BRIEFCASE-SMALL: The Road Less Traveled

For 20 years, Brad and Dina Baker have set their residential landscaping business, Baker Creative, apart with their focus on customer service, marketing and innovative landscape design. So when the opportunity to grow their $800,000-a-year company by acquiring Green Team Gardeners presented itself, the couple accepted the challenge head-on – even though it meant purchasing a business in a rocky economy.

“We look at this kind of economic period as a time to actually try to increase market share, because then when the upswing comes we are positioned to benefit faster,” Dina Baker says. “Obviously you have to tighten your belt to do it this way, but it’s a great positioning technique.”

Best of all? The husband-and-wife team didn’t even have to seek out the acquisition of Green Team Gardeners. When the woman who owned the business decided to retire, she looked around for a like-minded, knowledgeable horticulturist in the Philadelphia  area who would take care of her business. And Brad’s name came up, time and again.

After the owner of Green Team Gardeners planted the seed, the Bakers did their research and decided the time was right for the acquisition of the $220,000-a-year company, which promised to boost the Bakers’ cross-selling opportunities and help them increase market share. Plus, the acquisition provides the opportunity to dabble more in the artistic side of landscaping. “The company had been owned by a woman who was a self-trained horticulturist; her formal training was as an artist,” Dina Baker says. “We’re finding examples of approaches to landscape design that come from outside the traditional horticulture or landscape design field, so we’re gaining perspective on landscape design that we’re able to grow with.”

Plus, the acquisition helps Baker Creative further its mission to become a one-stop shop that promises “Carefree Maintenance.” The company now offers its customers myriad services at once, ranging from the landscape design they built the company around to more recent additions including landscape maintenance, drainage work and outdoor lighting design and installation. “It feeds into being an exterior property manager as much as their landscape-build person,” Dina Baker says.

From Seedling to Successful Startup

From the beginning, when Brad and Dina decided they were ready to start their own company, they looked for ways to set themselves apart from the rest. That’s why they shied away from marketing to the owners of new homes and instead focused on landscaping existing homes.

“It was the road less traveled by most other landscapers,” Brad Baker says. “There was less competition doing older properties. It required a different level of skill and knowledge to understand and work with what was already existing, as opposed to a blank slate.”

It’s a decision that’s paying off today, when so many other landscape design companies have taken a hit as a result of lackluster new home sales. As Brad and Dina point out, the need for watering and trimming doesn’t go away just because the housing market slows.

Smart Marketing

Implementing a savvy marketing plan from the startup stage hasn’t hurt either. Right away, Dina set to work putting her background in advertising, marketing, and public relations to use to drum up business. “It really was unheard of for a residential/landscape/design company to have the kind of marketing materials we had,” she says. “Our first brochure was extremely professional and comprehensive. I think that made a tremendous difference.”

Today, the company’s comprehensive marketing plan still includes an updated version of that first brochure, which is distributed as part of a direct mailing to lists of potential customers provided by Welcome Wagon. “We know where homes that fit into our model are, where we want to expand into. We are very strategic about it,” Dina Baker says.

So strategic, in fact, that Dina keeps records of what works and what doesn’t. “We know why people call us, we ask the right questions, we track it, so the decisions we make can be constantly refined to ensure we’re marketing effectively,” she says.

That’s why she knows, for instance, that despite its lower sell rate, advertising in Yellow Book USA is worth spending advertising dollars on. An occasional advertisement in a high-end consumer magazine doesn’t hurt either. And drumming up publicity is important too, which is why, for the third year, Baker Creative accepted an invitation to showcase their work at the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society Flower Show.

Of course, generating traffic to the company Web site (www.bakercreative.com) is another key. “We have a terrific website that provides not only information about the company but also tips for people,” she says. “Online marketing is becoming more and more important to our markets.”

Service With a Smile

Brad and Dina make no secret of the fact that customer service is a vital component of their business – and has been since the beginning, when Dina started manning the phones and making sure customers spoke to a real person rather than the answering machine when they called.

The Baker Creative model of customer service focuses on seeing things through the eyes of the clients. “We’re always trying to put ourselves in the position of the individual homeowner,” Dina Baker says. “We try to really learn about who the customer is and then marry that to the knowledge we have.”

“It’s being able to put our feet in their shoes,” Brad Baker adds. “We’re not imposing the landscape on them, we’re asking them the right questions and helping them put together a landscape that fits their lifestyle.”

They take customer education seriously too. “We don’t only want to use all the science and technology,” Dina Baker says. “We want our customers to understand it and be more effective property owners. We want to teach them something that is going to be of value to them in working with us.”

Going that extra mile with the customer has, perhaps, made all the difference. “We started with a level of customer service, and we never walked away from that,” Dina Baker says.

Nor do they plan to walk away from the customer base they’ve built up – or the one they acquired from Green Team Gardeners – anytime soon. In fact, this one-stop shop is just getting growing.