Only as good as the team

For one of Good Nature Organic Lawn Care’s longest standing employees, the company being named a Best Place to Work seems only natural.

“It validates what I’ve known for a long time,” says Lawn Specialist Dan Norris. “It’s a great place to work. One of the biggest things is that the people here all have a similar mission. A lot of companies have mission statements to be a great company, but ours is to make the world a better place and to lessen chemicals going into our water and environment.”

Good Nature is based in Cleveland, Ohio and was started over two decades ago by Founder Alec McClennan in 1999. For a long time, it was McClennan, Norris and maybe one or two other employees as the fledgling business tried to take flight in the organic lawn care space.

Nowadays, the sustainability-forward company is up to about 50 employees across eight branches canvassing the Midwest.

Days gone by

McClennan says his drive to start an organic lawn care company started at a young age.

“I grew up in the country and was kind of an indentured servant to my parents,” he jokes. “My dad always dreamed about having a nice lawn. He’d go buy all the stuff and I was the guy who had to do it all.”

It wasn’t until after one high school biology class that McClennan says he didn’t want to use the products his father was purchasing.

“He told me then I had to figure out something else,” he says. “So, I went to the library and started learning about other ways to take care of grass.”

Fast forward to McClennan graduating from college, and rather than pursuing an engineering degree like he originally planned — McClennan decided to go into business for himself.

“I made a list of businesses that I could start, and an organic lawn care company was something I thought people would be interested in,” he says. “I had a sales job and started the company in my spare time. It was a fun challenge.”

Norris says he remembers being there from the beginning.

“I’m going into my 23rd year with the company. When I started, basically we had one truck and one other person working here,” he says. “I had no lawn care or landscaping background. I needed a job, but I wanted to be in something that was sustainable and organic.”

Through Good Nature’s decades-long history, Norris says the company’s culture has only continued to improve.

“A lot of things have changed over the years,” he says. “From the very beginning, Alec was always conscious about trying to hire good people and treating them fairly. He was trying to build a culture of togetherness and working as a team.”

But building a thriving culture isn’t easy — especially for a young company just starting out.

“When we were a really small company, we didn’t offer health insurance, a 401K or a lot of those things that are somewhat expected of most companies,” Norris says. “All that has come to fruition. We have a 401K and a company match with the 401K. We have health insurance… we have paid vacation and there’s just a lot of things that evolved over the years.

“Maybe 20 years ago I wouldn’t have said it’s a Best Place to Work, but I did always believe in the mission and the goal of the company,” he adds. “That’s really important to me.”

Critical core values

Norris and McClennan say what helped build the culture up at Good Nature was establishing solid mission statements and core values.

“We have our core values, our mission and our customer service vision, and those are the things we always refer back to,” McClennan says.

Norris adds the company has made it a habit to have monthly meetings where the team discusses the core values, what they mean to them and how they can live by them. Good Nature’s core values are as follows: Improve continuously, Care, Sustainability, Attitude, Focus on the clients and Effective communication.

“We have an acronym — ‘I C SAFE’ to describe them,” Norris says.

But it’s not as simple as just naming off the core values or their acronym. McClennan says the true value comes in employees working, and living, by these values.

“We try to recognize people who are living those core values,” he says. “There’s a moment for that in all our weekly meetings. We also evaluate people on core values as well when we do our monthly scorecards. It’s a way to be consistent with it.”

Annually, six Good Nature employees receive Core Value Awards — one for each of the values instilled in the company.

“We let people vote to see who is most exemplifying each core value and at the end of the year we give out those awards,” McClennan explains. “It’s a big deal to be chosen from your peers. It really means something.”

One core value Norris feels has struck a chord with every employee is sustainability.

“I think some people came to the company not necessarily with sustainability in mind, but they’ve adapted and bought into that culture just because of how much we talk about it,” he says.

Whether its sustainability, attitude or another core value, McClennan says by focusing on those, he hopes it helps crews out in the field stick to a kind of moral compass.

