Refreshing the farm

John Puryear admits it was an ego thing.

He chuckles when he remembers telling a doctor “no.” After suffering a stress-induced heart attack in 2015, Puryear’s doctor advised him to stay out of work for three to four weeks.

“I told him I had to be back Monday,” Puryear says. “He just laughed and said, ‘No, you’ll be out three to four weeks.”

Puryear didn’t have the same clarity eight years ago that he has today. He worked 70 hours a week at his company, Puryear Farms, leading up to his heart attack. That’s not to mention spending all his extra time serving on community service boards and various local committees. Somewhat ironically, Puryear recalls testing his heart while running on a treadmill with his doctor just seven days before his heart attack. He passed that test with flying colors.

“It’s a good message for others to learn from,” Puryear says. “You can’t push the engine too hard without severe ramifications.”

Because his heart attack put him out of work, Puryear had to sit back and watch his team run the company. He had to set aside the compelling urge to weigh in on every single business decision. It’s a problem he knows many in the industry face — and it’s one he feels he’s overcome.

“I just had to keep reminding myself that these are smart people. These are people that take initiative, know how to make decisions,” Puryear says. “To my amazement, I found the business ran really well without me. If you let people run with the ball and you have the right people, they do a great job.”

Because Puryear changed his song from micromanager to delegator, the company has hummed to the tune of 110 employees and $12 million in revenue. Two years after his health scare, Puryear set a new growth strategy in motion. At that time in 2017, the company sat at $5.2 million. Behind new core values and a company culture of employee empowerment, everyone on the team makes choices like they themselves are the business leaders.

They are, after all, operating with open-book management, profit sharing and collaborative team meetings. Puryear says he’s a reformed micromanager — even as CEO of the company, he only chairs two of the company’s 10 weekly meetings.

“That’s something that doesn’t happen overnight,” he says. “You have to make people trust (that) if they make the wrong choice, you won’t be mad at them.”

Building up trust

If you know how Puryear started his company, you might forgive him for initially being too involved.

First, he started his company out of his family’s farm they’ve owned for over 100 years. Puryear’s got serious roots in Gallatin, Tennessee, as the namesake has lived there for 200 years. When he was a senior business major at the University of Tennessee, he switched into horticulture and met his wife, Laura, who he says knows plants better than anyone he’s ever known. Together, they started the company out of a spare bedroom on the farm in 1991. They’ve now successfully been in business for 32 years and do landscape installations, maintenance, lighting, irrigation and they even have a nursery.

But getting to that point wasn’t easy. Well before Puryear suffered his heart attack, he first dealt with the economic recession — “the same hell everyone else went through in 2010.” He likens the company’s performance to that of a ping pong ball, bouncing around so much that just when profits looked to be improving, they got worse.

Puryear solved that problem by tediously working, first to keep the company alive but then to help it grow. It wasn’t until his heart attack that he saw just how much he had been pressing.

Other employees saw it though. Michael Marvin’s now the company’s senior sales manager, but he joined the company 15 years ago, right after graduating from Western Kentucky University. He ran a crew for three years, which was back when Puryear Farms only had about 30 employees. “I’ve seen the internal struggles and fights,” Marvin says. “I’ve seen every side of the company.”

Marvin has also seen the company change from a team where there wasn’t much open-book communication. There weren’t clear status updates and there weren’t clear views into how the company was performing. But he always understood why Puryear was so keen on managing every little detail.

“That person owns that baby,” Marvin says. “That’s their life. There were pains needed in the company to make it better. It’s like a fine wine now — it’s getting better with age.”

Marvin remembers some initial whiplash with the employees once Puryear had decided on increased transparency. Employees protected data from their peers so they wouldn’t be judged if their segment of the business performed poorly. Nobody wanted to admit that a job they sold lost money. Marvin says those meetings were pretty brutal until they implemented a weekly Wednesday financial meeting to review the previous week’s work. Even then, it took some time for employees to feel like their bosses trusted them.

“Reviewing those jobs is one of the biggest things that’s contributed to that success,” Marvin says. “The entire team can see every penny that goes out the door.”

So establishing transparency was a key element. But Puryear says his profit-sharing system and tiered wage program has added an even deeper feeling of ownership among his employees.

