Could you imagine being 25 years into your business and what you would tell yourself if you were just getting started? Well, today I interviewed Rich Leeman, the owner of Landscape Technology Group, a landscape design company up in Vail, Colorado, about what he's learned over the last 25 years of running his business. And he shares some of his wisdom and we just have a great conversation up here at 10,000 feet. Right now it's snowing. We're skiing Beaver Creek. This is a really fun interview.
My name's Jack Jostes, welcome to The Landscapers Guide to Modern Sales And Marketing Podcast. This show is all about helping lawn and landscape contractors increase your profit and have an awesome lifestyle so you can go skiing or whatever it is that you love to do on a Thursday. That's what we're doing right now. So if you want to learn more about how to do that, check out today's episode.
Interview with Rich Leeman
Jack Jostes:
All right, folks, I'm here with Rich Leeman, the owner of Landscape Technology Group and the Garden Centers of Gypsum. Right now, we're at, according to my watch, 10,156 feet. Rich, guessed 10,000, pretty close. We're skiing at Beaver Creek and having a good time. So I wanted to chat with you, Rich. We've worked together for several years now. We're both members of the NALP. We're members of the ALCC. And you've actually served on some of those boards. So tell us a little bit, who are you? Where are we? Where is your business? What brought you to the Vail Valley?
The History Of Rich Leeman & Landscape Technology Group
Rich Leeman:
Thanks, Jack. Landscape Technology Group started in 1998. I started it in Aspen, Colorado, actually, and then moved from Aspen over towards Vail. I was at a kitchen table, just myself, been in the landscape industry since I was 14 years old, I knew I was going to be bigger than myself. I went to school at Colorado State. I was a computer geek, really into AutoCAD and into other computer programs. So thus, I was able to form the company, Landscape Technology Group.
Rich Leeman:
Yeah, like Jack had said, we've known each other for many a year. Started using Ramblin Jackson I want to say a little over five years ago. But Ramblin Jackson was a company that was something we as an office wanted to... We wanted to engage Jack and his team long before that, and finally was able to get it into our marketing budget. And today we're able to be here. I've been on our radar for Jack and I to get together and for me to show him our backyard. This is Beaver Creek, Colorado. Lived here indirectly and worked for Vail Associates and taught skiing since 1991. So I'm up here pretty much every weekend, having fun with either my employees, my friends and my family. I have two little girls, my wife, and we try to take advantage of the mountains as much as we can.
Jack Jostes:
Yeah. That's amazing. And you were telling me you went to school at Colorado State University, right, in Fort Collins.
Rich Leeman:
Correct. So I actually started out in computer science at University of New Hampshire for a year, and just sitting behind a desk in front of the computer wasn't something quite for me. So I transferred over to the two-year program at University of New Hampshire, and have a two-year degree in horticulture and had been working in the field for four years and building stone walls in the middle of the winter in New Hampshire or in Vermont with the plastic coverings over us, building walls. And talked to my boss at the time and said, "What can I do to do what you do?" And he was a landscape architect. So he recommended a few different universities to me and was a good mentor. And I ended up at Colorado State, studying the landscape architecture after I had my degree in horticulture.
Jack Jostes:
That's awesome. And so you were telling me, you used to drive from Fort Collins up here. And did you teach? Somehow you found a way to... You had this crazy schedule. Tell me about that. I don't know, you compacted your workweek into four days, so you could be up here for the weekend or something like that. What was it that you did so that way you could ski during college?
Rich Leeman:
Correct. So I was very fortunate enough. I also, besides skiing and ski instructing, which I have done at Vail, at Killington in Vermont beforehand, was also a hockey referee. So what I was able to do was come up to Vail on the weekends, ski instructor in the day and referee, whether it was youth hockey in the evenings or men's league hockey or women's hockey on the weekends to make quite a bit of money to help afford the schooling. So I was one of those people that played hard, worked hard, and schooled hard during my college career.
Jack Jostes:
And you still live that way, right? So it's a Thursday and you and I both took the day off work, kind of, right? We're actually getting some work done right now.
Rich Leeman:
Yeah, we're working.
Work Hard, Play Hard
Jack Jostes:
We're working, we're working. But we're playing hard for sure. We actually just skied a black diamond, the spider, which wasn't too bad. I definitely went way slower than you. But I'm on a snowboard and you're like a pro here. So tell me about that work hard, play hard. How is that part of how you lead your company now?
