Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Welcome to the Grow Show Powered by Steel. The Grow show is brought to you by Marty Grinder's Grow Group where we specialize in teaching landscaping companies how 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 of the Grow show are released weekly on Wednesdays. Remember to subscribe so you never miss an episode.
Now, here's your host, Marty Grunder.
[00:00:30] Speaker B: Well, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever the case may be. This is Marty Grunder from Grunder Landscaping Co. And the Grow Group. Thanks for downloading the Grow Show Powered by Steel. Today we're going to talk about opening up a branch location as we just did this here at Grunder Landscaping Company. 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 Dan Cummins. Dan is our signman over here at Grundier Landscaping Company. He's been doing signage for almost 60 years. All the signs you see behind me, there's signs all over this office, all of our building, all of our trucks, our snow pushers, the signage in our office, the name plates on the parking blocks, some of this other stuff you're going to see from photos here from our branch location in Loveland, Ohio in a minute. He's done all that. Dan is an all around great guy. Dan, we love you. Thank you for everything that you do. Now on to the Grow show branches. Well, we have one now folks, and we're off to a great start. Some bumps, but overall it's going really well. And in another year or two, we're going to have a super operation down there in loveland, Ohio, about 40 minutes from the Dayton location that we have. So some background. So first of all, as far back as 2002, I looked up at some old board of advisor notes and we had talked about opening up a second location. I had various board members telling me we should do it. Our longtime board member and advisor, Carl Friedrich, that still helps us out to this day. They all were pushing on it and I wanted to do it. It sounds seemed like such a great idea. Cincinnati, much bigger marketplace than Dayton. Wealth of opportunities. Gosh, it'd be fun, it'd be exciting. But I didn't have a clue how to get it done. So it just kept getting talked about and to be blunt with you, because we try to keep it real here at the grow group and hopefully you learn from our mistakes and our, and our successes. Each time I brought up doing a branch or we had a thought of it with my leadership team, they would say, well, we can't do that, Marty. Like, sure, that would be nice, but, but who would run it? There was no one here at Grunder Landscaping Company other than myself that was interested in doing another branch. And that was a problem.
And I ended up believing that we couldn't do it. So consequently, that's all I thought about, was Dayton, Ohio, and there's no way we could do another branch. And I believed it. And if I began to believe the nonsense that we couldn't do it, well, then we're dead. Brian Tracy, legendary trainer and motivational speaker, says, if someone else has done what you're trying to do, that's the only proof you need to believe that you can do it too. But I didn't understand that and I didn't believe those words.
So about 13 years ago, I met a gentleman by the name of Seth Flum. He joined Grunder Landscaping Company. He started out in sales, then we moved to production. And everything I gave him, he handled well.
And in the process of handing him more and more work, him and I had more and more conversations about what was possible.
And it became increasingly clear that I had some super talented people here working with me in the area of landscaping and horticulture. They were awesome and, and they were really, really nice people as well. But I didn't have anyone on my leadership team that had the experience with growth. And they all were very conservative in their thinking. They didn't want to mess up what we were doing. So well, it's perfectly understandable, folks, they weren't risk takers. And I began to run the company by consensus. And if the people around me didn't want to do it, I just said to myself, well, then I can't do it. Rather than seeing things that were possible for us to growth, or rather than growing with Seth, I found someone who not only liked my ideas, but quite honestly had more ideas than I did and a motivation to grow as well.
So you mix the two of us together and it's been awesome, folks. In fact, in the last four years, we've gone from 4.2 million in sales to a projected 18 million in sales this year, with over 90% of that growth coming organically. In other words, we've not acquired other companies to get there. We have done this in main way by pushing the envelope and growing.
The branch we have opened in Cincinnati is a part of a methodical, intentional growth to grow this company and to adhere to our mission statement, which I'm going to talk about here in a second.
Cincinnati is more than three times the size of Dayton. But I think it's more accurate when you look at all the opportunities down there that say it's five times the size of Dayton. Statistically it says it's three times. I think it's bigger than that. There's a lot more opportunities down there for us. And after 40 years in Dayton, Ohio, it was time to go to another market area.
