At Pleasant Landscapes, employee buy-in starts with 100 pennies.
Recently promoted CEO Kelly Slater has spent the last few years at Pleasant Landscapes teaching employees business and budgeting jargon, which can already be hard enough. Factor in cultural differences and a language barrier, and sometimes, explaining profit, loss and overhead becomes downright difficult.
Still, it’s a necessity for employees to know what’s going on at Pleasant Landscapes. Slater is now spearheading the company’s ongoing march toward an employee stock ownership program. While they’re still privately held on paper, Slater’s helped lead the team toward phantom stock ownership with plans to rapidly approach a full-on ESOP.
Here’s how the pennies come into play: Slater lays out 100 pennies and separates out direct and indirect expenses to show how the company gets left with just a few pennies, or their profit. Or, she uses the pennies to explain how much each employee owns in stock of the company, from senior leadership down to the newest members joining the ESOP.
Slater won’t take credit for the pennies teaching method, but it’s still proven effective.
“I heard it years ago,” Slater says. “It was so simple, so impactful, that I started using it regularly.”
Slater’s spent 15 years at Pleasant Landscapes, which first hired her to serve as a consultant following her help with accounting integration in the Miller Brewing Company-Coors Brewing Company merger in 2008. Now, she’s in charge of 56 employees at a unique point in the company’s history – Slater is tasked with establishing the ESOP and creating a multi-tiered leadership program.
It’s a job she can’t wait to take in full stride in 2025.
“Working on the numbers, seeing the processes and refining things – that’s really what gets me out of bed in the morning,” she says.
Establishing the company’s leadership program is also part of Slater’s plans for the new year. She’s tasked senior management with identifying potential junior leaders who might be interested in learning more about what career paths might be open to them as they progress with Pleasant Landscapes. This leadership program involves monthly meetings to discuss things specific to their departments, plus quarterly meetings where they’re learning the same things senior leadership already does.
Slater acknowledges that there are some folks who may not ultimately take on learning more about leadership, but she wants to highlight the ways and reasons learning more about business can benefit them.
Slater adds that the ESOP plans and leadership program empower employees to understand the business. It also adds clarity for management: After significant advancements in how they explain the business, Slater says she can now tell who’s in it for the long haul.
“We’ve really refined (the ESOP) so it’s not just a slip of paper that’s signed by the CEO and treasurer of the company,” she says. “You can tell that when a new employee is brought into that program that they either understand it and respect it and they’re excited about it, or they’re like, ‘Can I just sell my shares back to the company for a bonus check?’”
And for Slater, being part of the long haul means being part of the Pleasant Landscapes family. She says that one of the reasons she’s excited to take on the challenge of becoming CEO is the team that’s behind her. The company has served residential clients for 33 years, long enough for six father-son duos to work at Pleasant Landscapes today. So, when Slater calls the company a family, that’s literally what it means.
“Those are the things that I really love about this company,” she says. “It’s not just about the bottom line and making money.”
