The snow business is no doubt competitive, but could your competitors actually help you grow your business? Check out today's interview with the president of a multimillion dollar snow and landscape company in New York about how she learned to build strategic partnerships with people she once viewed as competitors. Elizabeth Bonadonna from Busy Beaver shares why attending SIMA events, going to networking groups and talking with people who have been in business longer than you that have a bigger company and being open-minded to new ideas is essential to growing your business. Now, people always talk to me about software so watch through to the end to see what software Elizabeth uses, what she likes and dislikes and which software she and I use in common.
Hey everyone, Jack Jostes here and welcome to The Landscaper's Guide. This podcast is all about helping you grow your business with sales, marketing, and leadership ideas. Now I love all of the green industry events. I got to meet today's guest in person before we did this Zoom interview at the SIMA symposium, which was just an incredible event. And hey, we've got a ton of cool events coming up that I hope to see you at so be sure to check out landscapersguide.com/events to see which events we'll be at and I hope to see you there. Now, let's get into this exciting conversation with Elizabeth Bonadonna.
Hey everyone. Welcome to The Landscaper's Guide. Today, I'm excited to interview Elizabeth Bonadonna from Busy Beaver Lawn and Garden. They're based in West Seneca, New York. We met at the 25th annual SIMA symposium where we were both presenters and I'm excited to have you on the show, Elizabeth. You have a really interesting business. You all do not only commercial snow and ice management, but also residential landscape design and construction and you have a garden center. So, tell us a little bit about Busy Beaver and how did you all get started?
Busy Beaver And How It All Started
Elizabeth Bonadonna:
Yeah. So thank you for having me and I'm excited to be here. So we became incorporated in 2014, though, before we became incorporated, it was a little bit more of residential snow plowing, residential lawn mowing, and then it started growing into commercial contracts. And then we realized it should make sense if we protect ourselves, if we're doing commercial snow plowing, so we became incorporated and took advantage of becoming a WBE, which we are actually now certified. So that's exciting.
So yeah, we kind of just built it up from blood, sweat and skills and everything came from scratch. So we worked really hard to do the landscaping, the snow plowing, and now we only do the commercial snow plowing. And then last year we took over the Zittel's Country Market, which is a business that's been around for 36 years in our area and it's like a huge staple for local produce and different things like that. But before that, we did have our own garden center. We were waiting for the right opportunity to grow it and find a place and everything kind of aligned. And here we are today and we get to enjoy the fruits of our labor, no pun intended.
Jack Jostes:
Well, very good. And yeah, I'm curious, so are you keeping it called Zittel's? I mean, it's been around for over 30 years or are you changing the name of the brand?
Elizabeth Bonadonna:
So we are keeping our name because we have our own brand. We agreed with them that we can use formally known as Zittel's Country Market for a year after the sale. They obviously wanted to keep their name because they think in the future, some of their grandkids or kids are going to expand and have their own little market, not in our area, but somewhere down the line. But I can also respect that they want to keep their name, it's their brand. And we obviously worked really hard to create our brand. We just do a lot of marketing and advertising so people know that we offer... our slogan is "Same great Zittel's and the same great faces, just more."
Jack Jostes:
Great. Well, so you presented actually on marketing at SIMA's symposium, but I'm excited to talk to you more about the operational side of the business. You were interviewed in Snow Business Magazine in October, 2021, and at that time you were really thinking of keeping it all in-house, doing your snow with in-house employees. You've even grown tremendously since then and in our conversations, it sounds like you've expanded your mindset around that. So I wanted to just hear a little bit about in particular, the snow side of the business and some of the challenges you've found and how you're planning to work through them.
Elizabeth Bonadonna:
Yeah. So in that article, my biggest thing was cautious growth and that's because we could have taken more work, but with that comes... you need to buy more equipment, you need to increase... as you're increasing your sales, you're now increasing everything else and if it's parallel, great, but sometimes it's not always parallel. So we decided this year, instead of expanding and just keeping it all self-performing, which is something we've always felt really passionate about, we're trying to do more of that growth by subbing. And if we already know how to manage a bunch of our own people, I think it'd be really easy and safe to say that we can manage other companies, other professionals, in our area or even in a different area.
Jack Jostes:
And how will that allow you to expand your number of clients or the quality you're offering? How do you see growth by subbing working for you?
Elizabeth Bonadonna:
So I think by subbing, whatever we sell the price for and we sub it out for whatever the price is, in my opinion, because we are a very, very snow heavy market. We get on average 93 inches of snow a year, which is a lot. So if we had, let's say, a contract for 10,000 and we sub it out for, let's just say, 5,000, this is just an example, we know we're going to potentially make that 5,000 dollars, obviously there's going to be a little bit of buffer. So then you can plan and say, "Okay, I can invest in this piece of equipment," where you just know what your profits are going to be. Whereas if you have, which in our market, most people want to do seasonal contracts, so we sell about a million give or take in snow because that's what I felt most comfortable doing without feeling as though I'm going to fail or give a poor quality service based on the equipment and the things that we have.
