Culture shift

Owner Pat Morstad felt as though his business growth had plateaued.

His company, Precision Landscape & Irrigation in Ottertail, Minnesota, had settled into a fairly regular routine of making around $1 million in revenue and $100,000 net profit annually since its 2012 launch.

Hoping to move beyond those thresholds, Morstad set in place a company-wide transformation three years ago focused on improving Precision’s staff culture and operational processes.

Since that time, Precision’s growth has been strong. Last year, the company brought in around $4.5 million in revenue for a profit of $750,000 — and they’re on track to do even better this year.

“Once we started working on areas that we were weaker on, it literally allowed us to do things that we didn’t think were possible,” Morstad says. “And this win isn’t my win. It’s my team’s.”

Transforming workplace culture

When Morstad began working with his consultant, Cardone Ventures, his company had around 25 full-time employees, all of them men. The company now has around 40 full-time staff, and 18 of them are women. Seven female employees work in the field, in roles including irrigation crew lead and softscape crew lead. Eleven other women — including Morstad’s wife, Trista — cover high-profile, office-based tasks in project management, sales, HR and finance.

Including and elevating more women in leadership roles has helped positively shift the company’s energy and trajectory, says Morstad, who had worked nearly two decades in golf course development and management before launching his own landscape company.

“These women are go-getters,” he says. “We’re hiring these women on the basis of their positive attitudes, and we’re training them for results. In the process, they see the possibility for a true career here.”

Morstad says his female employees help bring a different eye to projects, one that helps them envision new ways to improve processes in the office or in the field — as well as ways to deliver higher quality customer service for their clients.

“We’ve got a lot of women in leadership positions now, and it’s incredible to see,” says Michelle Wangler, Precision’s project manager. “As the company continues to grow and expand, the potential is limitless for everybody here.”

Day to day, Wangler is in charge of scheduling four hardscape crews, two softscape crews, an irrigation crew, a lawn care crew, a fertilizer application crew, a mechanic and several materials delivery team members. While managing so many moving pieces might sound challenging, Wangler enjoys it.

“I love the fast-paced nature of it,” says Wangler, who came to Precision in 2022 following decades of experience in property and commercial real estate management. “There’s always something going on, and I thrive on the organization and troubleshooting aspect of it all.”

For his part, Morstad describes the new company culture as one that’s based on transparency and accountability. “It’s results-oriented. It’s aspirational and disciplined,” he says.

Admittedly, making the move to such a mindset did not come without hurdles. In the first year of the transition, Precision lost roughly 90% of its sales staff because they “didn’t fit the new culture,” Morstad says.

But the staff turnover opened the door for new employees who truly wanted to be at Precision and who meshed well with its new processes and approach.

“One of our biggest weaknesses (previously) was the component of people,” says Morstad, who was able to “change how we were doing things with our culture and change how we were hiring people.”

The company’s new hiring process includes a set of questions meant to tease out a potential employee’s goal orientation and drive.

The result: Precision now prides itself on having a company culture where both energy and morale are high.

“We hire people that fit our (new) culture, who are goal-oriented and who are comfortable being around other highly motivated, highly driven, and highly inspiring people,” Morstad says.

Investing in employees

Each month, Morstad and other company leadership conduct meetings with individual staff members where they discuss the employee’s PPF, or personal, professional and financial goals.

Every staff member receives ongoing professional development training, and the office also now has precise, well-documented employee pathway mapping — which the company calls its employee maturity model — so staff members know what it takes to be promoted to the next level within their departments.

“It’s very clear now, if a person is out in the field, they know the path and what steps they need to take to become a crew lead, and then what’s involved in moving up from crew lead to become a field supervisor or a project manager, and so on,” Morstad says.

Additionally, improved operational documentation and ongoing process training help ensure that employees are primed to thrive in their various roles at Precision.

As a result, everyone at Precision feels invested in both the company’s success and in their own personal advancement. The subsequent, company-wide energy transformation has been palpable, according to Morstad.