The location that we have down there in Cincinnati, In Loveland is 15 minutes from the wealthiest zip code in Ohio. It's unbelievable the amount of residential work down there, folks. It's crazy. Cincinnati is a market full of commercial work. We're doing well there as well. But the residential part is where I believe we really stand out in the sea of sameness. We are great at landscaping and slowly but surely our talents for design, build and the maintenance of them are going to leave its mark in Cincinnati, Ohio like we've done in Daytona. It is going to take us time down there. No one knows who we are. We just don't have no name awareness. I mean, we're. It's Cincinnati. People don't know. So we are spending a lot of money on postcards and other marketing to create awareness for us. A ton of networking. I'm down there a lot. Warm calling. We don't do cold calling. Cold calling means you don't know anything about who you're calling on. We don't like that. We want to, we want to call on somebody that we know something about. Right? You can't be that lazy. All you gotta do is google their name and find something out.
And you know, as I drive around down there, everywhere I go, I find another neighborhood bigger than the previous one I drove the week before.
My daughter and her husband and my granddaughter live in Cincinnati. My son lives in Cincinnati. And we're down there a lot. And everywhere I go, I see work, both commercial and residential. The neighborhoods are incredible. I mean, there's, there's homes down there that I see when I go to major markets like Houston and Chicago and New York and Philadelphia, all those other big things. There's just some tremendous places down there that we're going to get our mitts on.
We originally were going to build a brand new facility on the north side of Cincinnati, but we were shot down by zoning of a particular township. And that was frustrating because we spent a lot of time and a lot of money on engineering and plans and everything else to try to make it work. But the residents that lived fairly close to this proposed location, they didn't want us. And they were very vocal about not wanting us near their neighborhood. In fact, supposedly the the only township meeting that they've ever had that had more people attend, it was one to oppose Walmart. So gosh, I never thought Grunder landscaping would be considered a villain. But in that particular township, they thought we were a great company. They just didn't want to have us down the street. That hurt. I'm not used to that. So Seth and I went looking again and eventually seth found a 25 year old building that belonged to a food related company that went out of business. The bad news was it was extremely dated, needed remodeling. The good news was it, it was a food related company. So it was spotless. Like they must, I guess they got inspected by the fda, so it was clean. We got a decent deal on the building.
We didn't steal it. Okay. I don't think you're stealing commercial real estate right now. It's very hard to find and you just don't have a whole lot of leverage. We got a decent deal. Seth and I are partners on this endeavor. We remodeled it and it's turned out really nice. You can see now some pictures from the inside of it so you get a feel. Those of you that have been here to the Dayton office, which is where the grow show emanates from. I'm in the steel studios on the campus of Grunder landscaping in Miamiburg, Ohio, outside of Dayton. Once you're inside that office down there, it looks a lot like this one. And that's the exact look and feel that we wanted to have. That was intentional. We feel that our look is part of our culture and we think that what people see programs them. We want our offices to be nice, comfortable and safe. But, you know, nothing fancy. Okay. Hopefully you're watching this on the YouTube version so you can see things.
We have a nice look and a feel we don't have near the space in Cincy that we have in Daytona. The offices are very spacious and the warehouse is actually bigger. But here in the Miamisburg location, we have 18 acres. Down there we have two and a half. So that's forcing us to be much more efficient. We don't have the dumping area in the Loveland office, in the Cincinnati office that we have here in the Miamisburg office. We don't have an area to store all the materials that we have here. We're really spoiled here in miamisburg, but it's going to work out just fine.
Today as I record this episode, we're finishing up the fencing, the asphalt paving at the Cincinnati office. Seth, again, is my investment partner in this building, and it's been really fun to work with him on this. We've had a lot of fun. We both wanted the branch to look the same, feel the same, be the same, smell the same. We have a little fragrant things that we have throughout the office. We got the same ones down there. We want to have the same vibe. And we've done all that. They're very, very similar. Hopefully in the future, Emily and Vince and I and the grow group, we have a plan to do a field trip where you get to see both of our locations and learn from that. We don't have anything in the works yet. Probably a year away, we're still working on things down loveland, but it's.
