Environmental Leadership Awards 1999: Laurie Broccolo

Laurie Broccolo doesn’t hide the truth about the people working at Broccolo Tree & Lawn Care, Rochester, N.Y.

"Everybody who works here is a real nature lover," she explained. "That love for nature is what drives us. We even get excited when we find new insects on one of our properties. I guess that means we’re a little weird, too."

Weird or not, Broccolo’s passion for protecting and preserving the environment has served her, her company and her customers well. In addition, it has earned her recognition as one of the 1999 Environmental Leadership Award recipients.

A Career-Long Commitment. Pursuing a career in horticulture was an obvious choice for Broccolo, as few professions provided the combination of interpersonal interaction and conservationist work. But after receiving her degree Broccolo was frustrated by her initial employer’s lack of Integrated Pest Management focus.

"When I got into the industry, there was no such thing as IPM," she noted. "Everything was done in blanket treatments. I tried to get customers interested in our services from a consulting standpoint rather than a spray standpoint, but it was a hard sell. Customers had it in their mind that they were buying product from us, not expertise, and they never looked at the landscape industry as a technical field."

When Broccolo’s previous employer was sold in November 1990, she took the plunge and went into business for herself with the goal of selling a different type of lawn care service. Today, Broccolo Tree & Lawn Care employs 21 full-time employees and adds 10 more employees for the busy season.

The company’s emphasis has remained on the IPM approach to lawn care, and that means the staff at Broccolo is constantly educating someone about the meaning of IPM.

"IPM is the whole approach of looking at all of the environment from checking plants and only treating them as needed to planting other plants that attract beneficial insects to following proper design concepts and installing the right plants in the right places," she explained. "Our emphasis on educating customers starts when a phone call comes into our office and we screen the calls to make sure the potential customer knows we don’t just visit properties and apply product everywhere.

"After we visit a property, we leave the customers with literature that has been professionally put together and explains our programs and our pricing," Broccolo continued. "The customer needs to trust that we’ll do what we need to do and when we need to do it on their property."

The education of employees is driven by several of the company’s full-time horticulturists and one person who is designated to constantly identify weed, disease and insect samples that technicians bring back to the office. In addition, each technician is equipped with a radio so they can contact this horticulturist for diagnostic assistance while they are on a property.

An equally important audience to educate, however, is area landscape contractors.

"We track all of our leads, and 48 percent of our sales last year came from landscape contractor referrals," noted Broccolo. "That means educating them to be more plant friendly is important because helping their business helps our business.

"For example, if we see a problem on a job, we’ll ask the installing contractor to come out to the job and show them the problem instead of just pointing it out to the customer and hurting that contractor’s reputation," she explained. "We have between 60 and 70 landscape companies that refer work to us and we refer work to, and this type of educational approach really helps get them beyond the point of just being labor landscapers."

While the bulk of the company’s business is derived from its lawn care, tree and shrub care has become its forté.

"We take care of lawns because everyone has them and that gains us access to the trees, but tree care is more exciting and keeps employees interested longer," Broccolo noted. "Tree care is also more demanding, so we start technicians out in routes where they are partnered with an experienced technician on a route heavy in the lawn care and slowly move that person into more tree care."

Fun with Bugs. Caring for the environment also means instilling an appreciation for nature in the local community, which Broccolo does.

"A new nature center opened in town, and I wanted us to get involved," recalled Broccolo. "So we had a field day where we took a day off from work and invited our customers and the day care centers in the area to come out and catch frogs and let them go catch bugs and let them go, and take nature walks. We had more than 400 people show up, so now this is an event we host every year to show the community how committed we are to the environment."

In addition, the company purchased a red Volkswagen Bug and painted black dots on the car to create a giant ladybug.

The lack of quality employees and the potential for increased regulatory efforts both concern Broccolo as she looks to the future.

Current legislation being considered by the New York politicians upsets her so much that Broccolo would rather not talk about it.

"Manufacturers are trying to make better, more environmentally friendly products, but I get so frustrated when I see how difficult obtaining new product registrations is in New York even when the products are so safe," she laments. "Then we have to bang our heads against a wall with the proposed 48-hour notification bill that would make it impossible for us to do IPM-oriented lawn care."

The author is Editor of Lawn & Landscape magazine.