Break the walls down

Jeremy Miller isn’t looking for excuses. While most companies are happy to break even these days, he’s not using a bad economy as a reason for stalled growth. “If you are sitting stagnant you are going backwards,” says Miller, general manager of Miller Landscape in Orion, Mich., about 30 miles north of Detroit.

Even though his company has performed well financially the past couple of years, it hasn’t done well enough in Miller’s mind.

“We hit that wall where our revenues were staying stable and we couldn’t seem to get over that hump of where to go next,” he says.

The company wasn’t being proactive enough in seeking out the right customer, Miller says, and the employees who were trying to sell services weren’t sales people. They were employees who knew the technical aspect of landscaping, but weren’t skilled in making a sale or running a business.

“We were relying on our past history and waiting around for the phone to ring. That was 90 percent of our business – was referral based – and if someone called us, we would provide them with a proposal and that was about it,” says Miller, adding that, for help, the company used LandOpt, a business performance organization. “Now we are going out and looking for the type of customer that we want to work for as opposed to waiting and hoping that they would call when realistically they would never call.”

You can be picky.
One of the first steps of improving the sales process was identifying who the company wanted as a client.

“Rather than wasting time with clients who were probably never going to do business with us anyway, we eliminate them very early in the process and concentrate our time on clients that we think we have a much greater chance of getting some business from,” he says.

He wants potential clients to talk about their budgets and what their goals are for a project in order to find out if they are simply looking for the lowest price, which doesn’t interest Miller. 

“We’ve almost completely eliminated ourselves from what we call ‘RFPs and bid processes’ because there’s nothing we can do to make ourselves standout and to show the customer the value of working with us,” Miller says.

Once Miller and his company identify an ideal client, they have to find a way to get that client’s attention. If there is a corporate sign covered by weeds, they will take a picture of it, and use the company SendOutCards to generate a card to send through the mail to show a before and after picture of the property.

With the card comes a couple of reasons for doing the work and a request for a 15-minute presentation to explain how the landscaping process works.

“What we’ve found is by letting them touch and feel something that is actually their own property, whether it be their sign or their front entrance or a certain part of the building, that’s a lot more powerful than saying, ‘Hey we’re a great landscape company and we think we can improve your property,’” he says.
 

It’s not about volume.
After looking at the numbers, Miller realized that some of the company’s largest and longest tenured accounts weren’t profitable.

“We had some very long term maintenance customers that for lack of a better word, the margins were covered up by the installation division and we did not have the tools, the techniques or the time to dissect these accounts the way they really should be,” he says.

After telling customers the company needed to increase prices 20 to 40 percent to keep the same scope of work, Miller says many weren’t interested.

“As painful as it was, when we ran the numbers and just took that revenue out, and then took the direct cost associated with producing that, we started seeing half percent gains in our profit, just by getting rid of the account all together,” he says.

Cash flow might be tempting for a company struggling to get by, but in order to grow you may have to sacrifice in the short term. “I’m never going to say that cash flow isn’t a good thing, but if it’s costing me $110 to bring on $100 of cash flow, it’s not a good thing,” he says.

Miller says the company’s revenue grew from $2.6 million in 2009 to almost $3 million in 2010. “More importantly,” he says, “our gross margins are almost double what they were before.”

The author is Associate Editor of Lawn & Landscape. E-mail him at bhorn@gie.net.