It's pretty cool. What we've accomplished. There have been challenges. The longtime employee that we selected to run the branch for us decided that he didn't want to do this any longer and resigned. I've been in business long enough to know folks that you can't make people like their work. And you have to worry about those who want to be with you and see the vision that you have and want to be part of it. You just got to roll with the punches. So we're managing that branch right now by committee. We don't have a designated branch manager, Seth, spending a couple days a week down there. Two of our other members of our leadership team are spending time down there. And quite frankly, it's working out really well so far. We will find a branch manager for that and solve that issue. But for now, I'm really proud of how everyone is stepping up to do what needs to be done to be successful. And I think it's showing that we have pretty good systems because no matter who goes down there, we're doing what we do up here in Miamisburg office. And we're. We're going to do the same thing down there. We are focused on taking care of our two most important people in loveland, just like we are up here in miamisburg. Our team and our clients and our systems, they are good. So that since that's the case, if your systems are good, a lot of things should run on their own. It shouldn't be that hard. There shouldn't be a difference between those things. Other challenges are budget things always cost more than you think they will. I mean, it was an old building. We ran into all kinds of little surprises here and there. And I like things nice, so does Seth. But since this is essentially a startup down there, folks, and we don't have private equity, we don't have sugar daddy. I mean, it's uncle Marty and uncle Seth. I mean, that's who's paying for this. We got to be very careful about how we're spending our money down there. We did this branch to be successful financially and capitalize on the economies of scale. We don't need two marketing professionals. We don't need two accountants. We're trying to capitalize on that. Okay?
And we have to remind our team that Grunder Landscaping Company has been in this Miamisburg location for over 30 years, in business for over 41 years. We don't need everything that, you know, we have down there. We're not going to get it right away. We feel everyone has to struggle a little bit down there to find our way. We're trying to get it off the ground. We gotta be fiscally responsible to make this work.
All the accounting and everything will still be done out of the miamiburg location.
So the Loveland location is just basically sales and operations. Some other behind the scene moves that might help you understand what we're doing. We moved a sales pro from Miamisburg down. He lived fairly close to the Loveland office. He's doing great. He's off to a great start. We have a new sales pro that's from the Cincinnati market that we're very excited about and is doing well. And then we added a new young man in sales down there that's promising and we're excited about him as well. So there's, there's good stuff. There's a lot of promise. We're getting our reps in. We're. We're finding our way. We. You know, I went on a call down there. I didn't really know where I was going. I had to obviously always use my ways. But you know, I'm seeing things and my head's on a swivel. I'm looking all around. It's very exciting. It's fun to be in a new market. We did move some of our H2B workers down there to that location. We're supplementing them with some new hires from the Cincinnati market. And that's exciting because it's opened us up to a, a whole new pool of workers down there, and we are in hiring mode. And then we moved an experienced group leader down there to help with the transition. So it's, it's a good thing, folks. We did this branch. The reason that we did it was because we saw a great opportunity to adhere to our mission statement. Our mission 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.
Mike Rory, my longtime friend and mentor, told me about 10 years ago when I was eating a bowl of soup with him at a Mitchell's fish house in Cincinnati. I remember this. He said, marty, the main reason you grow a business is you have so many good people. They're pushing you, and if you don't create opportunities for them, they're going to move on. And that's what we're doing. We have all kinds of examples now of people that started here working on the crew that are now managing. Bill started out working on the crew, ran the crew, ran the fleet. Now he's one of our members of our leadership team with a significant role in operations. Brian started out watering plants, ran the nursery, got involved in the, in the lawn care. And as part of our leadership team, he's doing a host of things for us. So this other opportunity, this other location is an opportunity for people to grow. It's, it's very, very exciting. The sales thing, it's been a challenge. We have a lot of work that comes in here just from our reputation, from seeing our trucks, from being in business 41 years, from people I know, you know, people I go to church with, people I went to college with, people I went to high school with. Well, down there, that, that's a different market. People, they, they don't know who we are. And so we're, we're having to hustle. We're attending a lot of chamber of commerce events, a lot of networking events. We have earmarked a large percentage of our marketing dollars for the Loveland location over Dayton because we've got a pretty good foothold here. We, we have a good reputation. We get a lot of work just from people knowing who we are. But down there, it's a different deal.
