[00:00:01] Speaker A: Welcome to the Grow show brought to you by Marty Grunder's Grow Group, where we specialize in helping landscaping companies to clarify their platform, grow their people, build their processes and realize profits. Everything we teach is grounded in real experience. Our team is actively involved in the day to day operations of Southwest Ohio's Grunder Landscaping Company.
New episodes are released weekly on Wednesdays and are made possible with the support of Bob Yard. Remember to subscribe so you never miss an episode. Now here's your host, Marty Grunder.
[00:00:28] Speaker B: Well, good morning, good afternoon, good evening wherever the case may be. This is Marty Grunder from Grunder Landscaping Company and the Grow Group. Thanks for downloading the Grow show episode number 169. Wow, folks. And today we're going to talk about planning for 2027, something you should be thinking about now, not in December. It's going to be a nice conversation today on the Grow Show. But first, a reminder. You can get the latest edition of the Grow show delivered to your phone, tablet or computer by subscribing wherever you get your podcasts or Watch us on YouTube for an enhanced learning experience. The Grow show is the greatest thing since My Grandpa Name Yes, I am a grandpa. I'm almost afraid to share with you my grandpa name as I don't want you to steal it if you're a grandpa or going to be a grandpa. But my grandpa name is Mulch. M u l C H My grandkids call me Mulchie. My son in law who lives in Connecticut gave it to me after his sweet little daughter was born. My daughter's daughter and I have to say I love it. But what I love even more than my grandpa named Mulch is being a grandpa. Folks. It's just unbelievable and it gives you and your spouse something really amazing to experience together. I'm very blessed folks and focused on making my business improve so I can spend more time and yes, money on my four grandchildren. And like my kids who are all boys except for three, my grandkids are all boys except for three too. Ah, think about it. Now onto the Grow Show. Today we're talking about something that I think separates companies that continue to grow from companies that eventually plateau. It's June of 2026 as I record this, ladies and gentlemen, and we're still trying to execute our plan for this year. We've got jobs to sell, work to perform, team members to hire and train, clients to take care of, but here's the reality that I want you to think about. If all you're doing is working on 2026, you're already behind for 2027. The best companies are constantly asking, what's next?
What service should we offer? Should we expand geographically?
Should we target a new type of client? Add a new maintenance division? Should we start irrigation? Should we do snow? Should we get into commercial work? Landscape lighting, Tree care, plant health care? The challenge isn't coming up with ideas, folks. The challenge is implementing those ideas without blowing up your business.
And over the years, we've expanded services here at Grunder Landscaping Co. We opened a second location last year. We've grown divisions and we've tried things that worked and we've even tried things that didn't work. Okay? And here's what I've learned, and that is that most successful expansions happen through a very simple three step. One, two, three step process. You can't just wing it, folks. That doesn't work. You gotta lay out a plan. There are a lot of resources that are needed to win at the game of business. And if you want to grow one, there's a lot of work to do there too. It's not just, poof, here we go. Okay? It's a lot. And I do mean a lot.
So step number one, in honor of Mark Thompson, a great coach I have, he says the goal of every entrepreneur is to conduct consistent and constant low risk experiments. So step number one, low risk experiments and training.
Most owners of entrepreneurial endeavors, most owners of landscaping companies, they do exactly the wrong thing. They decide they're going to launch a new service and immediately spend money on new trucks, new equipment, a new building, new team members. And then they discover that they don't really know what they're doing.
Instead, start small, start learning, start experimenting. Think of it as buying information.
Before Grunder Landscaping Co. Ever scaled many of the services we offer today, we first had to learn how to do them. Now, that might mean sending people to training. That might mean visiting companies that are already doing it. Ask them what went well, what didn't go well. What would you do if you had to do this all over again? Attending conferences like Grow, okay? Bringing in consultants to help you and speed up the learning process.