So when you have a seasonal contract and you keep having these snow events, and Buffalo's kind of hit or miss, or it's just very heavy, it's almost like you keep taking withdrawals out of the bank account and at the end, you're like, "Okay, this is what we're left with," and you don't know that. So going into the snow season and saying, let's just say I sold two million and we self-perform one million and the other one million, let's just say if our profit margins are 50%, this is just an example, then we know we're going to make $500,000 that we can reinvest into our company, which right now we have a lot of things we do need to reinvest in. We're in a growth phase where banks, they see things as black and white. So when I finance the mortgage for the building, I'm pretty much capped out for probably a year or more. They're just going to say, "No, you have too much debt."
They just... it's very limiting. So I think this is a good way for us to grow and know exactly what we're going to make in the year so we know what we can reinvest, whereas we don't really know, and then if we didn't make enough money, then we're struggling for the next year until we can figure out how to better for the following year.
Jack Jostes:
Yeah, absolutely. So what changed for you, I guess from a year ago when you did that interview and here we are now?
Why Attending SIMA Events And Networking Is Essential To Growing Your Business
Elizabeth Bonadonna:
Well going to SIMA, meeting other companies, most of those companies, they're selling millions and some of them are 10 million and 20 million and I say, "How do you do it?" And that's what they say, "Well, we sub things out." They do a little portion as self-performing or they have some equipment just to kind of help stabilize if some of the subcontractors failed. But majority of these really big companies, they're subbing work out, they're working with service providers, or we call them subcontractor service providers. So I've learned, and I already knew that secret, but I thought that we could try it and see how far we can get. But it's also, I have two other partners, so their opinion matters as well.
And now that we have a Director of Operations who has a huge passion for growth and sales, he's on board and he's already started the process. So it's not just up to me to do it on my own, now I have a team of people who are backing me up that says, "Okay, we all believe in this and we all see that it could be really a good thing for our company." And realizing that in our area, we have a lot of salt so our equipment goes rusty really quick, it needs a lot of maintenance, a lot of money, so instead of worrying about fixing everything like crazy, we kind of say, "We'll let the other people worry about that."
How She Learned To Build Strategic Partnerships With People She Once Viewed As Competitors
Jack Jostes:
Well, and those other people also though, they're hard to find, right? There are a lot of people who want to subcontract to a reliable snow professional so how are you finding those people and persuading them to work with you?
Elizabeth Bonadonna:
So the tricky thing in our area is it's obviously a lot of our own competitors, I'm going to start by saying that because it is something that is a little uncomfortable because we may have people that maybe don't love us. Well, we don't know that, but you're just assuming because when you're a fast growing business, it can be very cutthroat. So we do have people that we like, know and trust that we've either worked with or we've associated with so we start with them. For example, so and so neighbor says, "This company, they're exceptional," or "We've had some issues, but we're going to keep using him." So that A, it makes sense because they're doing the neighboring property and B, you're getting that feedback knowing, okay, you're not going to read Google reviews and you're not going to listen to whatever they say. You're getting it straight from another client who can vouch for them.
So that's been something that's been really helpful. Obviously we do our own vetting. So we look into them and we read some reviews, we call them, we talk to them, we look at their work. A lot of it we know who's kind of... we know who's reputable in our area. The other thing is we're thinking about expanding, which most other companies go to different markets. So for us, I think it would be very efficient and very smart if we went to other areas that A, had lower snow totals or B, needed really significant amount of help. So for example, when we went to cultivate, we were talking to different people in the Ohio, it was Columbus, Ohio, they said they only get 20 something inches on average and sometimes they don't know what to do with the snow. So we're like, "Sometimes we push 20 inch snows in one event." We're like, "This could be easy."
Obviously we've gotten some advice from different people, different companies and even our business coach and they say, "You just hire someone that can manage there so this way there's boots on the ground." And obviously if it's only 20 inches, it's not like it's every day. So it would be easy to manage because for us, we're going out almost every day in the season, because we have a lot of freestyle or just little events. So we're doing different approaches and we're going to try to target markets that either don't know how to deal with one or two inches of snow or they have very low snow totals.
Jack Jostes:
Yeah. I like that. So that might be... are you finding that those areas have less competition in some ways?
Elizabeth Bonadonna:
Yeah.
Jack Jostes:
Are they less desirable to maybe some of your competitors?
Elizabeth Bonadonna:
Yeah. So when we were doing a little research in the Columbus area, people were saying that it's hard to find a reliable contractor because they don't fully know how to deal with the snow. Some areas I'm sure it's fine, but a lot of places say they don't have as much equipment, they don't always know how to deal with it because they're not prepared for it. And it's like if Florida got snow, it'd be kind of chaos.
Where it's for us, it's only five hours away and if we had to send our people to help if someone was failing, we can easily deal with that because if it was two inches of snow, it'd be absolutely easy for us. But if it was a bigger event, like six to 12 inches, we have full capabilities and that would still be very successful for us to clear on our own if subs were failing, that is.
