Tips from the top: Jordan Lavin

I started a lawn mowing business when I was 15 years old. Westwood Property Maintenance. I used to borrow my mom’s car (once I turned 16) to pull the little trailer I had until I could save enough money to buy a truck.

I came out of my college horticulture program and bought a Nutri-Lawn franchise. I ran the franchise for five years, sold it and transitioned straight into a corporate operations role.

I was 22 at the time, just into my second year as a franchisee and after a day-long visit to my operation, a fellow franchisee said me: “You’ve got two options. You can sink or you can swim. The choice is yours.”

It certainly felt like I was starting to sink. It was tough love, a reality check that I needed to change my style of running the business at that time. It was a realization that as the driver, you’re in control of everything that happens, good, bad or indifferent.

We’re currently 100 percent Canadian.

The Canadian market is strong. It’s a great market. The economy has stayed very strong from 2008 on. We have a mismatch of legislation we operate under, but the market as a whole is a great market to operate in.

In a four-year window, we went through do-not-call legislation, economic meltdown and pesticide ban, and guess what? We’re in the business of applying pesticides; we get our customers by phoning them and they gotta have money in the hole. To stay in business you have to get creative, and you’ve gotta stay positive. You have to look at every one of these adversities and try to find the opportunity, or guess what? You’re dead.

It’s made us very agronomically savvy when it comes to both education and diagnosis. We spend a lot more time on curative practice than we ever did. We do a lot more slit-seeding, top dressings and turf renovations now.

From 2008 and 2009 on, when these pesticide bans started to become more official, the municipalities were empowered to make local decisions, so that was a total dog’s breakfast.

We’d send a truck out and you could be in three municipalities in a day and all three operate under different legislation. You could use products in this market and not that market. And throughout that transition period, between when they banned pesticides and when we actually came up with workable, natural solutions that were accepted for use, we had a couple of years that we went through a lot of turmoil. At one point, we’re hand pulling weeds. Try to figure out how to run a lawn care company by hand pulling weeds.

In the Ontario market, we’re treating insects the same way we always would in the sense that we’re still going out with a truck and doing 30 applications a day off of a truck with a tank and a hose. We’re using nematodes for grub control and we’re using a couple different soap products for chinch.

We’ve put a big push the past couple of years on the customer nourishment experience. It all starts with a very detailed evaluation, which is done on a tablet. Right from the customer’s lawn we hit submit, and it instantaneously sends them this form with all the dispositions already in place. We try to involve the customer in the science of it.

Our average spend per customer is on the increase, but it’s not as easy to bring new customers to the table as it once was. The new generation of homeowner doesn’t buy lawn care like the previous generation of home owners necessarily did.

There’s always, always, always going to be a market for lawn care and there’s always a market for people to have decent turf. I think we’ve done a damn good job of ducking and weaving and coming up with products that solve the problems that we have.