Growing a Business in a Pandemic:

Saint Patrick Landscaping

Businesses across the country have been closing due to the pandemic, but there is a small percentage that have grown!

In this series we take you behind the scenes in those businesses to empower you to apply the same strategies to your business, whether you’re in growth mode, or recovering!

We’re asking three questions to bring out a few different kinds of answers from our interviewees:

1. What do you do?

2. What contributed to your growth?

3. What are you doing to ensure you continue growing?

This Week’s Interview Guest:

In the middle of the pandemic, Michael grew his business by 20% and Stephanie had the great opportunity to sit down and chat with him about it. Michael is a repeat attendee of the Grow Retreat, and a phenomenal business owner!

Prefer to watch or listen instead? Check out the youtube video.

Behind the Scenes

Question 1: What do you do?

Michael:

We’re a full-scale one-stop shop landscaping company. We do everything from initial consultations, to designing landscapes, to installing and maintaining that beautiful landscape, to changing a current landscape to be something more pleasing to the eye. Roughly 70%-75% of what we do is maintenance, and 20%-25% is new installations and retrograding. We create landscapes that help people enjoy their lives, home spaces, and work spaces on top of adding real-estate value to the property.

We used to be primarily residential, but now we’re roughly 50%-60% commercial.

Question 2:

What contributed to your growth?

Michael:

The thing about a landscaping business is that it’s not a necessity. It’s not something people are just randomly going to invest in, especially in an economic downturn. So there were some things that we specifically worked on to grow the company when everything went crazy.

Community Outreach

Going back to the name and meaning of the company gave us a good leg up if you will. Originally, the name Saint Patrick came from the Catholic saint of enlightenment, so we’ve always done a lot of education and community outreach.

So when the pandemic hit, we reached out to our current clients and asked if they’d heard any friends who were stuck at home and now having to work in an environment where they have to see their lawn. Because when everyone got stuck at home, we started hearing complaints of “Oh my gosh! My yard is disgusting! How did I let it go this long like this?”

When people got stuck at home, they had to be working in a space they weren’t used to working in and suddenly work got harder because the environment you work in impacts your ability to work. So when we reached out to our current customers about the issue, we started getting lead after lead and project after project.

My Little Marketing Guru, and a few other Marketing things...

Another thing that helped was my little seven year old.

He just turned seven, and he goes to school and brags about all the work he does with us to the teachers and staff. So he’s constantly like a little marketing guru for me and keeps just sharing about the cool things he’s learning by coming on jobs with us. And on top of that, we work on my version of marketing which is about developing long-lasting, intentional relationships. Because long-lasting relationships are not just helpful for me, but create a sense of stability for clients is a good life practice.

One thing I really worked to apply this year was to create an experience with what we do and with our marketing.

I learned at the Grow Retreat last year that it's all about experience. People want a good experience! And if the experience is bad, they’ll never come back. For example, we tried a seafood restaurant recently because we love crab and all the lobster and all that stuff. But the experience was horrible! We never went back, and I don’t even know how long the restaurant was in business for because the experience was just that bad. So I hope to God that we never hear a complaint like that, but we also strive every day to create a top-notch experience for our customers.

In specific regard to standing out as a Landscaping company, I’ll share two things:

Relationships and Quality over Quantity.

#1, Relationships:

In our industry, people tend to be numbers and paychecks instead of people. When people are just numbers and paychecks, it’s easy to forget that they are people and to treat them like they aren’t. When you do that, people are receiving negativity so they give off negativity.

But the moment you set that stigma aside and say “that’s an actual person,” you can have an intentional relationship with them. And intentional relationships are the key to any good business, both in internal affairs and with clients. So we strive to set aside that stigma and see people for who they are: not just a paycheck we receive or have to give out, but an actual person who lives and thinks and breathes and has a life. Because good business is about treating people right and investing in relationships with them.

#2, Quality over Quantity:

We strongly believe in quality over quantity, which means that we aren’t a low-end landscaping company.

In other words, I’m not looking to charge the smallest amount and corner the market on cheap landscaping. I’m looking to provide quality service. Because as a client, you see all the things that you pay for that weren’t completed and we don’t ever want to give that experience. For example, if I take my truck to an auto mechanic and I say “I’ve noticed these three things that are wrong,” I’m paying them to fix those three things. And I don’t think anything of it if I get what I’ve paid for, but I notice if they only fix two of the three things. So we focus on providing the best service, instead of being the cheapest service.

Instead of getting 100 clients a month at a lower price, we have a higher price and half that number of clients.

Question 3:

What are you doing to ensure you continue growing?

Michael:

First and foremost, we’re holding to “if it's not broken, don't fix it.” So we’re going to keep doing what we’ve been doing that has provided that growth.

More Outreach

In addition, our plans for next year are to reach out to more people that we don’t know. We’re going to start developing more and more relationships to help people find out about us, and we’re going to seek people who both want our services and that relationship.

A demographic we’ve started serving in increasing degrees is the elderly population, because they desire connection and people to reach out to them. Especially to this demographic, we’re more than a lawn service because I’m going to sit and talk with them for 10-15 minutes and just hear their war stories. It’s amazing to hear their testimonies and what’s going on in their lives, knowing that we make an impact just by being there, listening, and connecting with them. Because this demographic often doesn’t have family to do that with on a regular basis.

If Michael sounds like the kind of business owner you’d love to get to know and network with, make sure you book an interview for Grow2021!

Michael is a repeat attendee, and will be in attendance in January. He is absolutely phenomenal, and a perfect representation of the kinds of business owners you’ll get to meet at the retreat!