Jack Jostes:
Do you grade your commercial landscape clients? Well, in today's podcast interview, I talk with the director of sales from a company that does over 10 million in revenue about why they grade their clients A, B, and Cs, and then onboard all new employees, all of them, regardless of their prior experience, on the C accounts, plus how they create a healthy internal competition amongst their staff to advance on a clearly communicated career ladder.
Hey, everyone. Jack Jostes here, and welcome to The Landscaper's Guide, where we share inspiring stories about sales, marketing, and leadership for the snow and landscape industry. If you want to grow your company, you need great people, and in order to find great people, you need excellent job ads, but your current job ads stink, so join me on May 10th for a live webinar on how to write killer landscaping job ads that generate a response. Learn more at landscapersguide.com/events. And now, let's get into this podcast conversation with Jeff Cassani from Ideal Landscape Group.
Welcome back to the Landscaper's Guide. Today I'm excited to interview Jeff Cassani. He's the director of sales at Ideal Landscape Group in St. Louis and we're going to talk about how to grade your clients A, B, and C and how you can use that information when you are training your bench, when you're onboarding new employees. Are you going to put them on the A clients first or the C clients? Jeff, tell us a little bit about Ideal Landscape Group and a little bit about your background.
1:46 Jeff’s Background
Jeff Cassani:
Ideal is in St. Louis. We've been around for about 35 years. We have 120 employees. We're strictly commercial. We have three divisions of playground division. They do municipal playgrounds and a construction division that does large parks and things like that. We have a revenue north of 10 million a year. Myself, been in the industry for almost 30 years now, native of St. Louis, huge soccer fan. Pretty excited that we got a soccer team here. A little disappointed that Colorado just beat us, but I won't hold that against you.
2:25 How Do You Grade Your Clients?
Jack Jostes:
Yeah. Well, tell me a little bit about how you grade your clients A, B, and C.
Jeff Cassani:
An A client for us is a high-end, high-demanding commercial property. Could be a business park office complex, could be even a retail center. A C client, same category, could be office retail. Usually, they are non-irrigated, they're not as demanding. They still want their properties to look somewhat decent. They don't want to let them just look vacant, they want to keep them maintained, so clients will fall in there. B's are in the middle. They'll fall in into one of those three categories and from there is where we start routing.
Jack Jostes:
When you're selling to clients, do you offer them the option of being at an A level, a B level, or a C level, or maybe you don't use those words, but do they know that they're selecting the C level of care but that A level of care is available?
Jeff Cassani:
They do not, actually. When we sell a client, we offer only one level and that's an A level, even though it might be a C-level client, and we know that internally, we're training our guys to treat every property the same because you can't one day say, "This has to be absolutely perfect, nothing out of place," and the next day just say, "Mow it, whatever." They have to have consistency with that. Consistency builds your brand, so it doesn't really matter what type of property is, as long as it falls into that consistent A look. What we don't go after is a C client that wants a C product. We want the ones that they want that higher detail, even though it may not have irrigation, it might go dormant in the summer because it's hot, but we still provide that A service to an A, B or a C. You use that as your training background for all your guys building your bench so that when you do have a client, you have a team ready to step in there.
4:49 What Is It That Actually Makes Someone An A, B, or C Client?
Jack Jostes:
What is it? Is it the services that they buy or is it the amount of spend? Is it revenue? What is it that actually makes them an A, B, or a C?
Jeff Cassani:
It's usually the service, the number of services, the different types of services. A, they're mowing weekly, they're fully irrigated, bush pruning, fertilizer, tree and shrub apps. They want their property, no matter what, it has to look good. Every time you leave there it has to look perfect. Then the difference between all the way down to a C is they might just purchase mulch, pruning, and mowing because they don't have irrigation. They might do one or two lawn apps just to help maintain the turf, but nothing that completely turns it around. They don't have the water to turn that turf around, so they do minimal service, but we still look at it as an A. We're providing the services they want, but we're making sure that when we leave that property, it looks like an A client should
Jack Jostes:
Doing north of 10 million in revenue, roughly how many active clients will you have in a year?
Jeff Cassani:
We have just about 200, 210 clients. We also plan for next year, so we're already in the plans for 2024. We look at what we have employee-wise, what type kind of teams we have, so we know who's going to step up to the plate next year, how many A clients can we sell, how many B can we sell, and how many C. That way you're not overselling one area and you then you're underperforming. We take our growth real serious. We make sure that when we're growing, we're growing in the right areas.
Jack Jostes:
Do you find that the retention rate percentage varies between the A, B, and C clients?