And, and I'll be honest with you, that. That's been humbling, like, to be going down there and you're, you're telling people, I mean, I was talking to someone, they said, so, are you, Are you a brand new business? And I'm like, oh, Lord, no, we're not A brand new business. And, you know, you think people would maybe have seen one of your trucks. We got like 60 of them or so on the road now. All the vehicles we have, but we haven't been down there. So it's, it's new. It's like a startup. So there, there's, there's things to go there, but it's exciting.
A lot of things remain the same. People call you, you call them back if they're unhappy, you make them happy, do a good job, communicate well with them. Those work in any marketplace. So we just have to do what, you know. We have the hard part figured out. Ladies and gentlemen. We're pretty good at landscaping. Nobody knows who we are, and we got to create a lot of awareness down there, and we got to get to work, and we got to work hard while staying humble, hungry and smart, as Pat Lencioni would say. So business lessons with this on the Grow show Powered by Steel today. Overall, it has gone. And I have to give most of this credit to Seth. He's willed this thing into the win column along with my team. I mean, I've been involved and I've done a lot of things, but he's been. It's just been so motivating to be around him with this. It is exciting. It's been a lot, but we've got it. Brian from our leadership team has done a whale of a job chipping in down there, helping out. We've got a whole full lawn care route that we're running out of Cincinnati now. I can see the strength of our culture that even when our. The person we put in the branch manager position resigned, we haven't lost a beat there, folks. Is it perfect? No, it's not perfect. I'm not going to lie to you. But our culture is so strong, our systems are so strong. There's a lot of things happening, and the team is guiding us through this in the right direction. We've already been through a lot. We went through Covid. Okay, we went through a lot of things. There's some changes in the economy and a new president and all those things that we've been through and we've overcome that. So we're very excited about what's going on. As we wrap this up, let me share some final thoughts. You know, I was talking to Vince about what he's seen in the ACE groups in terms of what makes a successful branch, and we were talking a lot about communication. And Vince has impressed upon Seth and I, and we knew this, but it's Been so helpful to have Vince's comments on this.
When you have one location, you better communicate well, but when you have two, you better. Vince has stressed to us, your communication better be 10 times better. To make it work, you have to keep talking about the things because you now have two physical locations and there's just a lot of things that can go sideways when you do that.
So at the end of the day, I think a branch is something you should consider if you've saturated your current marketplace. If you're looking for opportunities, we've got numerous aces that have done a very good job of this. Cole Weller up in Sioux Falls, South Dakota is one that comes to mind. He's got a branch in Minnesota and one in Iowa, and, you know, he's doing it the right way. There's a lot of others are doing it the right way, but a branch is not something you do just so you can go to grow and brag about having two locations or so your website has two pictures of your facilities.
That's not what it's about, folks. The goal is to make money and to provide opportunities for your team. That's what it's about. It's all about the team.
We're not perfect here at Grunder Landscaping, and we're not perfect at the Grow Group, for that matter. But we're winning most days.
And look and listen here at the Grow show and on the content that we push out at the Grow Group for more updates as we go along, I'm sure we're going to step on some more landmines and I'm sure we're going to make some more mistakes. But here's one thing I want to tell you, and if you think I'm cocky, I'm sorry. I promise you we will figure this out too, because we have a great team, we have a great vision, we have a great mission statement and we have core values, the beliefs and the behaviors that must be present in the organization to win. I'm 57 years old, folks. Hard to believe I'm that old. Hopefully you don't think I'm 57. I say to myself, what happened? How did I get from 37 to 57? But I am, and I'm having a blast. Hopefully you see this in my face right now and in the enthusiasm in my voice. Even with the challenges that we have, I'm having a blast watching my team at GLC, led by Seth, do what we're doing. It's fun. F u n fun and it's extremely rewarding. To see members of our team stepping up to new challenges and winning themselves. Well, that's a short little look into what we're doing here with the branch that's going to do it for this week's edition of the Grow Show, Powered by Steel. 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. All right. And send this addition to someone that you know that might benefit from it. That would really help us. Thanks for joining us this week on the Grow Show. We'll talk to you next week.
[00:19:15] Speaker A: Thanks for listening to this episode of the Grow Show. A special thanks to the folks at Steel whose support makes this pot podcast possible and whose outdoor power equipment makes our jobs easier every day. Remember to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And head to growgroupinc.com to learn more about our other offerings or to find more information to help your landscaping business. We'll talk to you next week.
