A numbers game

Joel Wihebrink’s market is small. In a northern Indiana county with 70,000 residents, only about 5,000 fit his target demographic.

Wihebrink’s market is small, but it’s healthy. Warsaw, Ind., is in lake country, full of second homes for Chicago natives and first homes for employees of the state’s booming medical device industry.

During the recession, he says, he had low debt and high levels of cash on hand. His company held its own and gained market share, thanks to a small but solid team focused on stellar customer service. He didn’t try to reinvent himself as a maintenance company or try to add on another segment. He danced with the one that brought him.

“We stuck to our hardscape guns,” Wihebrink says. “Because that’s how we’ve branded ourselves.”
 

Siren song. As Wihebrink grew, the competition shrunk or folded. Four years later, his maintenance segment is growing, as is lawn care. But it’s the hardscapes that got him this far, and the hardscapes that will keep him going.

“Several contractors in my market are gone. The guys that did install quality projects seem to be doing OK, but they don’t have the steam they had years ago,” he says.

As things got tight, many of his competitors were tempted by the hardscape segment’s siren song: big impact and big price tags.

“They see the price tag of jobs but don’t understand the risk and how they can go broke quicker,” he says.

Know your numbers. Wihebrink says it was his attention to his budget numbers that got him through. That, and pricing jobs by the time it takes to actually install them, not by how many square feet of pavers they require.

His advice is simple. “Be able to read profit loss and balance sheet,” he says. “If you don’t know where you stand right now financially, it’s absolute suicide to venture into another service you know nothing about, especially hardscape. The numbers get big and the risks can be large.”

Wihebrink does at least 10 paver repair jobs a year, fixing somebody else’s slapdash or shoddy work – somebody who might not even be in business anymore.

“If you don’t know your numbers, you don’t know where to go,” he says. “If you’re going to go broke, why not go broke fishing?”

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