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 Jennifer LemckeWhat have you been up to since you won your award in 2008?
We’ve really been working hard at creating an online presence. So, just to kind of put it into perspective, at Weed Man one of the things, as a franchising organization, we have what’s called the National Ad Fund. In the past, because we didn’t have a critical mass of franchises across the U.S., they were taking back that National Ad Fund and putting it at a regional level.
From 2008 until now, we have collectively gathered those dollars and now are really working on pushing our branding at a national level. So, that’s kind of what I’ve been focused on is developing and expanding our brand and really, we’ve been doing a lot of stuff online, and some other things we’ve been doing, as well, to help support the brand and help support the marketing efforts at the local level.
When I say developing an online presence, in the past, what we had was a national website and all of our franchisees were tucked into this one website.
We recreated and developed a brand on a national website. But, what we did was, every single franchise got their own website so that they could expand our footprint. We went from one website to over 100 websites representing the Weed Man brand. ... What we really want is for the franchisee to attract people online at a local level.
Why the focus specifically to an online presence?
Because we weren’t really there in that space and looking at what some of the other folks are doing – we have never been a company that wanted to be cutting edge but we wanted to be a company that was in line with what the market dictates. So we started to see requests from customers to manage online accounts. We started to see that being first to a quote, somebody requests a quote, you want to be there first. You want to give them every opportunity to be able to get on your website, whatever time it is at night. People are just used to buying online, doing things online, so we just wanted to expand that and be in that space.
How do you see social media impacting the industry?
It’s funny, I went to a franchising conference and I was sitting in the crowd and the speaker said “Who’s doing social media?” Everybody in the room put up their hand. Then he said, “OK, who is making money doing social media?” Two people put up their hand. You have to be there because everyone else is there. Should you be spending a lot of time? I don’t think so. I think there are a few companies out there who are able to use social media to actually make money but there are a lot of companies wasting a lot of time. So, I would be very, very careful. If you are doing a newsletter and you want to use this as another medium to post your newsletter on, I think that’s a great idea if your customers are part of your fan base. A lot of the times it ends up being your friends and family that are on there. I am so tired of my inbox being full of stuff. My kids know exactly what their friends are doing. I don’t have a need to know what everybody is doing around me. And I’m actually getting to the point where it’s overload and I’m turning a lot of things off. I don’t want to know who’s having what for dinner tomorrow night. So, I think a lot of companies are in the space, I don’t think a lot of companies are doing it well and that’s including us because I can’t say that we’ve gotten a customer from doing social media. I can say that we’ve got a lot of franchisees that have done beautiful Facebook pages and they’ve also been able to keep people updated on what they are doing. And I recommend don’t spend a lot of time doing it – maybe a couple of hours a week and it’s going to help your internet footprint at a minimum.
What is your take on how the industry will recover from the economic troubles of the last couple of years?
I think companies need to work smarter. You hear all about the sustainability, and that’s really what it all means is working smarter. It’s hard (to say) because our company has not been hard hit. The lawn care segment of our industry is typically not hit hard by recessions. We are a low-ticket item. We are able to protect and create curb appeal for consumers at a low cost, so it’s not usually something that people drop in the green industry. A lot of times they drop adding that pool, they’ll drop that big landscaping job, they’ll drop maybe removing trees or changing things up, but they’ll keep their lawn care services.
I’m on the PLANET board, and I can see what’s going on. The hardest hit is the design/build group. They need to find recurring revenue. To weather this storm, they need to figure out a service that they can offer through maybe diversifying and offering a more rounded service to their customer, but think in ways that will create recurring revenue.
Then that way you aren’t fighting to get the customer, or if one customer goes away, it’s not your entire business. I’m not saying just diversify into everything. Be smart about your diversification and look for things that create recurring revenue for your company.
What kind of advice would you give someone who is starting a landscaping company?
What’s your mission and what is your vision? What do you want to be as a company? Who are you? What type of culture do you want to develop in your company?
What kind of employees do you want to have representing your company? Stay true with that.
If you are new to the industry, I would definitely develop relationships with your vendors, with some of your competitors, with some of the people that are in the industry. Get involved in your state and national associations. Make sure to lean on your vendors because vendors nowadays aren’t just supplying product, they are supplying all kinds of different services that you can’t even imagine.
I would recommend not being cutting edge. Especially landscapers, they tend to get caught up in a sales pitch and all of a sudden they’ve got 10 new pieces of equipment that create scheduling issues for them, routing issues, nothing’s the same so it becomes very hard to train their employees on how to do quick fixes.
They end up having to hire mechanics on staff just because they have all these different types of machinery and no one knows how to fix it. So I would stay a little bit below the radar. You want “new,” but do it smart.
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