Partnering with experts. When we got into lawn care, we partnered with Siteone and their agronomic department to help us learn about that. Doing a handful of trial projects in that area. The goal isn't profit at this point, folks. The goal is to learn. So I think what you have to ask yourself when you're considering adding another location or expanding your services, do clients actually want this? Are they going to write a check for this? Can we perform it profitably? What equipment is required? What skills are missing? How will we sell it again? Who's going to write a check for it? You know, we have looked at buying a mulch blower on a truck, which looks to be, if we bought a used one, maybe 300,000. If we bought a new one, could be as much as half a million dollars. We just don't think it makes sense. It might make sense for your business. I'm not here to tell you you're wrong. I'm just saying, like, that's something we have explored to try to help us be more efficient. And we don't see how it works. And you're doing a similar thing. You're gathering intelligence. And I think a lot of owners have a tendency to skip this stage because they're impatient. And I think one strengths also are our weaknesses, our desire to go for something, to just jump in feet first. A lot of times that works. But you know, the bigger you get, the longer you've been in business. Why do that? Okay. Because this stage is often the cheapest part of the entire process, like experimenting and looking.
So take some low risk experiments. Look into this. Think about it. Do all the prep work. Step number two, implement on a smaller scale. Once you've learned enough, now it's time to test that business model. Notice I didn't say launch a division, I said test it. This is where owners, I've seen them get into trouble in our ace groups. They see a little success and immediately go all in. I can't tell you how many times the owner of a landscaping company has told me they're doing something like I remember an owner of a landscaping company say they were open a garden center because there wasn't a garden center around them and they knew that they would do well with it. Well, I get why. Logically you would think that since there isn't a garden center by you, you might be able to do it smartly because nobody else is there. But maybe the reason there's no garden center there is it doesn't work. Okay? So you've got to be careful. Instead of jumping in feet first, run a pilot program.
Maybe you try it on 10 maintenance clients, your plant, health care, you see what they decide to do. Maybe you want to buy a top dresser and start top dressing lawns with compost. Rent the top dresser, try it out, see how it works. You know, that's quite frankly a service that we're looking at adding when we've rented A top dresser. You know what the problem with a top dresser is? It breaks down all the time. Like, we don't know if that's a piece of equipment we want to buy. It's constantly getting clogged. It seems like it's trouble. Yeah, you could say, well, you're renting one that gets abused. So you'll buy a brand new one. It won't do that. I don't know.
Like, walk before. Crawl before you run, folks. Crawl before you walk. Walk before you run. Bid a few commercial projects. If you're deciding looking into commercial maintenance, can you get them? Are you even competitive service in a market?
Before we went to Cincinnati, we began to sell some work down there, and we got 1 million 5 in work in Cincinnati before we even opened up our branch. Now we need a lot more than a million five in Cincinnati to make that branch pay for itself.
But we did have some critical mass that we could move down there and get started. Maybe you add one crew, maybe you assign a team leader to something, keep the experiment manageable and watch the data and be careful and temper your enthusiasm. Like, look at the results and the data again. In our lawn care thing, that's what we did. We tried it out for two full seasons. We tried it out and saw what worked. What didn't work, we had a kind of a crappy setup. It was a flatbed truck with a trailer that pulled the little lawn buggy. And. And we got some other things and we tried it and we found a lot about what we were doing and what was wrong and what was good before we went out and went in full scale like we are now at this stage. Folks, you're looking for patterns, and questions that should be asked are things like, can we consistently sell this work? Will the client pay? Will our existing client base pay for it? Can we perform it in a quality standard that we want? We're looking at masonry work. Like, masons are becoming, like, really hard to find. And we have one awesome one, but after that guy, it's hard for us to find them. So we're thinking about sending some of our workers to learn how to do masonry and do it. And we're going to try a couple things. Maybe do a couple walls around the office here, maybe do a wall at my house, a wall at Seth's house, a wall at Vince's house. Okay, what are the margins? Where are we? What operational problems keep showing up? You know, before we got into snow in a big way, we had vetted that very heavily, talked to some very Big operators. What do you like? What don't you like? What do you. What is so hard? What are the biggest challenges? Where are they? What systems are missing? The goal is repetition, folks. One successful project doesn't prove anything. 20 projects start to tell a story.
