MISSISSAUGA, ONTARIO – The biggest name in Canadian lawn care is joining forces with some big names in the U.S. lawn care industry with the goal of building the second-largest lawn care company in the United States within the next five years.
The Weed Man, a 30-year franchisor of lawn care services with 135 operations grossing approximately $50 million annually throughout Canada, shared its new plans for expansion into the U.S. market in an exclusive interview with Lawn & Landscape.
"Our goal is to open up 100 territories servicing about 70 cities throughout the U.S. within five years," related Roger Mongeon, president of Turf Management and Turf Operations, the two holding companies that own master franchise rights to the United States for Weed Man.
"Our biggest problem with entering the U.S. market until now has been the lack of key people, but now everything has come together bringing the necessary people with the expertise in the U.S. market," explained Dez Rice, Weed Man president.
One of the key people joining the Weed Man team is Terry Kurth, a former employee of The Scotts Co. and a long-time franchisee in the Barefoot Grass organization before it was purchased by TruGreen-ChemLawn in early 1997.
Kurth will serve Weed Man in developing master franchisors, which are individuals who own the territory rights to a number of territories in a geographic region and who then sell the various franchise rights to the individuals who will run the operation in the area. The master franchisors will then retain a percentage of the royalties paid by each of the franchises they sell, set up and support.
Kurth and other Weed Man representatives pointed to the presence of these master franchisors as a key strategic difference setting Weed Man apart from other U.S. lawn care franchise systems such as Leisure Lawn, Lawn Doctor and All-Green.
"With the labor situation as bad as it is, a lot of contractors are tired of beating their head against the wall and now they want an opportunity to leverage their experience," Mongeon noted.
"I’ve talked to a lot of lawn care operators who have thought about expanding their businesses but they don’t know if they’ve got the necessary support to do so," Kurth explained. "Franchising with Weed Man means these contractors have an immediate infrastructure to grow from and computer software to manage their business with and all of the other benefits of being part of this group."
Kurth added that the first master franchisor agreement should be finalized with a prominent industry veteran in the upper Midwest by November, and he sees a great deal of potential for Weed Man across the country.
"There are a lot of landscape contractors who are re-examining the way they handle their chemical lawn care work either because they’ve sub-contracted the work to TruGreen-ChemLawn and they don’t want to do that anymore since TruGreen-ChemLawn has gotten into landscape work, or these contractors have realized how strong the margins are in lawn care," Kurth added. "The problem for these contractors is that they may not be familiar with the pesticides lawn care companies use or they don’t know the proper way to tank mix these products, so that’s where buying a franchise and obtaining all of the support from the corporate office and master franchisor can help."
Currently, Weed Man’s U.S. presence is primarily represented by corporately owned offices in Seattle, Wash.; Denver, Colo.; and Minneapolis, Minn. These locations have served as testing grounds for the last one to three years.
"We’ve been concentrating on getting our licensing paperwork taken care of for the U.S. markets and looking for any differences between the U.S. and Canadian markets," explained Mongeon, noting that Weed Man found few variations between lawn care businesses north and south of the border. "We feel very well prepared to start offering these franchises now," he added.
Weed Man has historically focused on selling franchises in smaller markets in Canada – populations of 50,000 to 150,000 – and although the group has plans to target larger markets as well in the U.S., Mongeon and Rice explained that their expertise in small markets will be an asset in the future.
"Selling a master franchisor a large territory to develop through selling to individuals in the smaller, more local markets will generate quite a bit of interest because right now TruGreen-ChemLawn is just dominating in some of these markets," Mongeon explained.
"And we’ve learned how to make operators successful in the low population areas because Canada doesn’t have the same population density that the U.S. has," Rice added. "While we will definitely sell franchises in bigger cities in the U.S., the sheer size of the U.S. means our potential there is phenomenal."
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