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At the start, the Owner was holding the business together through sheer effort - working 60 - 70 hours a week, covering for unreliable crews, and managing operations personally. Revenue hovered around $555K, with a questionable net income of $100K; but the business was stuck on a hamster wheel with no path forward.
With guidance, the Owner set a new strategic direction: stop surviving on frugality, and start building a business around reliable, well-paid people and scalable crews. This meant breaking free from outdated habits and resetting the culture.
The transformation came by working through the business - using daily leadership decisions to align operations with the new strategic vision. With the help of T-suite frameworks, the Owner:
letting go of unreliable legacy employees and rebuilding crews around higher standards of performance.
paying new employees more wages while creating a culture where accountability replaced chaos.
focusing on building complete, reliable teams instead of patching holes with constant replacements.
growing a once-new hire into a successful branch manager, proving the system could develop long-term talent.
Fifteen years later, the business has grown to over $11M in annual revenue with net income exceeding $1.2M. What was once one of the worst field cultures became one of the strongest - providing stability, profitability, and opportunity for employees to thrive.
Some business owners make money on volume, others make money being the best at producing work, others make money by pure luck - and then there are those that make money simply by being frugal. The frugal owner does everything he or she can to save a dime. Outdated trucks and equipment are held together with band-aids, and in the shop all the time – Check! Employees paid the lowest acceptable wages – Check! High School friends have come to work for you because no one else will – Check! You’re tolerating poor attendance and drama from field employees – Check! The company has zero debt – Check! You believe your market is cheap, so you have to be cheap too – Check! This Owner checked the all the boxes of frugality in his landscaping business.
Dealing with the constant drama of unreliable employees had him working 60-70 hours a week as he tried to hold everything together himself. There was no one there he could rely on to make sound decisions, show up on time, or sometimes to show up at all. It was a constant battle. The company carried far more employees than it should have, because five backups were needed just to cover the constant callouts from the “crew leaders.” He had no real support and was left operating alone on an island.
At the time, in 2010, his annual revenue was around $555K per year, and he was making over $100K in net income, miraculously. The sad part is that the net income was solid for the size of his company - so he thought he was “winning.” What he didn’t understand was that he was on the never-ending hamster wheel and never getting anywhere. A visit from one of our senior consultants showed him the issues in the company, what needed to be corrected, and how to go about correcting them using our T-suite tools.
The first step was coming to terms with needing to fire all but two of his employees. He decided to keep his office manager and one field employee who was new to the company, young, and a hard worker. But the rest of them had to go. Period. The situation didn’t create itself overnight; it happened over time and needed to be corrected over time. A number of bad apples were let go at once, and the company culture began an immediate shift! The goal was to replace a crew at a time not one person at a time.
After a year, all the bad employees were gone, the new employees were paid more, and the drama in field dropped (to a normal level of field drama, that is). Let’s face it, no one is getting rid of all the field drama – afterall, it wouldn’t be contracting without field drama.
Fifteen years later, that one field employee he kept is a successful branch manager within the company. The business has grown to over $11M in revenue with the Owner netting over $1.2M a year. He went from having the worst crews we had ever seen to being one of the better places for employees to work and grow.
