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CALABASAS, Calif. – In 1949, Burt Sperber founded a landscape company that he named Valley Crest Landscape. Over the latter half of the 20th century, Valley Crest Landscape grew into Environmental Industries Inc. (EII), a $500-million landscape company that comprised numerous divisions and names.
Today, Sperber revisited the past when EII changed its name to ValleyCrest Cos. “The EII name isn’t a very recognizable name,” Sperber told Lawn & Landscape in an exclusive interview. “The Valley Crest name is very well known among our customers. Ask anybody in the landscape industry in California, and they’ll tell you they know ValleyCrest, but they probably don’t know what EII is.”
“The driving force for the re-branding is to simplify the way customers view us and better communicate the scope of the company’s services,” added Richard Sperber, president and chief operating officer.
Ironically, the switch from ValleyCrest to EII wasn’t Burt’s idea. “When we took the company public back in 1969, our investment banker told us that ValleyCrest was a bad name. He said the future was going to be about the environment, and we needed a name that was more of a name for tomorrow. He suggested Environmental Care, and I didn’t even know what that meant. I called my wife, and she couldn’t even find the word environmental in the dictionary back then.”
In addition to not being a marketable name, Burt said the word has come to mean something different than it used to. “Today, environmental refers to oil spills, mediation work and so forth,” he observed. “That’s not what we do.”
As part of the change, all of the 7,000 employees uniforms will be standardized to red shirts, abandoning the green that so many EII employees have worn for years, and the company will gradually change its fleet of more than 4,000 trucks over to the same color. “We want people to instantly recognize ValleyCrest as the nation’s leading landscape resource when they see our new red truck fleet and uniformed workforce whether they are on a golf course, at a hotel, around the corporate campus or in their neighborhood,” added Burt.
Many of the companies will be changing their names, as well. Environmental Care will now be known as ValleyCrest Landscape Maintenance, and it will be joined under the ValleyCrest umbrella by ValleyCrest Landscape Development and Valley Crest Tree Co. However, U.S. Lawns, the landscape maintenance franchise organization owned by ValleyCrest, will maintain its name.
Burt also pointed out how this change will enhance the company’s customer service. “The shifting of landscape maintenance work from the construction company to the maintenance company will be much easier for us since the companies share the same name now,” he predicted.
