From the outside looking in

When Harry Lamberton announced he was switching his career path, his dad congratulated him – but not before teasing him. Lamberton’s dad wondered how his son – who seemed so unwilling to rake leaves or mow the lawn as a kid – would lead Yellowstone Landscape, a $579 million landscaping company?

Lamberton, who worked in the waste industry for 30 years, had a pretty simple answer for his father: “Well, you couldn’t get me to take out the trash, either.”

Lamberton, plus panelists Austin Ashmore, Billy McEnery and Lori Johnson, offered an outsider’s perspective for attendees at Lawn & Landscape’s Top 100 Executive Summit and Awards. The panelists came from a diverse set of spots: Ashmore and McEnery served in family businesses before corporate roles, and Johnson joined operations after a career in marketing and nonprofit work.

Today, they’re all executives of Top 100 companies. Ashmore is the CEO of Sunrise Landscape (No. 34), McEnery leads Green Garden Group (No. 72) and Johnson is the CEO of The Grounds Guys (No. 24). Collectively, they told attendees their perception of the industry before joining it and – more notably – compared their previous industry experiences to their time in landscaping.

Lamberton sees plenty of similarities between his role as president and CEO of Yellowstone and his time at Waste Management. He still cares for his employees, cares for his culture and has to work hard so everyone’s motivated to come back to work at 6 a.m. the next morning.

“I spend a lot of my time focusing on, how do we create a good work environment?” Lamberton says. “I get a lot of satisfaction out of creating better jobs and better careers for these folks.”

KNIFE FIGHTS. It can be tough for a newbie to immediately jump in and run the company. McEnery knew that when Green Garden Group started acquiring landscaping companies in the Chicagoland area, there’d be some frustrated folks at those respective companies. The optics for the skeptical looked like this: An investment banker with more experience in structuring deals than mowing lawns would walk into their businesses and tell them how to do their jobs.

Of course, McEnery says that’s not how it happened. No one doubted his ability to run the financials, but he says that bringing a blend of emotional intelligence helped him bridge the gap in contentious conversations. He says now he wouldn’t expect them to just change their habits without showing them some empathy. The early days of running the company meant he was just getting them to come to the table to have tough conversations.

“A lot of it was different from how they did business before,” he says. “I knew some days would feel like knife fights. I was coming in being comfortable with being uncomfortable.”

For Johnson, it was a double whammy: She was entering a male-dominated industry as a woman without a clear landscaping background. When she earned the CEO job, she imagined franchise owners sitting around a table, leaning forward and saying, “let me get this straight – you hired a female leader with a marketing background.”

Thankfully, that’s not really how it went down, though Johnson recommends new leaders should come in aiming to listen rather than making sweeping changes from day one. It also helps to maintain a level of transparency and not spitting out a bunch of corporate talk. A little humor goes a long way, too.

“I didn’t come in and pretend that I knew everything. You need to listen to the people who know,” she says. “I am very honest and transparent up front. You’d be surprised when you open up the conversation with a direct question…that most people are willing and wanting to be honest.”

Ashmore says it helped to also appreciate where the employees were coming from, even if he didn’t know exactly what landscaping all entailed when he took over. Yes, he brought in key performance indicators that helped the business from his other corporate roles, but he says his unique advantage actually came from growing up in a family business. His dad slept with a radio beside his bed to be constantly on call for his employees who worked in late-night paving, which can be extremely dangerous.

“That kind of example, I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but I sure as hell appreciate it now,” Ashmore says. He adds that when he was old enough to work in the field for his father, other employees reserved especially taxing work for him because he was the boss’s son. It was there he learned that all employees have families and their personal stories and goals that motivate them.

“(It helped) being in that environment and being able to personally relate to people,” he adds. “We can get too wrapped up in the spreadsheets and the KPIs.”

Lamberton adds that the higher up you get in business, the less honest feedback you’ll receive from employees. They perceive providing feedback as possible career-killing words, so they stay silent. He recommends going down to the frontlines and doing so often. He’s noticed it often takes three or more trips to the yard.

“It’s spending time with them… it’s having conversations about what’s going on,” he says. “Don’t just show up one time and now all of the sudden, everybody’s going to tell you what’s going on.”

CHANGE UPS. The distinct advantage to being an industry outsider is that, once you get folks to buy in, you might offer unique ideas to change the business. Johnson experienced this herself – she helped market for companies that dealt with emergency services, so speed was everything. Meanwhile, in landscaping, she noticed right off the bat that things operated with a much longer runway.

She saw employees not answering phones or missing essential materials. To help combat this, Johnson says they emphasized the “why” behind their work. She knew from her time at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital that in nonprofit, all the work is very purpose-driven. She hoped to bring a bit of that perspective to landscaping, too, where sustainability practices and beautifying outdoor spaces are crucially important.

 “That perspective of emergency services, where you need to have those things or you lose that business forever, is important,” Johnson says.

Lamberton says he saw that some folks didn’t understand direct margins and didn’t have the tech in place to capture it. Or, they had the technology and were doing great work but they didn’t know how to leverage that technology to benefit their bottom line.

“At the end of the day, they were just scraping by,” he says.

 McEnery admits it can be challenging to get folks to buy in to an outsider as a leader, but it’s important because they can help reshape the negative perception around the industry itself, especially on the consumer side. Clients assume the landscaping work is all folks jumping out of a truck with a mower or shovel.

Ashmore agrees – he believes the industry still needs to emphasize diversity in leadership. It’s not lost on them that the majority of their workforce is Latino, so hiring folks who represent the employees out doing the work is important.

“As a company, we’ve made some strides to do that,” he says. “But I also think there’s another wrinkle of diversity of thought.”

Ashmore adds that inter-industry hiring is vital. Not every CEO at a Top 100 company needs to come from another Top 100 company.

“There’s also ways to think about, why is it done this way?” Ashmore says. “This is the way we’ve always done it is not a very good answer.”

The author is an associate editor at Lawn & Landscape.