Jeff Cassani:
Not normally. If you take care of them, so if you take care of that C client like an A, we find that we actually get more business from that property manager because we're willing to help them out on one of their lesser properties, and they know that it's a mow and go, it's nothing fancy, but we're willing to help them out there to improve that as best we can, then they're inclined to give us more business in the long run.
7:20 Does Profit Margin Vary Between As, Bs, and Cs?
Jack Jostes:
Do you find that the profit margin varies between A, B, and C? The reason I'm asking is I've worked with some commercial businesses and they think they have that A-level client and they are buying the most services, but they're also, they didn't estimate the work properly and their profit margin is actually lower than the C. Have you ever had that experience?
Jeff Cassani:
Yes, that's a good question. In the A's, Sometimes because so many people are competing for those, your profit margin might be a little bit less than what you're expecting, and the C's are usually a little bit more. However, with efficiency, especially if we retain it year over year, every year we're increasing that efficiency, which isn't line increasing that profit margin. We do have a strict, "Don't go below a strict threshold to not dip below this profit margin," because the company's got to survive. If the company can't survive, then nobody has a job. But we've found that with our training that our guys have become super efficient at most of their jobs, and if they're not, we study that job and figure out why to get that profit margin back up. But it is, you do find the flip that the A's are usually a little bit less because it's so competitive after it.
Jack Jostes:
Yeah, that makes sense, what you're saying. Internally with your team, so you're onboarding new employees and they're generally assigned to the C level. Is that based on their skill? If you hired somebody that had five or 10 years of experience, would they need to start on the C-level accounts and prove themselves to get to the B's or the A's or how do you manage that?
Jeff Cassani:
All new employees, whether they have 10 years or experience or we just hired them 'cause they had a good attitude and we're going to teach them, they start out at that C level because we want them to learn what the Ideal expectations are, what our expectations are at our company, how... Now somebody with 10 years of experience, they might only sit on that C crew for two or three weeks and move up, but we want them there to learn what our expectations are. There's more margin of error at the C level than there is on an A level, but once they get a grasp of what Ideal Landscape is, then they're moving up to another company because we want to utilize their talent for sure. We don't want them stuck down there.
10:00 Does Grading Cause Healthy Competition?
Jack Jostes:
Is this information public within the company, so if people are currently new and they're on the C team, essentially, can people see that and does that create some healthy competition? Or is this just managed privately or how do you go about managing this?
Jeff Cassani:
Great. We are open book so everybody knows and it does create a big competition. It's healthy competition. Everybody wants to help each other improve and nobody wants to be at the bottom. We have grade cards every month, so at the end of each month we grade every crew. That's posted publicly and the goal is for the crews is they don't want to be the bottom. They always want to be at the top. There's that competition and whoever's at the bottom, they get razzed a little bit, but nothing out of the norm. But that just motivates them to move to improve for the next month. We have an internal text network and we do photos of the month, so they post their work on there, and that creates a competition of improvement for training as well. Everybody's trying to outdo the previous photo.
Jack Jostes:
I like it. I think this healthy competition, there's a certain amount of it that can motivate people. I've shared that I used to actually sell door-to-door. I did door-to-door sales as a milkman on a dairy farm and they had a whiteboard and at the end of the day the sales manager would write your name and your number, how many sales did you make? There was a weekly total and a monthly total and it did create some healthy competition amongst us and partly to inspire people of, "Wow, there was this person, Donna, who would sell consistently 10 or 12 and I was getting, some days there were four or five." But then they also tracked their retention rate of the different salespeople and every, I don't know, it was just interesting to see that.
But it could also create potentially a negative culture or... What do you do? You need to retain the C accounts, so if I'm an employee and I'm wanting to move up to be on the B team and eventually the A team, is there a home for somebody to lead the C team really well? Because like you said, some of those are even your most profitable accounts.
Jeff Cassani:
Right. There is. Not everybody wants to move up. There's some people that are happy where they're at. There's a couple of guys that they just kill the C routes. We offer monthly bonuses based off of the grade card efficiencies and they have their routes down. They like to be trainers, too, so they train multiple different people. You have those that want to move up. You have those that are content where they're at. We're happy with everybody as long as they have a good attitude. If they don't have a good attitude or they come and work all grumpy every day, we don't want them around. Nobody wants to work with them. But yeah, they're our guys that just, they're happy there. They don't want to move up. We utilize them as trainers and they know that that's what they do. They know that they're watching their guys train, move up the ladder, and that's what they like.
13:40 What Is The Ideal Way?
