Firing on All Five Cylinders: Jeffrey Domenick’s Framework for Growth

00:07
Robert Murray
Welcome back, everybody, to another episode of the IM Landscape Growth podcast. Today, I have an awesome guest, Jeffrey Domenick, joining us. Jeffrey, thank you so much for doing this.

00:44
Jeffrey Domenick
Yeah, thanks, Robert. Thanks for having me.

00:47
Robert Murray
Pretty unique background. Many, many years in the construction industry and then slowly moving into the green industry and now building out, you know, a super-regional landscape company to really kind of like change the industry a little bit in terms of how you guys are bringing people together. So maybe you can give people a quick little rundown of where you’ve come from and how you’re changing the way people think about or run landscaping businesses.

01:17
Jeffrey Domenick
Yeah, no, that’d be great. Yeah. So, you know, I’ve been an industry guy, I think, you know, most of my working life, you know, like a lot of us, you know, mowing lawns and working for landscape companies in high school and in the summers. In college, I got a degree in landscape architecture from West Virginia University and quickly realized that you know, I love the industry. I love the design-build side. I’m not this great designer. Right. I’ve always gravitated towards, you know, the business side of the industry, and I’ve got a pretty broad experience. My first job out of college was working for Del Webb prior to Pulte acquiring them in 2002, I believe.

02:02
Jeffrey Domenick
I worked at Sun City Hilton Head and worked with homeowners to help design their new landscapes for the homes that they were going to build. Did some work in the public spaces in the land development areas and spent two years doing that in Hilton Head, South Carolina, and then had an opportunity to go and work with the Brickman Group, which I think a lot of people know, you know, they were, you know, a premier commercial landscape company, you know, and they’re now part of, you know, the Brightview organization. With the consolidation of Brickman and Valleycrest, I spent three years there, and that’s really where I learned, you know, how to run a PL for our industry. But really, you know, how to run a P and L, you know, period.

02:52
Jeffrey Domenick
They were really good at, you know, kind of explaining and, you know, from the top down, making sure everybody understands, you know, what drives the profitability in the business. From there, I spent a few years in high-end design build with a company called Ed Castro Landscape in Atlanta, which is now part of the Mariani Premier group. And in 2000 and in 2007, I, you know, was really at a crossroads. You know, I either needed to start my own landscape company or maybe look at doing something differently. We were living in Atlanta at the time, and my wife and I, Martina, really didn’t think Atlanta was going to be home. When you start a business, you know that it’s now your home.

03:44
Jeffrey Domenick
So, I took a job with NDS Drainage Products as a regional specification manager, calling on landscape architects and engineers. And then, you know, 2008 hit, and I took a role as a regional sales manager. Then, I eventually ended up running in 2009 in the eastern U.S. Eastern Canada and worked at NDS until 2015. NDS was a terrific company. You know, as a manufacturer, our customers were distributors but spent a lot of time working with landscape contractors and specifiers. NDS is really the first company I worked at, where they had what I would consider a really professional leadership team. And you know, we’re private equity backed, but you know, our CEO really thought investing in the people would drive the business forward.

04:53
Jeffrey Domenick
And you know, so I had a coach, and you know, we developed the sales process there, and you know, we really became a professional selling organization. And that was a lot of fun. In late 2014 and early 2015, John Deere landscapes, you know, came knocking. It was right after they were acquired by Clayton, Dubilier, and Rice, and they were beginning the transition to what’s now Site One Landscape Supply. And they offered me a role to run their landscape supply and hardscape business, which is really, which is really great, you know, coming from manufacturing, having a good contractor experience and then, you know, distribution, you know, I now, you know, was really seeing all sides of the industry. So, I spent two years in their head office in Roswell, Georgia.

05:44
Jeffrey Domenick
And then they asked me to go out west and run their, what they call their Mountain west region, which was now Western Canada, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico.

05:57
Robert Murray
Better skiing, at least.

05:58
Jeffrey Domenick
What’s that?

05:59
Robert Murray
It’s better skiing, at least.

06:01
Jeffrey Domenick
Much better skiing. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And you know, the business I took over wasn’t a bad business; it wasn’t a great business. It wasn’t really hitting, you know, a lot of the milestones that other branches and regions were hitting. In Site One, they hadn’t done any acquisitions. And so, you know, when I got out there, I got to work and I spent just under five years in that role. And we did 14 acquisitions. You know, we grew the top line from, you know, $135 million to about 450 and we grew the bottom line by about 800 basis points. So, you know, I learned a lot. And that’s really where I got the bug for acquisitions.

