Put it to practice

Tim Kent wasn’t looking for a career in landscaping. Before he became the maintenance manager at Blue Stone Gardens and Landscape in Oregon, he made sandwiches at his local Subway restaurant.

Kent says he worked at Subway just to earn his first paychecks. The job was never meant to be permanent, even if it didn’t hurt that he could just make himself his go-to steak sandwich for lunch. But Kent’s mom ran into Jake Hueners, Blue Stone’s owner and manager, at her Verizon store where she works. It came up in conversation that her son needed a new job, and Hueners told her he was hiring.

A week later, Kent interviewed for a job that’d ultimately change his life.

“I started out just as a crew member, working with whoever needed my help, and slowly getting trained up by a whole bunch of different guys,” Kent says. “I had no experience, didn’t really know what I was doing.”

That’s changed dramatically. Lawn & Landscape named Kent one of its Employees of the Year for 2024 because of his contributions to a company that’s grown substantially since it hired Kent. He was just one of three or four other employees back when he started in 2019, but the company’s up to 30. Though Kent and his bosses say it’s a team effort, Kent’s work in creating business standards for hiring, training and estimating have enabled the team to flourish.

“I helped design and set (these policies) up, but I had him implement and run them from the beginning,” says Jon Creach, the company’s operations manager. “He’s the one out in the field putting it to practice.”

On the rise

Hueners says he recognized a good leader in Kent pretty early on in his tenure at the company.

In his first few months with the team, there was a day where several crew leads couldn’t make it to their jobsites. Despite Kent’s role as just a crew member at the time, Hueners says Kent stepped up without a single complaint.

“He’s just a natural leader. He’s just really excelled massively where he can learn things really easy, and also he can bring people along,” Hueners says. “It didn’t seem like the field was too big for him.”

Kent rose quickly from a crew member to a crew leader in just a year’s time. After leading his own route every day, he was brought off that to become a supervisor, only stepping in on the field labor when he was needed.

His rapid ascension within the company revealed to Kent that his landscaping job he just picked up for cash might be something special.

“At one point, I started getting brought in on higher up business talk,” Kent says. “At that point, I knew maybe I could go a lot farther here than I thought.”

Bringing others aboard

The company wouldn’t have grown without Kent’s ability to find the right pieces for the team. These days, Kent does a majority of the hiring. Creach says the company’s office manager sets up the interviews, and while he and Hueners focus on hiring major roles, Kent’s the one interviewing and selecting candidates who become workers out in the field.

Kent says Creach provides a list of questions that Kent uses as a starting point in conversation, though he mixes in his own questions. He often asks candidates to define the word integrity.

“I’ve been told I have a great perspective on people when meeting them initially — I get a good read on them,” Kent says. “I like to meet these people before they come into the business because we don’t want just anybody in here. We want good guys or ladies who are going to work hard and be honest.”

Of course, it’s not all about the hiring itself. Creach says Kent’s in charge of the employees’ training process and their 30-day reviews. Training at Blue Stone used to be an informal process — now, Creach says they’ve standardized it behind Kent’s efforts.

“We used to kind of have on-the-job training (where) new guys would show up, hop in a truck and they might get different training depending on the crew they get,” Creach says. “We just figured we’d send everyone with Tim for the first week.”

Kent says the training process is still a work in progress. They’re making more videos to have new hires sit down in the office to review. He says it helps that he often has support from Blue Stone employees like Creach, Hueners and Anthony Johnson, a maintenance quality control supervisor. Through implementing more thorough training, they’ve also established more clear pay rates for employees to aim for as they rise through the company.

“We’ve got a sheet that we go off where we start guys on a certain rate, and kind of based on the skills that they learned… they get a certain pay bump up with those tasks,” Kent says. “As soon as they’ve completed those skills, they earn that pay. We would do quarterly reviews and go over what they’ve learned or mastered in the last quarter of the season.”

Practice pays off

As they’ve grown the company, Creach and the Blue Stone team implemented software that’s enabled them to more accurately estimate jobs.

That’s not to suggest that the pricing models don’t need to be checked. Creach says Kent has helped couple the software with standardizing pricing that now includes everything in one flat rate. This means material costs, labor burdens and scope of the jobs all factor into the equation.

“A lot of guys will look at (the software) and say, ‘This account may take us 10 minutes because it may be pretty simple,’ but they’re forgetting about all the pieces that may go behind it,” Creach says. “We definitely need that person in the field to go make sure (the jobsite) matches up with the maps. He’s usually with our guys going out to do our field estimates.”

Kent being someone who’s risen from working in the fields (and someone who still enjoys being out there) helps inform his decisions as a leader. He says it’s made it much easier after being out doing the work because it helps him and the account managers know how to predict possible hiccups or time constraints.

Even still, job estimating is a skill he says he’s still developing.

“I’ve learned a lot about it. There’s a whole lot that goes into it,” Kent says. “You have to account for anything and everything like fuel prices, equipment prices, things you would’ve never thought of.”

Kent’s process for estimating jobs includes reviewing the proposal on Blue Stone’s software and meeting with the client. This also helps him offer alternatives to clients if they’re unsure about pricing. In some cases, Kent even gets clients to spend more with the company.

“Some people don’t know what could get done,” he says. “They don’t know there’s different options.”

Kent’s growing the culture

Hueners says there’s one thing that really separates Kent from his fellow employees: he understands that working in the green industry’s not really about landscaping.

“It’s about developing and building people,” Hueners says. “He’s good at teaching people and mentoring them, just like how I did with him. He has a lot of patience with people.”

Creach also points out that Kent has grown more comfortable offering suggestions to benefit the team. One example from this fall: He advocated for a leaf vacuum that Creach says they mounted to a trailer so they wouldn’t need to use tarps and buckets like usual for fall cleanup.

“Now we’re buying our second one because we were doing cleanups three times as fast,” he says. “Having the boots on the ground to see what’s working versus what we’re seeing on the computer is certainly helpful.”

Creach adds that he’s watched Kent develop interpersonal skills that have greatly benefited the team culture. While some crewmembers have fought with each other or others are frustrated that they’re working on certain routes further from their homes, Creach has watched Kent step in and reason with the employees. He believes it speaks to Kent’s maturity, even as a young leader.

“A lot of friends his age are drinking and partying. He wants to take life a little bit more seriously,” Creach says. “He wants to be part of the long-term life of the company. I’ve just been impressed by him stepping up. He’s got it all.”

The author is digital editor at Lawn & Landscape.