“You can feel the difference when you walk into the office now,” he says. “It’s evident in the ways we talk with clients and how we talk to each other — and in the results that come from that. It’s been absolutely remarkable.”

Many team members have had the opportunity to travel to Florida to train directly with the consultant, and every department has a dedicated advisor they can turn to with questions at any time. Additionally, many teams, including Precision’s sales teams, conduct daily role play and training to foster employee skills development.

“Previously, our sales training was not as strong as it is now,” says Kelly Dorholt, who joined Precision as sales manager four years ago following careers in safety and environmental consulting and garden design.

“We used to let people kind of do their own things — and everybody’s sales style was a little different. Now, from a sales process standpoint, we’re able to train and be consistent across the board and have everyone doing the same things. It’s allowed us to scale our business in an exponential way,” Dorholt says.

Precision’s new results-oriented process includes very clear KPIs for each employee, which track specifics down to precisely how many proposal meetings or calls a sales team member has made each month.

Rather than being a point of stress for employees, the attention to detail is motivating, Dorholt says, noting that it builds a fun camaraderie among highly motivated team members. The employees now know the importance of celebrating their wins.

Perfecting processes

On a departmental level, each company division — whether sales, marketing, field operations or finance — now has its own tracking metrics to measure success.

And, on a procedural level, the best practices for every office or field process are now carefully standardized and documented. These best practices then become the basis of in-depth operational training and coaching for employees, allowing the firm to ensure a high level of consistency and excellence across all its services.

Before Precision’s culture shift, when a mistake was made, the tendency might have been to chalk it up to an employee’s absentmindedness or carelessness. With the new culture mindset, missteps are viewed as evidence of areas where training needs to improve. “Mistakes only happen when we didn’t set employees up for success,” Morstad says.

Fine-tuning of sales processes — including following a set, seven-step process that focuses on, among other things, extensive notetaking, close attention to customer priorities and expedited delivery of proposals — has allowed Precision to close a higher percentage of sales and provide elevated customer service, says Dorholt, who oversees onboarding, training and mentoring of Precision’s sales team members.

“Our new processes have really helped us maximize our clients’ positive outdoor experience while also allowing us to, internally, focus on every staff member’s personal, professional and financial goals,” she says.

To help build synergies between company divisions, open communication is encouraged. Each week on “Financial Fridays,” Precision leadership shares financial, sales and production figures across teams so that progress can be tracked and analyzed.

“Everyone knows exactly where we stand at all times,” Morstad says.

Wangler adds: “We’re very transparent as a company about where we’re at in terms of our sales and production. We share comparisons to a year ago, so everyone knows whether we are ahead or behind, and it helps everybody stay aligned to what we need to do (to achieve our goals),” she says.

The open lines of communication serve as a motivator for employees at every level, Wangler says.

“If we’re behind, staff members realize, ‘Oh, I really need to close out that project, because otherwise I’m holding everybody else back,’” she says. “Or, on the other hand, if we’re ahead of targets, it motivates everyone to keep grinding and succeed even more.”

Looking ahead

Since its beginning, Precision has been a company that specializes in a wide range of services for its customers — from hardscape design and construction to irrigation, exterior lighting, and traditional lawn maintenance. Last winter, Precision also acquired an electrical company, which they renamed Precision Electric.

The company is currently at work on growing and scaling its new electrical operations — which will include residential interior light installation — using the same techniques that have propelled the fast growth of their landscape operations.

“Our five-year plan is to take us to a $25 million operation,” Morstad says. “That will take a lot of growth, and we’ll likely be looking into other companies — perhaps concrete, irrigation or other landscaping firms — that we’ll need to incorporate to bring along with us in reaching that goal.”

As the company continues to grow, its employees feel certain they’re on the path to both personal and professional success.

“We're aligned, we're transparent, and we're all moving in the same direction,” Dorholt says. “And that has been really wonderful to see.”

The author is a freelance writer based in Kentucky.