Back to basics

Del Reynolds walked up and down the streets of Louisiana, every one of them identical under the murky cover of water and trash and lives put on hold. He talked with hundreds of people and listened to their stories. He wondered how all this could have really happened. He closed his eyes to push back tears, but couldn’t.

Reynolds arrived in the state in late August 2005, the day after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, then rattled across the state and uprooted so many families and so much history. He was working for State Farm Insurance then as an adjuster. He had been handed a list of more than 100 claims, each of which represented a real person, a real family, a real story of heartbreak.

He had just 24 hours to listen to them all.

“I heard so many stories and cried with so many people,” Reynolds says. “I like helping people, but it just took a toll.”

Reynolds had worked in the insurance industry for almost six years before that last trip to Louisiana. He had talked with thousands and thousands of people, had listened to thousands and thousands of sad stories. He was good, and when you’re good, you listen to more sad stories than most people ever will. But Katrina broke him.

He wanted out.


From Adjuster to LCO
Those days and weeks and months in Louisiana changed Reynolds and so many other people. Even if time heals all wounds, it cannot wipe away the images and the stories seared in Reynolds’ mind now when he talks with another customer or mows another lawn.

Reynolds owns and operates a Spring-Green Lawn Care franchise now in Hendersonville, Tenn., about 20 minutes northeast of Nashville. He has lived and worked there for more than four years, building a business again from the ground up. Why lawn care? Well, he’s no industry rookie. He always wanted to make yards look good – he always wanted to help people, after all, no matter his industry – and had started his own mowing business at 18.

Of course, when Reynolds was in his teens and early 20s, he was a young businessman comfortable with the accomplishments he had managed and didn’t have much of a plan to increase customers or revenues or market share. He often failed to call customers back in any sort of a timely manner. After his years with State Farm, he instituted a practice that each call was to be returned within 24 hours, if not the same day. Those six years provided him with a fresh perspective on how to build a business and interact with customers. “When I started back in lawn care,” he says, “I just thought it was great again.”

Reynolds started Spring-Green in 2007 and within the first year had more than 120 customers on his list – impressive, yes, but hardly an indication of future success. The business counted more than 230 customers near the end of the second year, more than 500 near the end of the third year and more than 600 earlier this year, after less than four years. “We could have had 200 more new customers, too,” Reynolds says, “but we couldn’t do that. Too much growth too fast really can hurt a business.”

How he did it
How did Reynolds and Spring-Green manage to grow so much so quickly? Well, a plan helped. Reynolds always knew what sort of growth he wanted during each of his first years back in the industry – about double the number of customers during each of his first two years before an eventual plateau – but effective marketing played just as important a role. Forget direct mail and all sorts of fliers. Reynolds and his sales team turned to knocking on doors and talking with folks about their lawns.

“Some people aren’t going to like it, but some people are,” Reynolds says. “We’re getting in front of them and showing them what’s wrong with their yard, rather than them just getting something in the mail and chucking it in the trash. They see a truck, they see a person, they put a face with Spring-Green.” It’s a lot more difficult to chuck a person, after all, than it is to chuck another flier.

A Focused approach
But marketing and sales aren’t the only factors in the tremendous growth Reynolds and Spring-Green have enjoyed. A more focused approach has been key – the business moved away from just lawn care and more toward a package approach that allows customers more services and only one invoice – as has an increased attention on customer service. Returning those calls is important, but customer service is now far more than picking up the phone.

“We try to educate our customers,” Reynolds says. “We want them to know what’s going to happen before it happens. Like this year, for instance, we had 15 inches of rain in two days, so we tried to inform as many people as we could that we were going to have a bad crab grass season this year. We sent out e-mails, text messages, whatever we could, so they’re not surprised and they’re not calling us and canceling because they have crab grass coming up or they have nutsedge or they have brown patch and it’s dying because of a lack of water. Education is a big key.”

Reynolds and his employees also look the part. They wear long sleeves and khaki pants, a uniform that some customers say is almost too nice. They keep their trucks clean to project a neat appearance. They knock before they start to mow or treat any lawn, and talk with customers if they answer the door. And they answer calls as soon as possible.

Reynolds still likes to help people. He always wants to helps people.

“If we’re around that area, we get out there that day and do it,” Reynolds says. “We just go by and get it done. That’s what they like. They don’t want to sit around and wait and wonder if that got done. We just get out there as quick as we can for the customer.”

The author is a freelance writer based in Cleveland.