06:49
Jeffrey Domenick
I just really enjoyed working with these, you know, family-run companies, you know, the kind of the lower middle market, anywhere from a million to, you know, $5 million in EBITDA. You know, I was just really having a lot of fun, so I made a bunch of deals and grew the business both organically and inorganically. And then, you know, Covid hit, and you know, it really gave me an opportunity to kind of step back and think about what I had been doing. And you know, both with NDS and with, you know, Site One, I traveled a lot. I was on the road three, four days a week, you know, about three weeks a month.

07:31
Jeffrey Domenick
And when Covid hit, you know, all of a sudden, I was home and realized I really do enjoy being home with my family and, you know, having a, you know, a little bit more structure. And my wife and I were also, you know, thinking about how far we were from family, and we decided that you know, we wanted to get back to the East Coast. And I had always been thinking about, you know, the strategy that we’re running at Keyserve in terms of rolling up landscape service companies and really doing it for the associates in those businesses. And so, you know, I got to work putting the strategy together and, you know, started shopping for, you know, some private equity sponsors, and you know, here we are.

08:20
Jeffrey Domenick
Today, I’m partnered with Kid and Company, a family office in Greenwich, Connecticut. You know, we’ve acquired seven companies. We’ll do another deal before the end of the year. And you know, we’ve built, you know, a company north of 40 million in revenue in three years. So, I am having a lot of fun grinding through and really enjoying being a part of this industry.

08:50
Robert Murray
Awesome, ma’am. And so now people have context in terms of the depth of the experience across the entire country and now bringing it to Keyserve and helping people essentially, you know, build a bigger pie and do more together. So what I saw that was coming up. I’ve had a couple of Jeffries in my podcast schedules, and I don’t always get to see the last name. So when I hovered over it on Tuesday, I was like, oh, it’s Jeffrey Dominick. I was like, I’m pumped. We had a chance to meet at the Elevate conference for the National Association of Landscape Professionals at the NASCAR Museum in Charlotte. And, and I don’t know, I’m not sure what spawned the conversation, but within four or five minutes of getting to know you, we’re talking about a five-cylinder engine business.

09:35
Robert Murray
And I almost zoned out because I was like, I don’t even want to listen right now because this is perfect podcast material, and I think that everybody needs to hear what you have to say regardless of industry because the model works great. So, what the heck do you mean by a five-cylinder engine? And then, can we walk through those cylinders together?

09:53
Jeffrey Domenick
Yeah, well, you think of a five-cylinder engine, you think of a British car that probably doesn’t run very often, very reliable, but it’s five and not eight because there’s really, and I’ve proven it out at, you know when I was at nds, you know, that’s really where the foundation, you know, began. And then I ran it at, you know, site one, and we’re, we’re in the midst of developing our sales process here at A Keyserve, and it’s really designed to be in control of your organic growth. I think a lot of times, you know, companies grow by accident. It’s not very intentional. They react, you know, to, you know, they do good work, and so they react to know what their customer’s needs are. And you know, I just tend to think about things a little bit differently.

10:44
Jeffrey Domenick
So there are these five key things that I think every service, service-related organization, distribution organization, or manufacturing organization can follow. And it and it’s really simple. So you know, cylinder number one is hang on to what you got. So, as landscapers, we all have, you know, I call it the annuity. We all have this book of maintenance business where we show up, you know, depending on what part of the country you are, anywhere from, you know, 30 to 44 times a year we perform services and, and we get paid to do those services. And as long as we retain those customers. You know, you’ve got this pretty stable revenue, and that’s really what’s most attractive to groups like Keyserve and other private equity organizations.

11:41
Jeffrey Domenick
And so, you know, when you think about hanging on to what you got, you know, I always think of it as this. So if you’ve got a million dollars in maintenance business and you don’t lose any customers, and you’re able to pass along a 3% price increase this year, you just grew 3%. Now, if you have a million dollars and you lose a hundred thousand and, you know, pass along a 3% price increase, guess what? You’re still behind, right? You have to go out and find new customers to grow. And you know, I like to think about it as your customers. If they’re coming in the front door and they’re walking out the back door, you know, it gets really hard to get good, stable growth. So we work really hard to protect that annuity and take good care of our customers.

12:31
Jeffrey Domenick
And that’s really, you know, and these are really kind of in order of importance, I think.

