J.T. Price // CEO, Landscape Workshop

This is my second run at landscaping. I worked at a private equity firm that invested in an equipment company, so I had some experience on the equipment side of the business.

I work for a family owned holding company (McKinney Capital) that has a number of operating investments. As we made acquisitions in the landscape industry, because of my familiarity with the industry, I raised my hand and said, “Hey, I really am interested in this industry. I’d like to take a shot at working with Landscape Workshop.” Several add-on acquisitions later, and this is what I spend most of my time doing. I’ve been running Landscape Workshop for 18 months now with my team.

We are really focused on organic growth and that’s a shift. The reason we’ve done three acquisitions in the last 18 months is they were three perfect acquisitions for us, one that got us into the Knoxville market, one that really took us from being a bit part player in Montgomery, Alabama to being the number two player in that market. Then this third acquisition, which is not closed yet, will get us into Nashville, but once we are in a market, our goal is to grow organically, invest in sales and marketing, invest in the best people and the best equipment.

A lot of the success that we’re having right now at Landscape Workshop, it’s not that I’m doing anything right. It’s that we’ve built a phenomenal team (over the last year.) We hired a guy named Paul Young who grew up at TruGreen LandCare and he’s our operational leader. We brought in a great finance leader. We brought in a great sales and marketing leader. I’ll take our team of general managers who own our office P&Ls, I’ll stack them up against anybody.

Coming out of horticulture programs, you have to pay a little more for that talent, but it more than pays for itself in terms of efficiency and professionalism, and in terms of how we face the customer. If I understood that sooner – that the talent is everything – we could’ve made even more progress than we have.

I share all of our financial data to many, many managers in our company. There are about 50 people at Landscape Workshop who see our financials every month. We get on the phone and we talk about them, If our shareholders win, our people win financially. I think that’s pretty rare in the industry. How can we ask our people to manage without that information?

The folks who I work with are very, very capable, and I defer to them in their subject matter areas because they know more than me. I think a lot of folks don’t necessarily want have people smarter than them around. If I can be the dumbest person at Landscape Workshop, that’s fine with me. It’s important that I know enough to be able to walk on to a property and have an opinion as to whether we’re doing great work or not.

It’s not important to me that I’m an expert on plant varietal selection because how am I ever going catch up with somebody who has a degree from Auburn University in horticulture and has spent the last 20 years thinking about which plant to put in which geography? So, I’ve spent a lot of energy learning from the best how to do quality control and how to provide useful feedback from a customer perspective, but there’s no way I’m ever going be a true horticulture expert. I’m starting too far behind. L&L