And at Grunder Landscaping, we've used this approach many times. And listen, one of the reasons I am qualified to teach on this Today on episode 169 of the Grow show, is because I have screwed up so many things.
I started a Christmas tree stand, okay? We bought 2500 of the most beautiful Christmas trees. On December 22nd, we had 2300 of the 2500 Christmas trees left. You know what you call that? Mulch. I started a power washing company that failed. I started a gift basket company. I mean, why in the world I ever started a gift basket company is beyond me. That lost. I've. I've learned this the hard way, folks. So instead of betting the company, we test things first. It helps us see a lot of things we otherwise would not have been prepared to deal with, like with our Grunder lawn care division and what we're doing there, we wanted to learn while the consequences were still small. Mistakes are tuition, folks. I love that line, mistakes are tuition, but let's keep that tuition affordable, okay? And by all means, seek out others who have done what you're trying to do here. Get in one of our peer groups at our Aces. Visit another business come to grow. Come out here to a field trip. The next one is in August. Come see me for a day and a half. You don't have to do this on your own, folks. Talk to your banker. Talk to other ones. Put it in chat, GPT it, Google it. You're gonna need all kinds of people's help to make a new market or a new endeavor successful. Take. Talk to the city, the. The city administrators in the area you wanted to locate in and see if there's a program that makes you locating there desirable. Before we opened up our Cincinnati office, we went and spoke to some communities. We ended up running into a business loan program through the state of Ohio that saved us a tremendous amount of money by looking. There's all this stuff you should do, all right? You can get involved in a peer group and you can ask around. You can find out. You can talk to your facilitator in our peer group if you're already in there. I can't tell you how many people have come to our shop here that said they're buying it. They're buying a piece of Property and going to build a new shop. And they wanted to know for me what I've done, what I would do differently. We just had a field trip last week and there was Tom and Tom in here from Toronto, Canada, and they were asking, they're building a new shop and they were asking me what they would do, what we would do differently next time. That is so smart, folks.
So step number three, after the first two, expand and invest.
And this is the fun part, because once you've proven the concept and you believe your customers will write a check for it, now's the time to commit. And when I say commit, I mean commit, because this is where companies finally earn the right to spend their money. But notice the order. We're going to do. We're going to do some learning, we're going to do some low risk experiments and then we're going to invest. We're not going to invest and then try to learn and test it. It's not the other way around.
It's learn, test, invest, learn, test, invest.
Before Aspire, I had hundreds of spreadsheets running in my organization. It was crazy. That's right, hundreds. We had an entire office dedicated to filing cabinets. Now I run everything on one platform built specifically for landscape professionals. My team works better. I have more visibility across the entire business, and nothing falls through the cracks. Ladies and gentlemen, running a landscaping company without Aspire is like driving a car with no dashboard. You're moving, but you have no idea where you're going.
And I know where I'm going. Now. If you want the same clarity in your business, check out your aspire.com.
And at this point, if you've learned a lot and you've tested it and all systems are go at this stage, you might purchase equipment, hire a dedicated staff, lease a facility, launch marketing campaigns, build processes, create training programs, invest in the technology. Because now you're investing in something that's already showing signs of success. The risk hasn't disappeared, but it's been dramatically reduced. And you have all kinds of lessons. And here's the key part. I think you've replaced assumptions with data with results. You know what works, you know what doesn't, and now you know what resources you'll need to succeed.
I think many expansions, either of a service offering or a new location, fail because of one of three things. The owner moves too fast, the owner falls in the love and the brilliance of their very own idea. That was Marty Grunder many times.
And the business hasn't earned the expansion yet. We didn't go to Cincinnati until we were doing 15 million a year here in Dayton. Okay, 15 million, not 3 million. All right? We had so much more work we could do in Dayton before we went to Cincinnati. It wasn't even funny. And then I think what happens with a lot of us, we underestimate the complexity. Things take a lot longer than we think they will, and oftentimes it costs a lot more.