Rich Leeman:
Well, what we try to do is that. philosophy exactly. Meaning, with my company, as long as we get the job done and the task performed and on a timely manner, that's what we do. Garden Center, we're open seven days a week through the summer. So I don't expect people to work all seven days, but we have flexibility. If you want to come and work hard on Wednesday through Sunday, meet your clients over the weekend when they're typically in town, we could do that. And you could have weekdays off when it's not as crowded on the mountain, or you can just work the standard Monday through Friday when the normal world works. But why would you want to be in the normal world or work the normal wold schedule when you have this? Today's a powder day, as you can see with this snow, you got to take advantage of it.
Jack Jostes:
Yeah. I lucked out on being able to come up and it happens to be snowing. And so how has that impacted your recruiting? So one of the things that you and I have worked on is actually creating a careers page on the Landscape Technology Group website. And I remember a few months ago you called me and you're like, "Jack, oh, we got to take the page down. We're getting too many applicants." And I'm like, "No, no, no, create a wait list. Create a wait list." So don't know, talk to me about that, about recruiting and how the website... how you're using that for recruiting.
Rich's Recruiting Strategies
Rich Leeman:
I wasn't recruiting... I'd been involved in a lot of different associations or the associations you talk about, NALP, Associated Landscape Contractors of Colorado, Colorado Nursery and Greenhouse Association, as well as a lot of local chambers of commerce and such. So I get out there in front of a lot of different business owners, as well as local families with their kids that are going to school and their kids that may be trying to pursue a degree in horticulture or landscaping or outdoors with soil science and such. So they come to me or the company as a way for them to figure out what that career path may be, and they'll work with us through the summers in the landscape industry.
Rich Leeman:
Also I've participated in the PLANET career days quite a bit for over 20 years and actively recruit students in March, wherever that may be. I've had the great fortune of visiting a lot of different campuses, which is awesome. Michigan State, BYU, we've been to Illinois, Mississippi State, and such, being able to represent Colorado, our company, to all different areas of the country. And what you find out, a bucket list for a lot of students is to come to Colorado or is to go to the sea coast somewhere to work, go to Martha's Vineyard, go to the state of Washington, go to the coast of Oregon. And so to me, that's been a great way to find a student that may want to come to Colorado for the summer.
Jack Jostes:
Yeah. So right now it's March 2021. March 2020, COVID started, and NALP, you were going to go and fly out and do that career fair. I was actually thinking to coming to work your booth. I do want to do that someday and help sell people on Landscape Technology Group. But we kind of had to shift focus. And so that was kind of a fun thing that we did was we produced a video for you remotely. I'm in the Lyons, which is two or three hours from where you are, but we had you and some of your team, I gave them some ideas on what to record on their smartphones. And then I took that footage and edited a recruiting video. And we'll roll a short clip of that video now.
Sam Barkley:
Hi there. My name is Sam Barkley and I'm a designer and project manager with Landscape Technology Group. I've been with the company for a year and a half now. A few of the reasons why I chose to work here and why I still love to come to work every day is the amazing location, a great group of coworkers, as well as the beautiful job sites that we get to design and work on. Being located in Vail, there's world-class outdoor recreation right out your doorstep. So there's never a dull moment from the middle of the week till the weekend.
Jack Jostes:
And one of the things that I like in that video is we had some interviews with people talking about the culture of the company and the work-life balance and the opportunity to learn and grow. And I think that that's one of the things that you do really well at Landscape Technology Group.
Rich Leeman:
So with the internship, so when we go to the student career days and we're hiring students, I realize you're either looking for an internship or you're looking for a full-time or part-time job upon leaving your full-time school career. With an internship with us, we try to get you into all of our departments, the landscape division, which is construction and design, the maintenance division, where we're doing lawn care, garden care, water feature maintenance, irrigation system maintenance, the Garden Center of Gypsum, which is a great opportunity to be in front of the client and talk to the clients and people that would like to go and install plant material right around their yard. And you get to go visit their yards and such. And then also more importantly, I feel, is you get to work in the office with us, working on the overhead, trying to produce an invoice, produce an estimate, try to do payroll. We're a small company. We do it all in-house. We do hire our outside professionals such as this because we can't do it all. But we do do a lot inside the company.
Jack Jostes:
Yeah, I think that's really cool. And we were talking about Linda, who is helping with the design of the garden center. And she's bringing ideas, new products to offer that I'm really excited about at the garden center, because it's mainly been a horticultural focus and she's bringing in some more of that retail, some of the gifts, things like that. And she's QuickBooks Certified. She does your books, right?
