Tips from the top: Harvey Massey

I’ve been in the business over 50 years. I went to work in the pest management industry.

I had thought initially about eventually getting out of the lawn business, but I was $4 million in debt with two kids in college and one going into high school. I decided I couldn’t afford to lose the revenue and whatever profitability existed.

So I decided to start managing it and really spending some time with it and as a result, I liked it. I liked the business; I understood more about it and as a result of that we decided to stay in it and make an investment in it.

By and large we were maintaining and decided to take an approach with our whole lawn care business –try to figure out ways to environmentally and economically reduce the consumption of water and the waste of water on the maintenance and irrigation of landscapes.

We’ve had 30 consecutive years of increased profitable revenue. We’ve never had a year when we’ve been down. This recession was the deepest, but this was the third one that we’ve gone through in 30 years.

I made a talk to an MBA graduating class at Rollins College and I said, “You can’t manage what you don’t know.” So I guess the question is: What is it you need to know? And I told them the three things you must know in every business. You must know why people buy from you. Two, you must know why people don’t buy from you. And three, you must know when people do buy from you, why do they cancel?

When a young banker asked me about retiring I said, “And doing what?” He just said, “Well anything you want to do.” And I said, “Well, hell, I do that now.”

We’ve never contributed less than 50 cents on a dollar to our 401(K) program and we’ve done that for 25 consecutive years. I said to our employees, “What I want everybody to clearly understand is we have the ability to do this and we do this not because of what you do, but how well you do it.”

We don’t have a lot of turnover in our company. We’ve just got people who have been with us a long time so what I’m most proud of, and what I get most of the compliments about our business, is our people.

I don’t spend a lot of time looking back. I really don’t. And I’ve made a lot of mistakes. None have been fatal – factually, financially, business-wise or personally. I’ve been married to the same lady close to 52 years.

The best advice I got was this: There never has been, isn’t today and never will be, a business model that’s permanent. The market never stops changing. The consumer never stops changing. And you never stop asking yourself, “who are my customers, where are my customers and what is it that they want, need and expect?” Your job is to make those transitions and modifications and alterations to deliver that. I think that’s the reason we’ve grown for 30 years. We embrace change.

I believe we’re going to continue to grow and we’re going to continue to grow profitably. That’s the confidence that I have in our people, in our business and the model that we operate from. The anticipated challenges would be to some extent the unpredictability of the economy.