Danielle Pungitore

Marketing manager, Pungitore Irrigation and Fertilizer, Hingham, Massachusetts

Pungitore Irrigation and Fertilizer is growing despite the ongoing challenges of finding qualified labor.

Danielle Pungitore says the labor shortage isn’t just about finding people — it’s about finding good people who fit the team culture and who know how to work in the green industry. Of course, she recognizes they have to start somewhere, but they don’t want people who take the position as just a last resort.

“We want them to want to be here,” she says. “I think COVID had a lot of impact on that. Our theory was (people) were trying to keep up with unemployment applications.

“We’ve been able to find talent and people with prior experience,” she continues. “We have a great mix of people, although it’s still challenging to find people in that space who are wanting to work, have the right drive, have the right talent.”

Danielle and her husband, Mike, have taken over the lawn maintenance work from her father’s company this year as he retired. It’s been an interesting jump into a new segment of the industry, but Danielle says she and Mike have learned a lot about that side of landscaping. The nice upside is the strong, predictable and recurring revenue stream.

Of course, that also comes with some challenges. As they added a whole crew, vehicle and equipment to what Mike previously ran, they’ve learned maintenance customers tend to lead to more client complaints because of how familiar they get with your service.

“You provide more service, you’re naturally going to hear more about it,” she says.

Back on the irrigation side of things, Pungitore says she’s noticed an increase in costs for all sorts of materials they’ve had to pass along to customers. One other thing they’ve done is recently open a warehouse/garage area to store some of those pipes and spray heads. As the prices of those materials continue to rise, Pungitore says it’s nice to store them up to mitigate against more possible price hikes in the future.

“Fertilizer is harder to store,” she adds, “but we’ve made other choices based on pricing and supplies, (and we) changed our vendor.”

Pungitore predicts that this time in the next few years, she’ll be talking even more about water conservation trends. She’s noticed they’ve really taken off in drought-stricken areas of the West, but she says those same trends will spread nationally.

She says it’s an area of opportunity to introduce more conservation-based practices. “We need to get ahead of that. Other areas of the country have already faced more water restrictions than we have,” she says. “It’s only a matter of time.”

Pete Haran

Senior Director of Operations, Cenova, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Snow services have traditionally occupied over 90% of the revenue at Pete Haran’s company, Cenova.

Not anymore. The company pulls in roughly $10 million in the Philadelphia area, and a vast majority of that revenue does still come from snow and deicing. But with such a light snowfall last winter and rising costs of salt, Haran says Cenova has seen an opportunity to grow its landscape presence.

“We doubled or tripled our revenue source for the landscaping,” he says.

Cenova once had just one landscape crew but tacked on two more this last year. Haran says the employees are seasoned horticulturists — for his part, he’s worked in the industry for nearly 40 years. And Cenova had previously done other green industry work like tree care or maintenance, but over the years, they saw the snow segment emerge as the primary money-maker. He believes it’s because there’s lots of sidewalk work in the city that other contractors might balk at due to the risk. So, with limited competition, Haran says Cenova has been able to charge a good fee for the snow services to make it worth it.

But their re-introduction to some services cannot come at a better time, Haran says.

“In my 40 years in the industry, I’ve never seen a year this low in snow in the Philadelphia market,” he says.

Haran says his team self-performs winter work in the Philadelphia market but will subcontract out work well into northern New Jersey and into Maryland or Delaware. And despite the fact snow has been the backbone at Cenova, Haran says the mild winter proved deflating.

To further complicate matters, Haran says they recently met with two of their salt suppliers. He admits they were surprised to learn that costs hadn’t tapered off a bit, but instead, the prices have stabilized to be about the same cost as they’ve been since COVID-19. It’s hard for the company to store a bunch of salt because there’s not a lot of places in the city where they can burrow away bulk salt in bins, but they have a yard in Philadelphia they keep open 24/7 for subcontractors to snag the materials.

So, keeping enough supply to feed the demand might be challenging this year.

“Our fee for deicing has gone up because of the salt,” Haran says. “(Adding landscaping) has nothing to do with the price of salt. It just has to do with increasing some revenues based upon the fact that if there is a slow snow year, at least we have some revenue coming in.”

One thing Haran says has become a trend in his area is wage inflation. His laborers are now wanting roughly $20 an hour.

“The demand is there for these guys because they will jump ship for a nickel,” Haran says. “Our feeling has always been to try and create a good culture and a good workforce where everybody gets along. We want them to come in and enjoy what they do.”

Eric Wenger

President, Complete Lawn Care, Gaithersburg, Maryland

When Eric Wenger talks to clients about their county’s herbicide ban, he does so with the understanding that they might just go buy the illegal chemicals themselves.