Rich Leeman:
Correct. So that's the other thing. With our company and with most companies, when I meet with a lot of people we try to think out of the box, not just a degree in horticulture. Like I said, soil science. Linda's come to us. Her background was graphic arts, but she's QuickBooks Certified, degrees in accounting and such. So she brings a lot of different facets to a design install company, maintenance company and garden center. And so that's what I'd suggest too, is don't just look for the horticulture person or the design related person. Look for somebody who has a varied background in their past life.
Jack Jostes:
I was just interviewing one of my clients down in Texas, Shades of Green. They are a landscape and nursery. They have a garden center and they do landscaping. And their marketing coordinator has a theater background. He's kind of like me. He has a theater, TV, marketing background, and he's been a customer of that garden center since he was a little kid. And then he learned the horticultural side. So he brings that marketing side and he now manages a lot of marketing for them. So absolutely, hiring people with different backgrounds. All right, Rich. So you started Landscape Technology Group in 1998. It's 2021. Looking back over the years, there've been lots of wins, certainly hard times and challenges that you've worked through. What would you tell the 1991 Rich? If we could time travel and you could go back and tell yourself some tips that would maybe save you some money and heartache, what would they be?
Business Advice After 25 Years In The Field
Rich Leeman:
I'd say a few of the different things is my degree in horticulture, degree in landscape architecture. Boy, take some business classes. Understand the books a little bit better, understand what cashflow means, understand getting in a check today helps you pay your bills tomorrow. I always like to design. I always like to be creative, and sometimes I miss the business end of things. And I'd rather be out here playing, of course, but sometimes you got to work a little bit later at night to accomplish it all.
Rich Leeman:
Something else I'd also recommend. I realize that it's taken me a while to get there, but buy your equipment new or fairly new used. Boy, the time we spend repairing my equipment that was original 15, 20 years old, I'll have five, $10,000 repair bills that could have just been the payment for a piece of new equipment through the season, and also we're not spending two or three weeks repairing it. Last year, I had a 963 Bobcat break down. It was a $9,000 repair bill. It took three weeks to get repaired. And we were just out of that piece of equipment at the time, where if we had a newer Bobcat, newer skid steer, we wouldn't have had the downtime and we would have been more productive and been able to make money and not just spend it.
Jack Jostes:
Yeah. So for sure, I think every business, myself included, honestly, I didn't know anything about money. I had no idea about cashflow, profit and loss, accounts receivable, accounts payable, all of these things that I learned the hard way. And for sure, I wish I had learned those sooner. What about from a networking standpoint? You've been super involved in associations. You and I met, we're both part of the ALCC, the Colorado association, and the NALP, the national association. Why are you involved in those, and what would you recommend to other landscapers who are maybe starting their company about getting involved with their state and local associations?
Rich Leeman:
Being involved is so much fun. You get to meet people from, in my case, with the landscape contractors from Colorado, people from throughout the state. You're meeting people who are also your direct competition, might be within the Vail Valley or over in Aspen when I was in there. But once you get into the bigger circle of around the state, you're dealing with companies and people that want to help you succeed and want to help you get ahead.
Rich Leeman:
With the state organization, I was fortunate enough, I jumped right in to ALCC right after graduating from Colorado State. And I got to become a member of the board after a year or two of being part of it. And I was a secretary-treasurer. So I was in all the treasury meetings and was able to understand a balance sheet, understand a profit loss statement. But also it was neat because I was able to understand how a nonprofit organization would budget their company totally different than a landscape company. But around the table were also 10 different members of 10 different companies that were in charge of their budgets. So I was able to feed off of them and understand their trials, tribulations, and also their positive points of what a budget does for you.
Jack Jostes:
Yeah, that's really great that you've had that experience with those, and it helped ultimately grow the industry. And it's helped you find employees. I know several people have come to Landscape Technology Group through the NALP program. We've certainly met there. And hey, it's been fun. Hey, it's really starting to snow, so we've got to go shred some pow.
Rich Leeman:
We're going to try to have Jack try to keep up with me a little bit.
Jack Jostes:
I'm going to try. I'm going to try. But hey, thanks so much for doing this interview. And everyone else, thanks so much for watching this. Check out the next episode of The Landscapers Guide to Modern Sales and Marketing at landscapersguide.com/podcast. We've got some other cool interviews. And thanks again. Rich.
Rich Leeman:
Thank you.