Jack Jostes:
What are some of the things that are absolutely part of the Ideal way? You mentioned even when you're onboarding that new employee who has, they have seasoned experience in the industry. What are some of the key components of the Ideal way that they need to learn?
Jeff Cassani:
It comes down to quality, crisp edges along the sidewalks. That all has to be crisp. Trash is picked up. It's not mulched over, left in the yard. Beds are free of weeds and no clumps of grasses, so it's quality-subjective, but there's no grass clumps left behind, there's no weeds, and curb lines are crisp. That's three easy-to-follow Ideal ways of quality.
Jack Jostes:
I agree that quality can be subjective and I've also done similar things in my own business with creating little grading criteria for various deliverables for us with search engine optimization and how we write headlines or how many times are a keyword used on a page, so that way some of those qualitative things that you know work, I mean, of course. Then when you say these things out loud, it's like, well, yeah, what customer would want squiggly edges or would want you to miss part of their sidewalk or to have clumps of grass or who wants weeds in their beds? They're kind of the obvious things, but I think having them written down and knowing that you're going to be graded on them creates some of that scalability and makes quality something that you can expand at the $10 million level. Speaking of SEO, I think you actually had a question for me about SEO. You guys are doing some.
Jeff Cassani:
Yep. We're currently working on some of our SEO and the guy that's doing it for us, he wants to post a new landing page every three, four days. We felt that you should go all at one time and launch the new site. I don't know what your opinion was on that.
Jack Jostes:
Well, I don't see any reason to wait other than the bandwidth of the person building them, meaning a quality thing. How many can you really build well is more of a consideration for me. But I can tell you that at Ramblin Jackson, when we're building sites, they typically have at least 20 pages of new content when we're launching them and we're gearing up towards that to launch it and then we do build out content over time. Part of the reason that it takes time is our client's bandwidth to review content and approve it and make sure that it's done. But there's no reason if all of those pages are ready and they're in the draft mode on your website to wait to publish them from my perspective.
Jeff Cassani:
Gotcha. Okay.
Jack Jostes:
Well, Jeff, thanks so much for sharing about grading your client's A, B, and C. Are there any other things that are really working with this method of grading your client's A, B, and C with onboarding all employees starting on the C team? Then I love how you said that you have these incentives, though, for the people who are like, "Yeah, you know what? I want to manage the C team and be a teacher and help be a manager and train these people and I'm getting compensated for it." Is there anything else that we should know about all this?
17:16 Creating A Live Career Ladder And Spelling Out Your Future
Jeff Cassani:
We created a very good live career ladder and it spells out their path through Ideal, gives them a future and with that, it has really helped with that internal competition as well as all of our supervisors have started in the field and you could actually see that they have moved up, so not only do we talk about it, we actually do it, and that creates customer retention. By creating the employee retention, sorry, the employee retention, and then that in turn gets your customer retention.
Jack Jostes:
How are you showing people, literally showing them and helping them visualize the career ladder? Because I think this is really important. I know it's something I've struggled with in my own businesses, in my mind, I'm like, "Oh, I see you being promoted to this role and this role and this role," and some people don't get it and that can create problems, so I'm curious, how are you doing this?
Jeff Cassani:
We have it on our spreadsheet. It is posted on the wall so you can see it. Each bubble is every level of the company. Inside that bubble tells you what you need to learn or what you need to do to move to the next level. It gives a range of pay for every level as well, so they know what they're going to earn at that level or, "Okay, I'm making this as a crew member. I could become a crew leader by doing two things and then make this much and then work into a training supervisor or a field supervisor." But that's known to everybody.
Our goal is to get everybody in the right seat. Just because you're a great crew leader, you might not be a good supervisor, but you might be a good account manager, so we move people around based off of what their strengths and weaknesses are. We had our production manager last year that did a really good job. We moved him to account management and he's killing it. It's the perfect role for him, so it's all about getting the people on the right seat. But that career ladder is posted. Everybody can see it, they can look at it, ask questions, and figure out what they need to do to improve to that next level.
Jack Jostes:
Thanks for sharing what you've learned and what's working at Ideal. For people listening or watching who want to network with you, how can we get in touch?
Jeff Cassani:
The best would probably be through LinkedIn. On there, Jeff Cassani. You could also find me at the Ideal website page, idealandscape.com.
Jack Jostes:
Great. Well, I'll put links to that in the show notes. Jeff, thanks so much for coming on the Landscaper's guide.
Jeff Cassani:
I appreciate it. Thank you. Had a good time.