Montgomery County, Maryland, banned pesticides in January 2020. At the time, Wenger and other lawn care operators in the area pointed to a ban in Canada where residents there just drove across the border to Detroit to get the chemicals and brought them back home. The litigation process obviously didn’t go Wenger’s way, and for the last three years, he and other LCOs have just adapted to the regulation.

There’s no other choice. Wenger still believes it affects some of their ability to provide quality service.

“I like to say that we used to have a toolbox filled with precision instruments, and the county threw it away and gave us a hammer,” Wenger says. “The unwritten joke is that there’s massive cheating everywhere.”

Wenger believes his clients are just enhancing the services performed by his two companies, Complete Lawn Care and Complete Plant Health Care. He hasn’t seen any more cancellations than he did before.

Another area where his clients are affected is by material shortages, where Wenger says the supply chain is still slow, albeit better than it was this time last year. Specifically, he points to plant materials, where shortages have affected the scope of his clients’ projects. When product finally becomes available, the clients have already changed their minds often times, making it difficult to stay on task.

“There’s definitely shortages of plant material,” Wenger says. “The combination of economy, COVID and then weather has wrecked a lot of nurseries in the southeast — it’s really fascinating to see how that has impacted the availability.”

To keep up with the price increases on the materials and fuel surcharges on those deliveries, Wenger estimates that his prices to clients are up as much as 20%. With a spike like that, Wenger anticipated some client frustration but they’ve also all been understanding.

“We are really passing it along. Prices are up,” Wenger says. “I think that we are seeing some pushback, but a lot of folks just understand. They’re seeing it everywhere.”

Mark McAteer

CEO, The Laurel Group, Long Island, New York

Wage increases aren’t just apparent in Pennsylvania —they’ve seen them in New York, too.

Mark McAteer leads The Laurel Group, a collection of companies in landscape design and maintenance that’s amassed over 300 employees and spans across 11 locations in Long Island, New York. The company pulls in $40 million.

Despite all that to manage, McAteer isn’t bothered by the rising price of keeping his employees. In fact, he’s encouraged by the changes his team has made — an improved benefits package and higher pay among them. They’ve even seen less labor market burden than before.

“It is significantly alleviated from the worst period, which was 18 months ago,” he says. “We’re seeing all throughout the entire ranks, from the professionals to unskilled labors. We’re seeing an availability of laborers.”

Some of the wage inflation comes from state legislators, where wage escalators and PTO laws have forced companies in the state to adapt quickly. In February 2022 when the changes were implemented, McAteer says Laurel was behind the curve on the wage inflation. Their contracts for design/build and maintenance were already out, so the contracts were going to underperform due to the wage increase plus spikes in fuel costs. In-season price increases to try and close that gap helped, but it still proved trying for the business.

“The budget was blown before March 1st,” he says.

But McAteer called the changes “overdue increases.” He says Laurel had some time to get it together after that initial shock, and the lowest employee ranks were already paid above the new minimum wages. But, existing employees had legitimate points about wages rising for everyone but them.

“They said, ‘My moment has come,’ and they were right. It’s part of how we operate anyway,” he says.

As an added benefit, McAteer says he’s seen less turnover as a result of the changes.

“Ultimately, we were in competition for CDLs (Commercial Driver License) with big, national companies,” he says. “We went from losing several CDL drivers per month to stopping that deterioration and then reversing it entirely.”

Now, McAteer says the company still has a steady pipeline of work. Their range of clientele goes from upper middle class to wealthy, and he says that at the very top level, that work continues on unabated. However, it seems to be slowing some at the lower end of their client spectrum.

Still, nobody’s going back to cutting their own lawn anytime soon. McAteer says his clients do value the relationship they have with Laurel, and while they may be choosing fewer enhancements, all evidence points to an intention to stick around.

One challenge McAteer says is tough to navigate in his region is heightening restrictions on building permits and administrative hurdles that go along with design/build installations. It’s roughly half of their business, but it’s becoming trickier than ever to get approval for new designs. That’s why he’s brought in two permit expeditors to stay in house — every time they want to take out a tree, they need a permit. If they want to widen the driveway, they need a permit. Installing a little garden near the house? A permit’s needed.

“You have to be good at it. Our internal landscape architects and designers are constantly dealing with the application process,” McAteer says. “It’s particularly acute in east side of Long Island, where preservation of native habitat is prevalent at a developmental restriction.”

That geographic area also proves difficult the further east they get, as materials and manpower get harder to find the closer to the coast they get.

“Geographic isolation means you have a finite pool of labor, even though it is a wildly lucrative area,” McAteer says. “But the reduced availability of manpower and material is a very complex thing to navigate on a day-by-day basis.”

The author is associate editor with Lawn & Landscape magazine.