are willing to work or want to do manual labor,” he says. “We’ve had to turn down a lot of work and we’ve just been able to keep our steady load that we’ve had. We haven’t picked up much more work than we can handle.”

He adds that he’s done about everything and anything he can to try and entice prospective employees but even getting them in the door is harder than expected.

“We’ve had job listings posted everywhere online,” he says. “We’ve tried word-of-mouth and contacted a lot of people to let them know we’re hiring. We’ve been so slim on interviews and applications.”

As much as he hates having to turn down work, Rindlisbacher notes CPR is growing.

“We’ve had steady growth every year,” he says. “We’ve grown 15-20% at least every year. We don’t do any marketing. Everything we do is through word-of-mouth. I attribute our growth to doing good work and our clients talking to people they know about the work we’ve done for them.”

Outside of looking for labor, Rindlisbacher says the weather can also pose challenges and that droughts have caused some new trends in landscaping and stricter irrigation practices.

“We’ve noticed a lot of people in our area are doing xeriscapes, because we’ve been struggling with a drought here,” he says. “There’s been a lot of people removing their lawns and putting in gravel and low-water-use plants.”

Though watering regulations are common in Utah, Rindlisbacher says they haven’t been too bad this season.

“This year we haven’t run into too many regulations or issues that’ve caused problems for us,” he says.

And while xeriscapes are trending, Rindlisbacher says it’s not something he pushes his clients toward.

“We offer those things, but we try to stay away from the trends in that aspect,” he says. “We figure that by installing a proper irrigation system and educating our clients on how to water, we aren’t going to have to tear up the whole yard to do rock, which will just be hotter on the house.”

The author is assistant editor at Lawn & Landscape.