Jack Jostes:
I hope you enjoyed today's interview with Jeff and I hope to see you at one of our next events, including the one on how to write killer landscape job ads. Learn more at landscapersguide.com/events and see our show notes for a quick link to that page. My name's Jack Jostes and I look forward to talking with you next week on The Landscaper's Guide.
How Do Vision, Mission, And Culture Impact Mergers and Acquisitions?
Steve Bousquet:
It's a cultural fit, and you want to make sure that you're on the same page with where they were driving this company for 30, 35 years. The mission is very important. It represents what the owner believes in and what they support. So if the mission is, "How much money can I grab out of this business?"... and I've run into a lot of companies where the owner's mentality is, "It's me against my employees, it's me against them," and it's, "How much can I grab?" And if that's your mission and your business, then that's not going to be a good fit for my company, because that's not our mission. Or what their purpose or why is... If it lines up to yours, it's better. And whatever your mission and vision is, I'm not poo-pooing or saying it should change. You just want to make sure that you're on the same page.
Jack Jostes:
Well, and what can go wrong when it doesn't fit?
Steve Bousquet:
You have disengaged employees. So if they come onto your team, they're already disengaged, because they know the owner was... I call it a money-grab. And so if the employees are not being developed and they're not being nurtured and they're not being taken care of, it's just a job, they're just showing up for a job. And we don't want people that are just showing up for a paycheck. We want people that are showing up to grow and develop as, not only as a landscaper, a lawn care person, but as a person in the community that my business operates in. And I'm not asking everybody to have that vision, but I need something close to that for the business to work.
Who Helps Find A Company Who Meets Your Culture When You're Trying To Also Be Careful To Not Let Anyone Know That You're For Sale?
Jack Jostes:
And Kurt asked a great question. Who helps find a company who meets your culture when you're trying to also be careful to not let anyone know that you're for sale? So how do you go about vetting that and finding that cultural fit without letting on to people, "Hey, we're getting ready to sell the company," which can spook a lot of people.
Steve Bousquet:
There are a number of ways. Associations are really good. If you're in associations, you kind of know who's in the association, they've been around for a while. There's also different brokers who you can get to know. I would always recommend trying to get to know some brokers before you're ready to buy or ready to sell. And have conversations with them, invite them to visit your business, and get that out there. There's a number of brokers, there's guys in the northeast, there's guys in Tennessee for lawn care, landscape businesses. But associations are good to know, because people typically that are heavily involved in associations have a value system that matches up with ours.
Jack Jostes:
Very good. We had a question, and I absolutely advocate for joining your state and national association. We're members of the Illinois Landscape Contractors Association, the Texas Landscape Contractors Association, the Associated Landscape Contractors of Colorado and NALP. And I found that those are really, really great and a great way to network and partly find a potential buyer or seller just from showing up and networking at those things. For sure. So I was curious... There's another Jack here. I'm not sure I understood the question. Jack, are you here to ask your question? If you could unmute and turn your camera on, we'd love for you to ask your questions about the earnout-based acquisition. Are you able to ask that, Jack?
Can You Just Pay A Referral Fee When You're Buying A Company?
Jack:
Yeah, absolutely, I will. And thanks for the opportunity. All this material that you've provided is super, everybody that's talked today. My question is, we've made a few acquisitions that are larger acquisitions over time, but I've also realized that we'll receive calls from time to time from other local companies that know us or know of us in the market, and they'll say, "Hey, I've done it for 20 years, and I think I want to hang up my spurs." And then you look at the financials. And number one, the business is really not worth what they want. But then number two, they don't really have much of a business. It's more of an owner-operated company, where they've been pulling a salary out and that's sort of like the net profit, if you will. And so I've tried a couple approaches here actually this year with two companies, and ultimately they just ended up closing the company, which was sort of crazy and we ended up picking up some of their clients that way.
But my approach was, "What if we don't give you anything upfront, but we'll pay you a percentage of whatever we generate off of the clients who successfully transition?" So that's what I call an earn out. It's like, "Okay, we're not going to really have a lot of risk in the very beginning, but we're going to do everything we can, and we expect you to help us to get those clients transitioned. And then we'll provide you clear accounting of exactly what we did. We most likely, because we're bigger, we'll upsell them on other services, and we'll pay you some percentage of that revenue on everything we generate for that client over a period of time." So that's really what was the genesis of my question.
