Tips from the top: Kory Ballard

I started mowing grass at 14 to make money, just to make some money in high school and buy a moped, buy a car and not work for anyone else. And when I graduated high school, we just continued to grow it from there. My now partner Matt Boelman joined the company in 1995, and I could quickly see him and I made a great team.

Before my grandma passed away, she still asked me when I was going to college. At that time we were doing about $10 million a year. She said, “Kory, when are you going back to school?” I’m, like, “Grandma, I got 75 employees. I’m not.”

We’re now about 90 percent commercial. We’re a full-service provider, so we really call ourselves a site management company. That’s everything from your turf care – which includes turf programs, tree health programs, mowing, landscape maintenance, irrigation installation and service, landscape construction and snow and ice management, which is our largest division.

In 2007, we bought a couple companies in the erosion business, which made sense at the time. It was a sister company to what we already do, and we were using them for a lot of our new construction services.

We allowed it to lose money way longer than it should’ve because our pride got in the way of the numbers. I don’t regret what we did. It was a great business lesson, but I think we could’ve drastically cut the financial losses if we would have just been honest with ourselves.

It felt like we’d never known failure. We’ve never not done well at anything we’ve done. When you feel invincible, you feel like you can’t screw up.

We trusted people, probably more than we should have, as well, which got us into some deep collections issues. When a guy tells me that he’s going to pay us, and we’ve been doing business with him for 10 years, and at the end of the day they go bankrupt, and they owe us over $100,000 – so we took some pretty big financial hits there.

As a company, last year we grew 26 percent. Our goal this year is eight percent, so we’ve lowered that number. We’re trending at about 10 percent right now, so we’re just a touch ahead of our goal.

One of the things I think we overlooked (in opening a new branch) was the ability to hire staff and get labor employees. Being an unknown name, an unrecognized company, I don’t think we understood what it would take to get 5 – 10 – 15 – 20 people in a market that we know nobody. And more importantly didn’t know us.

I think last September was kind of remarkable, but we hired 23 or 24 people, and only two made it through a month. We had to take a step back and say, “Who are we looking for? How do we reach them? What do we have to pay to get the next level up?”

When we’re at $1 or $2 difference (an hour), to me, I truly believe is a big difference. You get the next caliber of person. If you can just build your pricing metrics to understand that you’re going to pay a little more for labor, you get better people and you get more out of them.