“You make a million decisions every day and we try to give them some guideposts so they can think about how Good Nature would hope they’d handle it,” he says. “If they know our core values and our mission…they’ll make the right decision.”

Customer satisfaction guaranteed

Customers seem to be pleased with the way Good Nature crews are using the core values out in the field.

“I love that we get a lot of positive feedback from our clients about our team members doing things and going out of their way to make the customer happy,” McClennan says.

“I think that’s a result of us being pretty selective about who we bring in but also doing the best we can to make our employees’ experiences the best possible.”

Rob Hermanowski says he’s enjoyed the work Good Nature has done on his Cleveland, Ohio, area home for decades now.

“We’ve been a customer of theirs for over 20 years,” he says. “We were looking for a more organic lawn care system. We’ve stuck with them for the long-haul now, and we’ve been very happy.”

While Hermanowski says he knew signing on with organic lawn care would be an investment, the evidence in Good Nature’s effectiveness was evident when he and his family took a break from services.

“Maybe five years into it, I recognized this wasn’t the cheapest option out here, and wondered what would happen if we cut back a bit,” he recalls. “So, we did, and I regretted it greatly because our weed control issues got severely worse. But it ended up serving as proof that what they were doing was really helping.”

One thing Hermanowski says he appreciates most about the company is its knowledgeable staff and their communication.

“They’ve always been very communicative in regard to letting us know when they’re going to be out or when they were just out, and what to expect,” he says. “The employees all come off as both happy and knowledgeable. They should be proud of working for a company like Good Nature.”

Norris says it’s keeping clients like Hermanowski and others happy that’s led to the success of the company.

“We always say if we treat the clients right, they’re going to treat us right,” he says. “We want to treat the clients like we would want to be treated and we want to be a good company to work with. That’s why we have so many good Google reviews and we’ve had so many referrals.

“In the lawn care industry, that can be a little tough,” Norris adds. “There are so many things that are out of our control. There’s always a percentage of clients who leave you every year, but it seems like we are losing less than the industry standard.”

McClennan says he feels it’s all reciprocal — happy people make people happy.

“For us, the happier the people are, the better job they do,” he says.

All for one & one for all

Happiness may be synonymous with culture when it comes to employee satisfaction, but for McClennan, culture has become too much of a buzzword.

Instead of focusing on culture, McClennan says he and Good Nature prioritize connection.

“In today’s world, it’s harder to connect in real life with people. So, we do a lot of things that are almost like forced connections,” he jokes.

“Every branch has a meeting once a month where we take the afternoon and some kind of team building activity. A few times a year we try to bring everyone together. So once a year we’ll do a river float trip down the Mohican River with people from all the branches.”

Photo courtesy of Good Nature

Norris says the fun times don’t stop on the riverbank or when the crews get out of the office setting, either.

“In the offseason, we have training classes that not only help educate us in terms of work-related things, but we also have the Smart Dollar Program, which helps people manage their money,” he says. “We’ve also had fitness classes and things to help people live healthier lifestyles. There’s a lot of things like that going on.”

McClennan recalls one of the best connections at Good Nature coming from the coronavirus era.

“Every week, we have a whole company virtual meeting,” he says. “Everyone is on the call together. That is something we started during COVID, but it turned out to be a really good thing for us. It’s a place where people can share what’s going well and where the struggles are.

“We try to recognize people as much as we can for when they do great work then, too,” McClennan adds.

McClennan says it’s those kinds of things that keep someone from thinking a job in the green industry is only temporary.

“Instead of people looking at this as a stepping stone job, they’re looking at it as ‘How can I make a career out of this?’” he says. And it’s that mentality that’s fueled growth at Good Nature since the beginning. McClennan says he’s continuing to focus on growth and expansion as a way to give back to his staff.

“We have to grow to provide opportunity for our people,” he says. “We find good fits for people and the growth makes that more possible. The kind of people we like to have are the kind of people who want to grow personally and professionally.”

The author is associate editor with Lawn & Landscape.