Steve Bousquet:
So we've done many of the smaller ones, because, like you said, it's not actually a business. Many of them don't even have a website or they have no employees. So we basically just come up with a percentage and we pay a percentage that eliminates all my risk. And then the other thing is we're showing up and doing every application we're upselling. So potentially, they could end up getting more revenue from that. But the thing is, depending on their pricing, that's usually the issue. They're way under-priced a lot of times, and I mean up to 20% to 50% under-priced. And what was interesting is typically, you lose about a third of those customers right away, regardless of if you raise the price or not. They just go away. One third will stay, they just don't want to change. They'll pay the price. And it's that middle third that you can build the relationship, explain the price and keep. So we're finding that, even on the smaller ones, we're keeping almost a little under two-thirds of their customers.
Jack Jostes:
And Steve, in that earn-out model, roughly, what commission percentage, ballpark, is kind of customary right now?
Steve Bousquet:
So it depends on how long they want the commission for. It depends on how big the price differentiation is and how much we have to move. Typically. Between 5% and 15%.
Jack Jostes:
Okay. Well, I wanted to share that I acquired a company, two companies, with that model. And one of them didn't really go well. They were closing a department of their company and we acquired that department. And I didn't know enough at the time to dig into this, the reason they were closing it was it was unprofitable. And one of the key reasons was that they were significantly under-priced. And so when we came to those customers, and we were like, "Hey, your websites were built really poorly and to fix them, here's the price." They were not thrilled. So that was just one lesson for me was to learn, even for a earnout, for a referral commission, you've got to get clear on, "How much are these customers used to paying? Are they actually a fit for your company?" Because in that case it wasn't, but I definitely think it could work. And maybe there's less of this long-drawn-out, expensive process with lawyers and stuff.
Steve Bousquet:
That's just a one simple page agreement. I do have an attorney draft that. I work with an attorney, so she'll draft that. I'll have them look over that with their attorney, because I just want to make sure they don't come back and say they misunderstood it. And that 5% to 15% could be... Maybe it's 15% a year for three years, or maybe it's 5% for five years. It really depends on the quality of the account and, "Is it priced right?" If it's price right, it's worth more. So we're looking at... It's going to cost us about $200 to get a new customer in our marketing spend and not including the sales $200 to $300, and they're going to generate an average of $1,000 a year, that's our sweet spot.
Jack Jostes:
I like that. I like that you've figured out that number ahead of time. Like you were saying earlier, having that in mind can kind of remove some of the emotion from this. We did have good questions from Richard and Kurt. So go ahead and unmute, turn on your camera and ask your question. We'd love to hear from you, Kurt, if you're up for it, or Richard.
Can Landscape Companies Buy/Sell Client Lists?
Richard:
My question is, so we do about $500,00, $600,000 in revenue, and there's another small company locally that's interested in selling basically a client list. How do you know employees, know equipment? How do evaluation on roughly a $300,000 company when you're just purchasing a list of clients?
Steve Bousquet:
What's the service that they provide?
Richard:
They do basic lawn care, lawn mowing and general property maintenance. They don't do any real applications. So our company, what we do, we do organic turf management, ecological green infrastructure design, and we also use electric and robotic mowers. So there's a huge potential for upselling on all of these clients that this potential seller may not be aware of that we might be interested in doing.
Steve Bousquet:
Let's say his net is 15%, so he's netting $45,000. So if you do three, multiple three, that could be 135,000. That would be pretty generous in that, mowing and maintenance offers. People are delusional. Sometimes they'll ask for $300,000, because that's what the spray companies get. I would look at what his gross profit margin is, how much he generates of that $300,000. Cause you're going to have to replace him.
Jack Jostes:
Steve, I'm curious, why wouldn't we just pay, do the earn out model, the referral commission? Instead of trying to evaluate this $300,000 company, would it be better to just say, "Hey, we'd love an introduction, and for the clients that we retain, we're going to pay you X percent."
Steve Bousquet:
You absolutely could. And you could do it based on figuring out what the value of that is, based on his percentages. Yeah, like I said, there's different ways. Does he need $50,000 for some reason? Is it-
Richard:
Yeah, yeah. Part of it is the delusional part of it, exactly what you said. For his $300,000 list of clients, which, like you say, you might retain your lucky two-thirds, he wanted $1.5 billion. So at that point, I was like, "We'll have to think about it." Obviously, I was trying to find out best case scenarios of how, again, we can attain the client list and still acquire the clients and hopefully he's comes to his senses. That's really... Obviously he's not going to do $1.5 million.
Christeen Era:
Before our call, Steve shared with me that the company that he was looking to buy last year, they went under and now he's just picking up their customers without paying a penny.
Jack Jostes:
Right? And that's where, again, outbound marketing, direct mail postcards, in addition to being found online, you can generate a lot of your own leads. So what are you really buying, and is there a less expensive way to get those clients? And it could work out. I think there's a lot of nuance to it. We've got two minutes. So before Christeen leaves, were there any questions for Christeen? I know that Kurt had one. Go ahead, Kurt.