And every new service sounds easy from the outside, but I think you're going to discover that it's different equipment, it's a different mindset, it's a different sales process, different labor needs, the different seasonality, different profit margins. They don't have the leadership in place to do it. And that's the biggest one. Expansion doesn't just happen because the equipment shows up. Expansion happens because leadership shows up. Who owns that new division? Who is accountable? Who's thinking about it all day long? Who wakes up every day thinking about its success and goes to bed thinking about its success? If you don't have an answer to that question, you're probably not ready. And I would tell you if this piques some interest in you about expansion and new service offerings, go to episode of the grow show. Number 165 was just a month ago. And watch that one on YouTube for an enhanced learning experience or listen to it on the Lies about growth. It's a good one that goes deep on the issues you face when you try to grow a business or add a service offering. I'm certain you will enjoy it. So some questions to ask right now. If I'm you and you're listening to this episode, I want you to think about 2027. I want you to ask yourself what could be new? Is it a new service? Is it a new location? Is it a new customer segment? Is it a new revenue stream? What is it and what learning should I start right now? Where should I start trying to vet this out and see if this is something I should do? What conference could I go to? Who could I talk to? Should I join one of Marty's peer groups? Which company should I go visit? Who could I learn from? What books could I read? What can I find out on chat, GPT? What pilot program could I launch? What's the smallest way I could launch this to discover if it might work or not? How am I going to measure it? Something that lets you learn.
Because if you wait to January to start planning for next year, you're too late, folks. The companies that successfully launch new services and new locations usually begin planning 12 to 18 months before anyone sees results.
At the end of the day, folks, as we wrap up this edition of the Grow show, growth isn't about making bigger bets. It's about making smarter bets. The companies that win aren't necessarily the boldest. They're often the most disciplined and the most thought out plans are put forth by them. They learn first, they test second, learn first, test second, and only then do they go and spend money and try to scale. So if you're executing your 2026 plan, make sure you're also setting the stage for 2027 and ask yourself, what's going to be new and more importantly, what can I start learning about today?
So I'm ready for tomorrow. And here's a last antidote to maybe motivate you to look for other service offerings and define possibly another location if you're far enough along in your business.
Our mission statement here at Grunder Landscaping Company is to create opportunities for our team to grow and succeed by enhancing the beauty and value of every client's property while exceeding their expectations every step of the way. The best reason to grow a company as my longtime pal and mentor Mike Rory said I about 10 years ago over a bowl of clam chowder at Mitchell's Fish House in Cincinnati, Ohio, he told me, marty, the best reason to grow a company is you have so many good people, they're pushing you and if you don't create opportunities for them to realize their dreams, for them to make more money, for them to be more successful, they're going to leave. So growth is really a career path for someone. It's a reason for them to stick with you and get excited about it. Okay?
I also know one thing that you can do to help here. Come to one of our field trips.
Over 500 companies have gone through this one of a kind learning experience now in the last 20 years. I promise you, if you come see me here at Grunder Landscaping Co. You will not be disappointed. We will share our successes and failures in the last 42 years with you in a way that is fun, motivating and educational. I'm telling you, this is a life changing event. Come see me. We sell most of them out, so don't dilly dally around. Doesn't matter if you're half a million in sales or 60 million in sales, we can help you. So sign up today while it's fresh in your mind. Well, that's going to do it for this week's edition of the Grow show if you haven't done so already. Subscribe to the Grow show and if you can give it a rating or share a comment that helps more success minded landscape professionals find us. And if you really want to help us, take out your phone right now and and forward this addition to a team member or some landscape pro you know that helps more success minded landscapers find us. Thanks for joining us on the Grow show this week. We'll talk to you next week.
[00:19:23] Speaker A: Join Marty and the Grow Group team at Grunder Landscaping Co. This year we host GLC field trip events at our living laboratory Grunder Landscaping Co. Where we show you how we operate and how you can too. This event features small groups so you get the one on one attention you need and features a a full 27 hours on site at GLC where we dive deep into everything from operations to sales to administration.
Find more information and sign
[email protected] and do it quickly. These events sell out every year.
