BUSINESS OPPORTUNITIES: Weed Control Beyond Turf

Lawn care operators know that all weeds aren’t created equal. Their customers don’t always recognize this fact, however. That’s what Phil Fogarty and colleagues at his Euclid, Ohio-based lawn care company found out 11 years ago.

“We were killing weeds for people in lawns, and they had the need outside their lawns, as well,” Fogarty says. “They thought ‘If you can kill them in the lawn, than you could kill them in the parking lot.’”
 
What these customers were asking for isn’t as easy as it sounds. Fogarty and crew couldn’t simply apply a broad-spectrum herbicide down in a gravel parking lot like they would to turf. Entirely different chemistry is required and, as a result, the Environmental Protection Agency requires different licensure. Also, Fogarty notes, “It’s much more difficult to kill a weed in a barren area and to keep it away.”
 
What these customers were asking for, it turns out, was industrial vegetation management, or the eradication or control of noxious/invasive weeds at industrial, roadside, railway, forestry, aquatic and other non-turf sites.
 
After identifying this need among its customers, Fogarty’s lawn care company, which operates today as a Weed Man franchise, started Crowley’s Vegetation Control. Today Fogarty is the president of Crowley’s, in addition to his duties as submaster franchisor for Weed Man in Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York.
 
Crowley’s two main sources of business are industrial bareground work and invasive species control for small government bodies (cities, townships, etc.) that need their roadways, ditches, signage, railways and natural areas kept clear.
 
After Crowley’s applicators earned vegetation management licenses, the company began marketing to its current clients. “We started by doing work for our commercial customers on gravel and in parking lots,” he says. “We were able to land a big account from within our lawn care customer base and once we had that, we bought a little more equipment and did some more marketing and kept selling it.”
 
The next step was to market externally. “We started looking for other customers and we saw that vegetation control could be a division in itself,” Fogarty says.
 
Today, three full-time crews provide nothing but vegetation management services for the entire growing season. “We have grown by 50 percent a year in this side of things for the last four or five years,” Fogarty says. “We’re doing, all told, between $350,000 and $400,000 worth of vegetation management per year.”

CHALLENGES. One challenge Crowley’s encountered was a lack of information on the service’s best practices, Fogarty says. “There aren’t enough people doing it as a core business,” he says, noting that vegetation control is the certification designation that pesticide applicators add on most frequently, but it’s the category with the fewest number of primary applicators. “Consequently, there aren’t enough seminars, classes and experts out there,” he says. “We had to learn most of this from suppliers and from trial and error.”
 
On the sales side, when Crowley’s initiated the service it made sense to most of its current commercial lawn care customers who had weeds growing outside of their lawns. These customers were candidates for Crowley’s bareground service, as many organizations’ safety and productivity requirements dictate that certain industrial and utility sites and other commercial properties be kept weed-free.
 
Acquiring new customers in need of baregound work can be difficult, however, because one pool of potential customers includes overgrown, abandoned or for-sale properties that haven’t been used in a while, and as such do not have a decision maker on site. “Often, we know we can save the customers a lot of money on damage to the building and pavement caused by weeds, but we can’t find the owner,” Fogarty says. One tip he offers is to contact property managers or realtors dealing with vacant properties. Often, they can name the owner.
 
Once a contractor reaches an owner, however, he or she may hesitate to invest in vegetation management. “You’ve found someone that’s not getting any revenue from this source,” he says, explaining why some people balk at the service. Contractors should stick to the typical selling points, Fogarty notes. Vegetation control prevents pavement damage, reduces the long-term costs associated with maintenance and – most importantly for properties on the real estate market – offers aesthetic advantages.
 
The other type of vegetation control that Crowley’s offers – invasive and noxious weed control for municipalities – relates more to safety and protecting natural areas. For motor safety-related factors like visibility and drainage, rights-of-way, highways and railways need to be cleared. Also, untreated alien species of weeds can take over a once-productive piece of land and render it useless, destroying the natural ecosystem.
 
Another sales challenge, one that lawn care operators may be familiar with, is beating the weed growth to the punch. The value of the service is prevention; however that point can be difficult to convey to a customer who’s never experienced the ramifications of an overgrown gravel lot, for example. “The need is most apparent once the growing season is in full gear, but the value in what we supply is greater before the growing season starts,” Fogarty says. “If the customer calls after growth begins, even though we can kill those weeds, they’re still left with a stalk they have to deal with.” As a result, Crowley’s focuses on selling to and servicing current customers as soon as the weather allows and signs up new accounts during the rest of the summer.
 
In terms of profitability, Fogarty says vegetation control beats lawn care. “We feel it’s more profitable because the cost of the sale isn’t as much as it is in lawn care,” he says, noting that margins vary, but “could easily be in the neighborhood of 20 percent.” However, vegetation control is not as reliable as lawn care in terms of recurring revenue. “If you fix a problem for someone, they might not call you for several years,” Fogarty explains.
 
Due to the differences in customer and application types, price points vary. Crowley’s prices bareground areas by acreage. Fence lines, however, are priced by linear running feet. “Each job is based on size, products needed, difficulty – sometimes we’re walking through woods or swamp – and customer expectations,” Fogarty says. Generally, per-acre pricing for vegetation control can range from $450 to $1,000 depending on products used and degree of difficulty in reaching the target site.

TECHNICAL TALK. Although vegetation management has boded well for Crowley’s, it hasn’t been entirely seamless. Because of the different chemistry required to combat invasive species and weeds in unwanted areas, the EPA and state regulators require applicators to earn vegetation-control specific designations on their licenses. “Even though it seemed like such a natural transition for the customer,” Fogarty says, “it was very different for us to perform vegetation management compared to lawn care.”
 
Although vegetation control uses different chemistry than lawn care, the equipment and techniques are generally the same. Sprayers and spray trucks are standard; however, applicators may need longer hoses and platforms on trucks to treat overtop of overgrown vegetation. Also, the application tends to be lower volume to avoid any possible drift.
 
Regarding equipment, Fogarty stresses one pertinent procedure: “You need equipment that’s going to do nothing but this work,” he says. “You can’t mix hard vegetation control products and have them lingering as a residual for residential weed control on a lawn.”
 
Crowley’s is extremely vigilant about this practice, segregating vegetation control equipment from anything that resembles selective and horticultural services to avoid any mix ups.
 
Although the company already uses different tools, applicators, uniforms, shoes and storage, it has considered moving the vegetation control division entirely off site from the lawn care business – just to ensure there’s no potential for crossover.
 
Another technical challenge relates to pest resistance. “We definitely learned the need for understanding your target pest because Mother Nature is an amazing force and she adapts and evolves to survive,” Fogarty says. “For years we would have a product that worked fine in a situation and all of the sudden one year it didn’t work.”
 
Monoculture breakthroughs, where one weed pops up all over a property, aren’t unlikely, even after expansive, thorough pesticide applications that have worked in years past. To customers, these single weed pop ups can look as if the contractor didn’t do a thing, Fogarty says. “But what we did is get rid of everything except that one weed that developed resistance, but they don’t care that just this one weed slipped through.”
 
To combat resistance, applicators have to be flexible, Fogarty says, and change chemistry from time to time. He explains: “In time Mother Nature will figure out a way to beat you, so you have to stay ahead of her – just like any woman.”