One for all

Puryear says they implemented profit sharing five years ago and it’s been successful every year since. In their first year alone, they just about brought in more money the employees saw through profit sharing than the company had earned the previous year. Revenue has grown by nearly $7 million since then. He says it’s a huge testament to the vested interest his employees now had in the company’s profitability.

“We’ve had good economic periods before,” he admits, “(but) we didn’t experience that kind of profit.”

They’ve been able to share about 20% of pre-tax profits with employees since implementing profit sharing. It’s created a true all-for-one mentality at the company.

That’s not to suggest there aren’t personal, one-for-all incentives as well. Puryear Farms established a clear wage calculator, codifying the thought process behind why someone is paid what they’re paid. It was especially important to create this wage calculator program as Puryear started making every dollar spent so visible to the team.

Previously, Puryear had just given out raises once a year and all raises were done in 50-cent increments. The longer someone had been there, the more they earned. But when Puryear actually started putting out on paper what each person made salary-wise, he found some employees were overpaid. Others were underpaid. Pay wasn’t equitable — it just had to do with how long they had been there.

So now, Puryear created a defined chart that’s visible on the company’s walls with requirements on how to reach each level of pay. There’s a ranking system based on a 1-9 scale, with a majority of employees earning somewhere on the 1-6 ranking. These rankings are determined by a panel of managers who rank each employee on a scale of 1-10 in competency areas, down to a tenth of a point. There’s a grid that helps them determine how employees are aligning with the company’s core values. Puryear likens the process to a personal modifier score.

This does sometimes create a bit of a paradox in that someone can make more as a lower-level employee than a higher-level employee. For instance, a level three employee who’s knocking it out of the park but doesn’t have the same training as a level four employee might be earning more if the level four employee has been ticking off bosses or showing up inconsistently.

“But the beauty of that is that I can sit down with somebody and explain why they’re making what they are,” Puryear says.

Now, when an employee comes to him and says they can make a dollar more per hour to work elsewhere, Puryear can pull out a chart and show how his employee can earn two dollars more per hour instead. He can point to the areas where they need to improve to start earning more money. That doesn’t mean everybody stays.

“When I first implemented this wage chart, I lost 30% of my company,” he says. “I thought I had destroyed my company, but instead, I got rid of my chaff.”

Guiding principles

The last step to transforming his company culture into one of trust comes down to establishing some guidelines for how to operate. After all, Puryear says his employees started this process by making decisions based on “what would John do?” Now, they feel safe to make decisions based on their own thought process, but it’s because the company provided some rules.

Those rules are the team’s vision and mission statements, plus their core values, which include words like optimism, respect and accountability. All of the core values together spell out “Forward.” Meanwhile, the mission statement reads, “to provide quality landscape services for our clients, while providing growth opportunities for our employees, in a professional, suitable manner.”

Yes, statements like these can often come off as cheesy. Marvin says it was hard to get people fully onboard with using these as the guiding principles in meetings. He also remembers needing to repeat them several times before employees abided by them.

“At times, you feel like you are (preaching it at them). By the third time repeating the vision, mission, core values, you say to yourself, ‘Golly, I’ve said it three times,’” he says. “But you need to say it 50 times. Let them see in your actions that it’s more than words, it’s actions. Along with our profit-sharing rollout, that actually allowed them to see the things we’re actually preaching.”

Puryear says he was initially skeptical these terms would make a difference, just like his employees were. But he says it’s helped completely change the company. He now has them posted on a giant display in their training room on a sign that’s 12 feet tall and 16 feet wide, with clear illustrations and pictures.

“That’s not voodoo,” he says. “That’s real.”

Puryear also admits he also allowed too much leeway at times, which is one of the common struggles of a company starting to empower its employees. But he found a chart on strategic leadership that the National Association of Landscape Professionals has published, which helped him determine when to intervene and when to sit back.

“A CEO’s responsibility is to understand the different settings when executive action is needed by a CEO,” he says.

Puryear says it’s important that employees abide by the mission, vision and core values in making decisions. It’s not a huge deal if they make a costly choice; it’s a bigger deal if they make one that harms the Puryear name. He often quotes Warren Buffett when making that distinction.

“If you lose money for the firm, I will be forgiving,” the quote reads. “If you lose reputation, I will be ruthless.”

The author is an associate editor with Lawn & Landscape.