How Do Potential Buyers Evaluate Each Division Of Your Business?
Kurt:
The appraisal part of it, if anybody has input on that. And then what we are working on, and I think Steve mentioned that, is all our different divisions, what is their profit on each part of it? Because we have irrigation, we have maintenance, we have tree installation, we have the landscape projects, the outdoor spaces. So yes, we're working on breaking that down. Is that something an appraisal company wants to look at? How does that work? And finding somebody that knows our business.
Christeen Era:
So first I'll just add a few strategies in there, because we've worked with many companies to break down the profitability per division. And I call these profit centers in a company, where you know are going to have different services that you deliver in your company that are highly profitable and others that are not as profitable. And this is usually a blind spot in companies, where they'll go, "Oh, well my irrigation is super profitable, or my lighting is super profitable." And then once we dig into the numbers, we find that there's like two de departments in the company that have been limping along and are being carried by everything else. And what they assumed was highly profitable wasn't.
And we use the scalable growth business model assessment, which is an advanced method of profit-first. And just by getting your books in order and making sure that you're tracking those numbers properly, you can set this up to where you don't only need to use it in an appraisal process, but you can use it in your company to make some very vital strategic decisions as you move forward and make plans and even decide, "Well, we're going to get rid of this dead weight, and we're going to invest our money here," and maybe even putting a pin in it to create better profit centers before you sell so you could be strategic about it.
So that's something I'll bring to the table is just a little bit of wisdom on where to focus, when you could use the profit-first system to identify that building out in your books in advance. It's going to serve you long term strategically and when you are ready to sell.
And an appraisal company won't exactly do their due diligence on finding your profit centers in your business, because they're going to have to dissect your books. So this is something you're going to want to do in advance to make sure that your books are telling the story and you're not relying on an appraiser to do that for you.
Jack Jostes:
One thing I wanted to share about that, of getting that profit and loss by class dialed in, is that how you would recommend doing it, Christeen?
Christeen Era:
Yep. We either use class or location, depending on how you want to set it up in your business.
Jack Jostes:
So Kurt, if you had irrigation, landscaping, nursery design, and you could generate that profit and loss by class, you can also then bonus your teams based on that and incentivize managers and project managers and people. That's one thing that helped me. And I shared on the podcast that I had a ton of debt at Ramblin Jackson, and one of the things that really helped was getting clear on each department and what did we need to charge, and how much money were we making, or how much money were we not making, really, and then including my team in helping fix the problem. So I think there's a lot of value in setting it up in that way. I'm not sure how yours is set up currently.
Kurt:
Yeah, we're using QuickBooks, we're getting closer at all those numbers, and we do have a good accountant. And it's all good. And I just want to say thank you, and you've helped us a whole lot. So everybody out there Ramblin Jackson has helped us a lot and our branding and marketing and all that for sure.
Jack Jostes:
Thank you. Yeah, check out Unique Landscaping, and thank you, Kurt, for coming and saying that. Does anyone else have a question for either me, Steven, or Christeen or anyone else here? I encourage you to ask a question. Quinn, did you see any others?
How To Onboard Employees When Acquiring A New Company?
Quinn:
I didn't. I have one personally. I'm just curious for Steve, just a heads up. I'm also Quinn, I'm the landscape marketing assistant with Ramblin Jackson on Jack's team. And I was just curious, I know you mentioned when acquiring a new company, you want to look for ones with the similar culture obviously. And even when finding one that's similar, have you had any personal experience with pushback from previous employees of that company? And if so, or how did you handle it and then get them accustomed or on board?
Steve Bousquet:
So yeah, when we do, we do an interview with the employees that were there. And it's interesting, we look at a lot of other previous engagement. So we're asking for stories about people. How did they show up in difficult situations? And the person that has the weirdest stories, it was the person that didn't fit. Like unusual behavior or really selfish activities. He wasn't a team player, victim mindset, things happened to him. You couldn't take responsibility for stuff. After we were interviewing him, he decided that there's no way he could be part of our company, because we have this set of immutable laws. And it's like, "Show up on time, be honest, do what you say you're going to do, be respectful." He just could not buy into that, of course not because of him, but, "Nobody was going to do that live up to that."
So we knew immediately. And he just quit. He didn't even come on board. And other companies we bought, we basically give them a little bit of a trial plan and if when they have paid activities that they can go to for professional development and they don't show up, or they show up and they're not engaged, we coach. And then we literally have a chart. Are they capable but unwilling? Are they capable? Yes. Are they unwilling? They're not willing, so then they have to leave. So if they're capable but unwilling, they leave.
