The one who didn’t get away

John Harich already handed in his resignation to Ruppert Landscape. He was ready to return to the sporting goods store he worked at before Ruppert. The same sporting goods store where he sold Craig Ruppert, founder of the company, a basketball hoop a year before moving to Ruppert.

At the time, in 2002, Harich was mowing lawns on the side, and saw a want ad in the paper from Ruppert. Harich was looking for a new job so he called Ruppert, who remembered him.

“Most business owners are always looking for good people,” Ruppert says. “When someone stands out, and John stood out, we engaged, one thing led to another and here we are years later.”

In that decade, Harich worked his way up through the ranks from field manager to area manager to business development manager to branch manager.

In 2008, he opened the Frederick landscape management branch and in two years, grew the team from 40 employees to 60. In 2010, he opened the Baltimore landscape management branch and increased his team from 30 employees to 70. He transferred to the Laytonsville, Maryland, landscape management branch in 2012 and increased profit more than 10 percent in two years.

He returned to the Baltimore landscape management branch in mid 2015 and currently leads a team of more than 70 employees operating out of two locations. Each of his branches has an average renewal rate of 90 percent.

“He’s found a way to connect individually with each (of his employees) to know them at a deeper level, figure out what they are looking for in life and their career, and then making steps to providing that,” Ruppert says. “That’s a real leader there.”

Brutal honesty.

After working on the construction side of the business for less than a year, Harich was transferred to the newly established maintenance side. Harich would work for Doug Halsey, branch manager at the time and now regional vice president of the landscape management division.

As the year went on, Harich began to question whether he wanted to stay at Ruppert.

“I wasn’t sure it was going to be the company for me, Harich says. “It was hard. I didn’t know everything. I was being challenged. I just wasn’t sure about the industry at the time.”

Halsey, who has been Harich’s boss since his first day, says Harich was experiencing a bit of a change coming from the retail world.

“One thing about Rupert is we’re brutally honest,” Halsey says. “Both Bob (Jones, president of the landscape construction division) and I would just tell him how he was doing on a daily basis. It was a culture shock. You go from a retail sports store where he said it was really loose, and you come here and you’re told every day how you’re doing.”

After a series of exit interviews with Ruppert, Halsey and others at the company, Harich decided to tough it out.

“They talked to me about business development and other roles I could do,” Harich says. “They said, ‘Look, John, you can just be in the field. Get your boots in the ground and really start to understand what we do on a daily basis, understand production and how we do things, because this is going to set the stage for your total career.”

Culture is king.

Someone who manages a branch the size of Harich’s is representing not only himself, but the owner as well, Halsey says.

“You take on the face of Craig Ruppert in that territory and exemplify that to the max to the point where you almost think that Craig is there telling you the story,” Halsey says. “It’s just unique. There’s other branch managers like that, but (Harich) embodies the personal touch more than most.”

That personal touch can be seen in the way Harich approaches building culture.

His branch began the practice of managers standing in front of the group to publicly recognize each individual employee at the year-end party, both verbally and by distributing hand-written thank you notes with their annual bonuses. This is now a tradition in many of Ruppert’s branches.

“When you get to talk to them publicly in front of their peers, it’s an amazing feeling, especially when you have success,” Harich says.

“I think it contributes to some of the successful years and sometimes it’s even more important to do that when you’re not being successful.”

Harich has a passion for soccer so he takes his teams to D.C. United games and has televised the World Cup in his branch office. He also established a soccer tournament between local branches, which was officiated by real referees.

He’s also implemented a unique dress code for his team at the annual company-wide training event. Every year, Harich’s employees are dressed in matching attire so that they stand out as a team at this event.

He has successfully trained and passed on leadership to three succeeding branch managers and continues to identify and develop talent. That’s not too shabby for a guy who almost never made it to a second year.

“I’m grateful to this day they talked me out of it and they showed me the light,” he says. “Lord knows what I’d be doing right now. I’d be selling basketball hoops. I think that would get boring.”