Business breakthrough

B&L Landscaping partners with distributors and growers to stay competitive and grow into new markets.

Brian Yaffa started B&L Landscaping, Oak Park, Mich., more than 30 years ago with a couple of push mowers and a truck. Now, the company pulls in $6 million a year and employs more than 100 people in season, with divisions for landscape construction, maintenance and snow and ice management. But when the economy hit Detroit and its suburbs hard, and B&L’s margins on landscape installations took a hit, too.

To adjust, the company shifted its focus to more commercial and sustainable work – installing live roofs, rain gardens and bioswales – and reevaluated its relationships with nurseries, growers and other suppliers to save money and enter niche markets.

“We try to use the word ‘team.’ We’re all in this thing together,” says Dick  Angell, director of landscape construction. “People are starting to understand that. If we all want to stay in business, and move forward and have positive results, we need to work together.”

B&L Director of Landscape Construction Dick Angell, right, and Vice President Larry Yaffa look for quality – in plants and people – from their suppliers. Photo: Dwight CendrowskiWhat they look for
Angell and Yaffa say they look for flexibility when establishing a partnership with a plant material supplier. Margins grow ever smaller, and any wiggle room the company can provide on pricing and payment schedules is appreciated – especially when B&L’s own customers are slow to pay.

“We don’t’ consider ourselves a bank,” Angell says. “They understand that we really don’t like to pay them until we get paid.”

Also important is the quality of the plant materials delivered, and the people caring for them, Angell adds.

“It’s a living, viable product. If it gets mistreated … we have to warrant it and it can be pretty roughed up,” he says.

And he’s not interested in someone just selling him plants. He wants someone who understands their end use, and how to work around problems. If the nursery doesn’t have the exact specimen he needs, he’ll ask what they have that’s close enough to fulfill the design.

“Architects want to see material,” says Larry Yaffa, vice president. “We walk with our customers and go over how they care for it, where it’s come from, its background. A good nursery … helps us on the backside with warranty situations, so people are receiving quality product. If they’re just pushing material through the yard … it could be a detriment to us.”

On hold
During the construction boom, many landscaping companies couldn’t keep enough plants on hand. Now, with building slowing down, having all those trees and shrubs on hand is a liability. So, B&L reached out to its suppliers and asked if they could change the system. Instead of having a nursery drop-ship plant material or asking B&L to keep it in its own holding yard, the company asked if suppliers would hold materials until B&L is ready to install them. 

Distributor's Perspective

HOLDING YARDS

Eric Joy, sales manager at Christensen’s Plant Center, Plymouth, Mich., has worked with B&L Landscaping for six years. The re-wholesaler and distributor has 26 employees and sources plant material from 30 states and two provinces – from British Columbia and California to its own growing operation down the road. Christensen’s now holds plants for B&L longer, which lets the landscaping company be more aggressive with pricing. Joy described how the arrangement works. – as told to Chuck Bowen

We do it several different ways. We’ll bring in job-specific materials and hold them for B&L. We have 37 acres, and a 16 acre field where we’ll hold materials. We can hold them for months. They’re balled-and-burlapped trees we’ll auger into the field and re-ball them if we need to.

We’ve always done it in one way or the other. It was, in the past, inadvertent. As the jobs became larger and larger, contractors couldn’t hold enough material in their own yards, so it was difficult to hold material on projects.

We developed a system. It’s pretty simple. We write up material on a sales order, which commits it in our inventory. We tag all the trees with labels that have the customer’s name, order number and ship date. That makes them easy to find; customers know exactly what trees they’re getting. An architect can look at the exact group of trees for his project.

Obviously, knowing what we’re going to sell in advance helps any business. If I could get every customer to do this … what business wouldn’t like that? It also helps us with inventory.

If someone calls up and says, ‘In two weeks, I need 100 whatever,’ I can then plan to bring in that material two days before they need it. The time I have to hold it and care for it and pay for it is reduced. It just lets me plan.

“We really work with them on changing around their philosophies,” says Yaffa. “They’re looking at their operation as more of a holding situation than they were before. It’s a new thought process for us all. Before, we had it in a holding yard for ourselves. Now, everybody’s looking to the wholesalers and the growers to more of that for us. Obviously, that makes for good relationships.”

B&L works with about 15 growers and nurseries and last year spent about $500,000 on plant materials. Angell says the company started asking about changing logistics a few years ago, when freight prices spiked. And sitting down with suppliers has proven beneficial – Yaffa says the money saved by having Christensen’s Plant Center, Plymouth, Mich., hold plant material has given him room in his profit margins to be more competitive on bidding certain jobs.

