Growing by reputation

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KEI Landscaping is picking and choosing the right customers thanks to an increase in sales over the last few years. Not including snow management, the Milwaukee-area company has grown 30 percent without doing any marketing.

“Our branding is our trucks and equipment parked out in front of prestigious clients,” says Chris Kujawa, executive vice president. “We don’t do any advertising; it’s all person to person.”

KEI’s signature orange trucks were the result of a good deal in the 1960s that stuck. The city of Escanaba, Michigan had bought four trucks from International Harvester but could only take two. The trucks were set up perfectly but the dealer said he couldn’t move them.

“I said, ‘Why?’ and he said ‘They’re orange,’ because they had been bought by a municipality,” Kujawa says. “And I said, ‘I don’t care. I’ll take them. It wasn’t that long thereafter that marketing and branding sort of came into its own. People started saying what color should we use in this ad and will it appeal more to women or to men and orange was the color of confidence and safety.”

So they decided to stick with it.

KEI got its start in 1964 as a landscape management company but they now do everything from design to installation, maintenance, holiday lighting and even interiorscapes and some construction. Nearly all of their clients are commercial properties with 5 to 10 percent of business coming from high-end single family residential customers.

The team of 100 to 120 staff members stays busy year-round moving from maintenance to lighting to snow plowing.

KEI has one central headquarters and three satellite locations that serve mostly as yards for parking and staging. A supervisor at each location handles their own accounts, with most construction jobs coming out of the headquarters in Oak Creek.

To keep track of proposals, estimates, jobs, billing and inventory, KEI uses Asset software and is transitioning to handheld devices to easily keep track of man hours. But finding the right people to complete the needed man hours has been a struggle.

Visit bit.ly/KEIbranding to read the full article on the Lawn & Landscape website.

THE MATCHMAKER

How to connect with buyers online through the world’s largest search engine.

Look in the mirror – the way we buy products and services today has changed. Have you changed the way you market and sell your services? It’s time to face this reality and connect with buyers on their terms, not yours. It’s time to leverage the power of the world’s most powerful matchmaker: Google.

In a recent webinar with Chris Heiler, of Landscape Leadership, attendees learned:

• What makes a website great in the eyes of a buyer (not in your eyes)
• How to demystify SEO and learn how search engines really work (and what they want)
• How to leverage your unique knowledge and expertise to attract buyers
• How to turn objections and uncomfortable questions into a sales magnet

Visit bit.ly/HeilerGoogle to watch a replay of Heiler’s webinar.

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