Tips from the top: Kevin Mchale

All the rest of the kids were getting minibikes and our parents said, “We’re not gonna get you a minibike but we’ll get you a riding lawnmower.” So (my brother Steve and I) used to take our riding lawnmower out on trails while the other kids were riding minibikes. And we turned that into saying, “Hey, we can cut grass with this.” So, that’s how it started.

When I was a junior in college, we decided that when we got out of college, we were going to start a landscaping company and that it was gonna be 100 percent residential because that’s what we were used to as kids, you know, cutting grass in the neighborhood.

Our passion was the construction of design/build. So we started building decks and doing patios and stone work, and then as our customer base grew, the size of the company grew, meaning we had to hire more people. We were fortunate to get a lot of very quality, intelligent, capable, professional people.

Since then, it’s grown to where it’s over 200 employees and four offices in four different regions of the Maryland/Virginia area. And our focus is still residential design/build. And now we have a maintenance division that’s about eight years old.

Probably the fastest-growing component of our company now is the maintenance division, which we call “garden care.” It’s a little bit different, I think, than the commercial maintenance approach. And so we do a complete list of service from the mowing to the turf treatment, arbor care, enhancements, annual rotation – pretty much anything anybody wants to do outside, we’ll take care of that.

The biggest challenge is still finding qualified labor and even skilled labor. But as far as the market goes, there’s a lot of work out there. The builders are building again. Money seems to be moving and people are spending. I think the consumer confidence clearly is much better than it has been in the last four or five years.

Sometimes a consumer will think they’re gonna get the same product for a lower price. And that’s usually most always the case. So sometimes one of our challenges is educating the consumer on the value that they’re gonna get. And then they can make a decision if they wanna pay less and get less or do they wanna pay more and get more. And I think we’re seeing more of the clients willing to get more, which is a change in the way things have been.

My father was a banker and this accountant was a friend of my father’s. And he told me once, “When you build a business, never be afraid to hire people that are smarter than you.” And he said he thinks it’s an asset when you can hire and you’re not threatened by people. And he said, “Your role as an owner of a company is to get smart people and put ‘em in the right position.” And I think that we took that to heart.

I think sometimes people get too passionate about what they’re doing and they don’t pay attention to the numbers. I think that was probably something I learned from my father, because he was a banker, is that no one cares about the numbers in your business more than you. And no one is affected by it more than you.