Jack Jostes:
When in the process do you do that little trial period? Because I think you need to work with people in order to see how they work. And at Ramblin Jackson, we have our core values, and they're actually the what guides how we select employees. And so we have ways of vetting them. So for instance, one of them is be on time and prepared to add value. If someone shows up a minute late for their interview, we actually end it. Right? So that's like a little test. And then we do skills assessments. We have them do just small basic stuff.
For our account managers, they need to be able to listen to clients, take notes and follow up. So we have them listen to a recording and type how they'd follow up. And it's like, "Did you Google how to spell xeriscaping? Or did you type "zero scaping" as two words? Cool, you can't work here." How do you do that though with a company? How do you vet their culture without... And when do you do that? Before you get seven months in with attorneys and lawyers and CPAs and valuation companies and all this expense? How do you figure that out?
Steve Bousquet:
A lot of conversations with the owners. And then we have a conversation with the managers, and then we look at their folders and we see what's going on. If this guy has 38 lates in 60 days... Or we'll ask to see timecards. Who's late? And what happens a lot of times, the owners are so desperate to have employees, they let this bad behavior go on and on. So it's a predictive model. Now, is it 100%? No. We've had people that were like, "Okay, this is a different company, I have to show up differently, and I do want to work there." So they show up differently and they stay.
Jack Jostes:
Thank you, Steve. Quinn, thanks for that great question. Steve, if we had a question from Todd Reinhardt in Illinois who asked, "If you could share what are all of your laws. What are Steve's laws?
What Are Steve's laws?
Steve Bousquet:
So we just went over that. We just went over that this morning. So in between rounds, we start with immutable laws. And my team had input on that also. And it's simple. "Be respectful and be polite. Be respectful to the clients, vendors, teams, equipment, uniforms. Be on time. Being on time is part of being polite and respectful to your team members so they can count on you. Own your actions. Be accountable by realizing that mistakes are part and failing are part of learning and progressing. We trust that you are working honestly and sincerely. We understand we all make mistakes. Honesty is very respectful to everyone involved.
Sharing honest bad news is better than hiding the truth. Everyone makes mistakes at times and may need help understanding instructions or explanations. Be honest so progress can be made. Give and take. Flexibility is a two-way street. As a family business, we understand people need flexibility and we need our team members to show up strong at work. And do what you say you're going to do when you say you're going to do it." Nothing crazy, but it comes with a sense of responsibility.
Jack Jostes:
Yeah, it absolutely does. And I share a lot of those values. And I know that if I were vetting a company who didn't share them, I think the real risk is to your current people. When you have people on your team who don't share those values, the real risk is that it's going to frustrate your A players to leave. If they're constantly picking up the slack for somebody who's late or doing a sloppy job or they're rude to customers and they have to call and take care of it, at some point they're going to leave. So I think it is very meaningful to have that and to vet it as part of an acquisition. I'm curious if, Steve, you had any questions for me or Aaron or Quinn or anyone else, if anyone had another question before we wrap up?
What The Value Of A Website Is In The Purchase Of Another Company?
Steve Bousquet:
I think we had talked about what the value of a website is in the purchase of another company. And I think that would be interesting, to see the value. Because if you have a company that... There's a friend of mine, people just want to buy his logo on his website. They don't even want to buy the company, because he has so much brand recognition in that market. That is so valuable to certain people. So what's the value of that website, a high quality, lead-generating customer support website to a company?
Jack Jostes:
Well, and I think that some of the things I shared today about tracking, "How did you hear about us?" In your contact form and recording your marketing source is one of the ways that you can demonstrate the value of it. And then if you take it a step further and measure how many of those leads closed and what was their value, and, when you create your invoices in QuickBooks, if you track that marketing source, you could actually answer that with a number. "Our website produced this much revenue last year from this marketing source." Our trucks... Not only is there the value of the truck, but our signage on our trucks generated this much work, because we're tracking that in there. So I think otherwise you're kind of guessing what's the value of it and, "Is it perfect?" And the other asterisk that I have to share with that is often it's a culmination of those things.
People are seeing your trucks driving around, they heard from a neighbor you did a good job, they Googled online and then found you and they read the reviews. So it's sometimes hard I think to know exactly which one, and it's not like you're going to stop having signage or stop having vehicle wraps or stop having a website. I think they all go together, but when you do track it, you can really assign a number value to it.