12:35
Robert Murray
Well, and I think the thing you just said is exponentially more important as you bring on more maintenance customers to keep them. Because if your attrition rate is, say, 10% and you’ve got a hundred customers, we only lose 10. You only have to get 10. And getting 10 customers in a year is simple. But if you have a thousand customers and you lose 100 and you got to get 100, it’s just a different beast.

12:57
Jeffrey Domenick
So it is.

12:58
Robert Murray
I couldn’t agree more that keeping that or holding on to what you have is a great cylinder number one.

13:04
Jeffrey Domenick
Yeah. So, cylinder one, hang on to what you got. Cylinder number two is to sell something new. And you know, when you think about selling something new, you know, what are those services that are adjacent to what you do? Or they could be products, right? Maybe not; year one is going to be game-changing for you. But if you’re adding two or three new services or products to your portfolio each year, you now have two or three new things to sell to your annuity, right? So, think about it in a couple of different ways. It could be, hey, we’re really going to get into, you know, smart timers for irrigation, and we’re going to get into water management. And we’ve never really offered that service to our customers before, but we’re going to offer that service for a couple of reasons.

13:58
Jeffrey Domenick
Number One, it’s a very profitable service for the landscape contractor. But number two, you know, things like water management and those sorts of things are, you know, trending, you know, not just from a conservation perspective, but also from a cost perspective. You know, water. Water’s gotten really expensive in a lot of different parts of the country. So, you know, if you’re adding those two or three new services every year, you might start with three, and you might realize, you know, really only two are sticking. So let’s say that in year one, those two new services add a hundred thousand dollars of incremental revenue. Well, that doesn’t really change the game for you, but if that.

14:35
Jeffrey Domenick
Those two services add a hundred thousand in the first year, and then they add three hundred thousand in the second year, and in the third year, they’re adding, you know, $750,000, you really get this kind of hockey stick, you know, kind of. That’s a Canadian term for you guys up there. Right? Thanks.

14:51
Robert Murray
Like, you guys don’t play. Give me.

14:53
Jeffrey Domenick
Yeah, that’s right. We’re not as good as you, though.

14:55
Robert Murray
I don’t know.

14:59
Jeffrey Domenick
You know, you get this hockey stick approach. So if you’re adding two or three new products every year, then, you know, those products are really helping to drive your organic growth. And it’s very intentional. Right. You know, if you add new products or services, you know, could be something as simple as gutter cleaning, you know, or pressure washing, you know, these are services that your customers, you know, may or may not be using, but, you know, we’re perfect, you know, well suited to do that. Cylinder number three is market share. You know, you’ve got to go out and get a greater share of the market, and that’s adding new customers, you know, in the same service. So maybe they were using a different company, and they weren’t pleased with what they were getting. You’ve got to go add, you know, market share.

15:45
Jeffrey Domenick
And, you know the old saying, if you’re not growing, you’re dying. You know, I truly believe that you know, to take good care of your employees, you know, we have a responsibility to make sure that we’re growing. Once a company becomes stagnant, that’s when your top talent starts looking around and saying, hey, what’s next for me, Right? Yeah.

16:06
Robert Murray
That’s cool. One of the things you said earlier, too, about your experience over at NDS was that they were in, they were like a professional selling organization, and then you parlay it to cylinder number three in market share. What do you see as the key aspects of customer acquisition?

16:22
Jeffrey Domenick
Yeah, so, I mean, there’s a lot of different ways to do it. It’s funny because I had this conversation with one of our sales associates this morning in our South Carolina branch. And, you know, we’re talking about it because we do marketing, right? We do Google AdWords and those sorts of things, and we’ve got new customers coming through. But when we’re really targeting a specific, you know, area or a specific customer type, you almost have to be where those customers are. Those customers may not be with Google. They may not be there. So, you know, we really think about market share. There’s, there’s. There are really three types of sales calls that we think about. We’ve got account management calls. And so those are kind of kissing-the-baby calls, right?

17:06
Jeffrey Domenick
You’re getting in front of the customer; you’re walking the property with them. You know, you’re looking for areas where maybe we can do better, or you’re getting feedback from them in terms of, hey, you know, maybe it is time to go ahead and do that mulch. We usually only do it once a year. We want to do it, you know, every 10 months or something like that, you know, so. So, those account management calls are important for building a relationship with the customer and gaining credibility and trust, but they do generate revenue. Right. The second type of call we think about is prospecting calls. And prospecting calls, whether they are residential or commercial. You know, I think probably more commercially. It’s, you know, looking around and asking, you know, a potential client to express interest and provide a service for them.