“For the most part, we wouldn’t be who we are without them. That’s one of the biggest things that’s very important – the relationships with all the vendors we have … landscaping or parts – are key elements of our business,” Yaffa says. “To be able to provide the quality product we’re looking for in the timeliness that we need it, that’s built on relationships. Timing, payment – it’s a total package.”

B&L’s 2010 strategy is to increase sales from referrals and find niche businesses where it can stand out. To that end, the company has built a strong business in rain gardens, wetlands remediation and other sustainable services for large commercial clients. Yaffa says the specialized skills required in that niche mean the competition there isn’t as fierce as, say, commercial maintenance, and more business comes from referrals.

“We’re trying to find any avenues that we can get an insight into and not battle against 20 other 30 (other companies),” Angell says. “We know that price is important. We are really trying to sell value. After last year, a lot of clients are starting to see that. They went with low price, and they got what they paid for.”

Custom operations
One of the main reasons B&L has been able to focus on sustainable services is Jim Ashley, who owns Reed Perennial Farms with his wife, Cheryl Reed. The two companies have worked together for more than a decade, but the Fowlerville, Mich.-based grower has been producing custom-ordered wetland plants for B&L rain garden installations for four years.

B&L just finished building eight such gardens for the city of Auburn Hills, and all the plant material was custom grown. Reed also supplied the materials for four boulevard islands in Pleasant Ridge – projects the company might not have undertaken if it didn’t have a reliable material source.

“It’s just a phone call and he gets things going,” Angell says of working with Ashley. “He’ll set stuff aside. That’s just the relationship we’ve got. He’s right on time planting. The stuff he’s growing he knows he can sell. I knew I had somebody backing me up who could do it.”

And, Angell says, all he had to do was ask. “I asked if he’d be willing to do it. He said, ‘You bet.’ If you don’t ask the question, you’ll never get an answer,” he says. 

 


 

Grower's Perspective

CUSTOM GROWING

Reed Perennials has worked with B&L Landscaping for more than a decade, and custom-grown wetland plants like swamp milk weed, sedges and ornamental grasses for the company for four years. Twenty percent of the business is custom growing, and co-owner Tim Ashley says the relationship has been good for him and his Fowlerville, Mich.-based business.  Here’s how the process works. – As told to Chuck Bowen

B&L usually works with an architect who will specify certain plants, perennials they want to put in an installation based on color scheme or ease of care in location, or a theme.

Some of the time, quite a few of the items are a stock item we grow and have on hand at all times. Some of the things we do part of the time, some of the time it is a strictly custom-grow type of thing.

I think that by working with a reputable landscaper, which they are one of the most reputable in the area, there’s mutual respect for the other guy’s opinion. A lot of times they’ll hit me with a variety of perennial they’re looking for that isn’t going to work. I’ll tell them that, and (B&L director of landscape construction Dick Angell is) open to that and trusts my judgment.

Sometimes an architect will get an idea for an installation variety that isn’t suitable for the climate zone or a designer variety that’s hard to get or out of the budget. It’s nice working with somebody that trusts your judgment. Some landscapers will say they don’t care; it’s what the specs say.

Working with someone like that – custom growing – it’s really given me an insight into pushing something a little quicker than it normally would grow and given me an appreciation of how long some of this stuff takes to produce when I’m in a pinch.

We typically need a three- to five-month lead time. I can go as short as 60 days. I’ve discovered ways to push it a little bit without compromising the quality of the plant. You add a little bit of heat and ventilate and do a little balance, you get quicker growth without the floppiness that might occur. You use additional fertilizer, increase the daylight length with artificial lights.

We’re getting into some pretty large jobs, some have a finite timeline, so you’re just forced to go into some of these quick growth situations.

There’s been a big shift to native species as opposed to all the fancy cultivars that are abounding. Things like native purple coneflower, butterfly weed, false indigo, Joe Pye weed, blue flag irises, cardinal flower, lobelia, native Rudbeckia, liatris and a few grasses, like prairie dropseed and little bluestem.

The thing with custom growing is you know that that product is sold. You’re not producing for a spec market. We sell to landscapers and to garden centers. The only way to get garden centers to preorder is to heavily discount the stuff. With custom growing, you know when that plant goes into the pot, it’s sold.

The author is managing editor of Lawn & Landscape. He can be reached at cbowen@gie.net.

 

March 2010
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