One follow up question for you, Steve, is in that example of the local brand that has the logo, they've got the website and somebody would buy that, should they merge them into one new brand? Or how do you buy that and... You know what I mean? Then are you then owning and operating two separate companies and two separate brands, or how does that actually work logistically? How could you maintain that brand and website without it becoming part of the acquiring company?
Steve Bousquet:
There was a company called Bonanza. It was a steak company, steak franchise, like restaurants. And Ponderosa bought it to bury it. So the company that wants to buy it can't compete against this guy.
Jack Jostes:
So you're essentially buying your biggest competitor to put them out of business.
Steve Bousquet:
Yeah, yeah.
Jack Jostes:
Interesting.
Steve Bousquet:
And he can keep his customers, he'll have to rebrand and everything. That that's my opinion. That's why they want to buy it.
Jack Jostes:
Yeah, I think, long term, that can be the transition strategy. And for a period, though, having some of it, maybe even the old website, still up, so when a current or previous customer Googles it, finds it, they're then finding the new company and knowing that, "Oh, this company is now a part of this other one." That's how we've handled it for some of our clients.
Aaron:
And I think could they just traffic that so if they search that and it hits that, it just bounces to their website?
Jack Jostes:
Well, so there's a couple things. One is you could do a 301 redirection. And that's where... Let's pretend that I have Steve's website.com. If someone types that in, and I have a 301 redirect, it's kind of like when you forward your mail at the post office and it just goes to the new website, Jack's website.com. The other option, though, would be to keep Steve's website published and just edit all of the content on it. So it says, Steve's Lawn Care is now a part of Jack's lawn and landscape and click here to visit Jack's website. And the value of that is if this old website ranks for the brand name Steve's Lawn Care, because your old customers Google it, they forget it, they forget your phone number, it's still showing up, and now it's just telling them about the new company. Jesse, did you want to ask a question?
Jesse:
I wanted to make two points. Point number one is part of the merger discussion that you were talking about earlier, Steve was discussing earlier, is what I found very useful. Jack, you know we merged with a tree company over the past couple of years, and it turned out to be the best investment we've made, because we were heavily reliant on snow. And well, we had no snow. Winter did not arrive in Baltimore this year. So it was great benefits, even greater than we initially anticipated by having another division, another lucrative division. So I wanted to point that out.
And secondly, I wanted to give you a shout-out because Ramblin Jackson put us on a map. We did not exist in Google. We were, I think, in page 27, Y & L Landscaping. And now we're number seven in there, and actually we're number two on the business listings for the past... And it's only been I think seven weeks since our website went live. So thank you Jack and team. We greatly appreciate that. And there's a tremendous amount of value. Anyone out there looking for someone to make a big difference on their website and on their marketing should definitely reach out to you.
Jack Jostes:
Well, Jesse, I really appreciate you saying that. And just today, one of the things that we did to help them with their merger was we did a news release. So one of the things I want to share is you've got to let the public know, "Hey, this is good news, this is a good thing." So we did a news release. I'm going to share my screen. That news release was picked up by themarylandtribune.com. And so on this... So Steve, I was just talking about the linking strategy. They've got a link to their website here. The old one is still up and the goal over time is for Pikesville Tree service... and they were just on our podcast and they talked all about how it went. So this still ranks number one for the brand name, and on it... Now when we're here, we're learning that it's now a part of Y & L, right?
So now, all of those old customers are like, "Oh, cool." And it goes to this page there where it's all about the merger and acquisition. We made a video, we've got photos of the people. They have this awesome generous Mitzvah Monday program. So lots of good things. So the goal here is to transition the old customers to the new company. And Jesse, one really cool thing, it's coming up. Ooh, look at this. This page right here is on the top of the second page of Google. So we just published this. The goal is to get this to rank really high. And at some point, once it out ranks or ranks near this page, we'll just get rid of that website.
Lots of great questions, tons of value presented by Steve and Christeen from Green Profit Academy. I had a blast just during that Q&A. I hope you learned some great things, too. And I'd love to see you at our next event. So we host live and virtual events. We go to trade shows, we have booths. So check it out at landscapersguide.com/events. See our show notes for a link. And if you haven't already, subscribe at landscapersguide.com/podcast. We'll automatically send you our top episodes, our new episode each week, plus invites to our upcoming events. My name's Jack Jostes and I look forward to talking with you next week on The Landscapers Guide. If you're looking to attract more A players to your team, it's time to level up your job post so you stand out. Join me on Wednesday, May 10th, for my live webinar with Team Engine, How to Write Killer Landscape Job Ads That Get a Response. Register online at landscapersguide.com/events.