Benefits And Challenges Of Having Three Different Departments
Jack Jostes:
I'm curious, so you have these three divisions of your company. You have the residential landscape, you have commercial snow, and then you have retail. How much crossover is there between the staff? How many people work in each department or are they more specialized? How does that... What are maybe some of the benefits of having these three different departments and what are some of the challenges?
Elizabeth Bonadonna:
So for landscaping, everyone from landscaping works in the snow plowing portion. We have people that come on board for the snow plowing that only work during the snow because they have a different job and they work and supplement to their different job or they're getting laid off. Some of the best people that we actually hire, they work for the union or they're in construction, roads and things like that, and then they help us because they're laid off so they have the availability, they have the skills because they're constantly in the equipment. And currently right now we have about 50 employees in the landscape and that includes the garden center. And then in the snow time, we've had 60 to 70 people that we have go out in a night, typically, give or take depending on the event. But most people, they stay all year round.
The people in the retail they're kind of... they stay in the retail. We have a couple of the men that will go out and snow plow. Our general manager, he's actually helped snow plowing. Since the gardening center that we took over, or the Country Market, I should say, they used to close in the winter. So this past year we stayed open so it wasn't very busy. So it wasn't like we needed all hands on deck all the time. So he was able to do both and he actually enjoyed snow plowing cause it was a little bit of a change and he said it was fun.
And he was in his little skid steer and it was close to our shop so this way he could feel kind of close to home. But we keep everyone all year round as much as we can and then some of the guys that come on in the snow once in a while to help us in the landscape with any construction projects as well.
Software For Snow Projects
Jack Jostes:
What are some of the softwares or technologies that you absolutely rely on that allow you to do what you do on the snow side?
Elizabeth Bonadonna:
So for the snow side, we use One Call Now, which is a mass texting service. We use Google Docs and Google Sheets for all our game plans for the event, also for work orders, but this way we have a plan of whose and what vehicle, on what route. And then we have a route sheet on the Google Sheets and we even have our site maps on Google Docs. We've tried to implement Service Autopilot to take away Google Docs and Sheets, but we're finding that we still kind of have to have that backup plan because Service Autopilot's one of those apps that has to be perfect for people to use and it's user friendly, but it also can be non-user friendly. I think it's going to really help with the subs, but our own employees, I found it as easier to use the Google Drive.
Jack Jostes:
Do you all use Team Engine?
Elizabeth Bonadonna:
We do. So we've incorporated that for hiring and then it also has the same function, similar to One Call Now where it can mass alert all of your employees or certain groups, which is really awesome.
Jack Jostes:
Yeah, it does have that. We're actually a partner with Team Engine. It's one of the few softwares that I've actually partnered with because it's just legit. It works so well. It makes your recruiting so much easier and you can do the group text messaging, which many people, they'll start out on their iPhone and you're texting 20 people and then one of them leaves and then I guess I got to start a whole new thread or whatever. It gets messy. I really like Team Engine. Well, Elizabeth, thanks so much for coming on the show. One of the things that I like about this conversation and following you a bit and reading your article was how you've been open to changing your mind along the way to trying new things. So originally thinking like, "Oh no, we're going to do it all in-house." And then going to SIMA and talking with other people who are what? Three, four, five times the revenue of your company and seeing how they're doing it and opening your mind to using subs I think is really smart.
Elizabeth Bonadonna:
Thank you. Yeah. I appreciate you having me so I can open up and talk about it and hopefully inspire other people as well.
Jack Jostes:
Yeah, definitely and I'm sure people may have follow-up questions for you. So if we do, what's a good way to connect with you?
Elizabeth Bonadonna:
So my email's always good or my cell phone, that's always good as well.
Jack Jostes:
Okay. Well, I will put those in the show notes so that way people can see that and find it and connect with you and, Elizabeth, thanks so much. Hope to have you on the show again and see when you're at 10 million or how big are you wanting to grow this thing?
Elizabeth Bonadonna:
Oh, sky's the limit. I don't have a number in mind, but I guess let's start with at least five million and then let's see where we can go from there.
Jack Jostes:
Right on. Okay. Very good. One of the ways that Elizabeth is growing her business is through attending events and talking with other people in the industry. And I'm excited that we've got a ton of cool events coming up this fall and winter. On September 14th, we'll be presenting The Landscaper's Guide to Solving the Labor Problem with Team Engine. On September 18th, that week we're going to be in Orlando, Florida at the Elevate conference put on by the NALP. Check out our booth number 1128. We're going to be raffling away at Traeger grill. I'm going to have one of my clients in the booth with me. It's going to be really fun so check that out. And on October 6th, we've got The Landscaper's Summit. This is a full day virtual event. We've got all kinds of cool guest speakers.
So check out landscapersguide.com/events to learn more about that. My name's Jack Jostes, I look forward to seeing at one of these events coming up and next week in The Landscaper Guide. That's a wrap. That's a wrap. Wrap.