17:54
Jeffrey Domenick
So that could be, you know, getting into a property management office and saying, hey, you know, I’m Jeff Dominic with Dallicasa Landscaping here in, you know, South Charlotte. And, you know, we’d love to have an opportunity to tell you about our organization and, you know, see if there’s an opportunity for us to work together. Showing up, it’s not something that a lot of folks in our industry do. We have a tendency to react to a phone call, hey, I’ve seen your trucks. Can you come and, you know, give me an estimate, or, you know, I know this guy over here, and he’s referred you? Those are great. You know, that’s why we have. It’s a big deal on our trucks.

18:30
Robert Murray
But it’s not predictable, it’s not consistent, it’s unpredictable.

18:33
Jeffrey Domenick
And you’re not in control of it, right? So, you know, you have to go out and ask for it. Ask for the business. And then. And then we’ve got, you know, an opportunity management call. And, and that’s really the culmination of, you know, either an inbound lead, you know, somebody contacted us, or you went out, and you did some prospecting, and you gained some traction, or you’re with an account, and an account management call, and they’re like, hey, you know, I’ve got this other property. Can you have a look at that one as well? So, you know, really looking at that. Every salesperson needs to understand what percentage of their time should be spent on account management and what percentage of their time should be spent on prospecting.

19:10
Jeffrey Domenick
And then, most importantly, if you’re doing those two things and you’re not following up timely, you know, with. With proposals and estimates, you know, then. Then you’ve really done all this work, and you’re not. You’re not seeing it through. So we really think through that. And in every. Every market is a little bit different. You know, we might have a really mature market. Our North Charlotte is up in Mooresville. You know, we’re. We’re not really trying to add a tremendous amount of maintenance customers. You know, We’re. We’re running 11 maintenance crews out of there. We’ve got about 1200 residential customers. And so we’re not. We don’t. We’re not ready to add the 12th crew or the 13th crew. What we’re really trying to do is gain a little bit more share out of the wallets of our existing customers.

19:56
Jeffrey Domenick
And that’s kind of where you land on cylinder number four, which is growth plans. Right. So we’ve got customers that, you know, we work with, and they trust us to come on their property and take care of them. Their stuff. But we should be. Be really looking at their properties and saying, hey, here are some services that we have that you don’t take advantage of. So a great one is seasonal color. It’s probably one of the most underutilized, you know, services. Hey, you know, Mr. Smith, you know, I notice, you know, you’ve got this grand entrance on your front porch. I’d love to, you know, bring some pots and some seasonal color in here. We can put them into irrigation. You know, you really won’t have to worry about them. We’ll service them every other week for you. Is that something you’re interested in?

20:44
Jeffrey Domenick
So they’re not. It’s not market share because they’re not buying it from someone else. It’s not a new product because we already use a ton of seasonal colors. It’s getting greater share out of your customers wallets and it’s a value proposition. Right. Who doesn’t love beautiful pots on their front porch?

21:03
Robert Murray
Oh yeah, for sure.

21:04
Jeffrey Domenick
You know, so, you know, it could be, you know, irrigation services. There are a lot of different things.

21:09
Robert Murray
Well, I think a lot of people also don’t want to be pushy salespeople, but they forget that the job of an organization is to present opportunities and let customers make decisions. It’s not like they’re sitting there jamming it down their throats. It’s like, I want you to know this is available for you and you can tell me yes or no. Either way is cool.

21:27
Jeffrey Domenick
That’s really great. You know, we, interestingly enough, we, you know, let’s see, we just completed our third one, but we started doing customer satisfaction surveys across our businesses in Florida, North Carolina and Alabama. And the one common thread in feedback that we got from those customers is they want a better relationship with us. They, they want us to help their property look better.

21:55
Robert Murray
Yeah, that’s cool. Proactively and tell me about what I should do and let me know what’s going on.

21:59
Jeffrey Domenick
Yeah. And give. And let them decide whether it’s something that they want to invest in or not. Right.

22:04
Robert Murray
Yeah. We talk about it all the time as a salesperson. Never say no to somebody.

22:07
Jeffrey Domenick
That’s right. That’s right. We want to make sure that, you know, we’re providing that service. And if that means, you know, hey, we’re going to subcontract that. They would prefer we subcontract it than for them to interview five pressure wash guys or two tree guys. And they know we’re making a little bit of money on top of it.

22:25
Robert Murray
But we’re now responsible for the outcome.

22:28
Jeffrey Domenick
We’re the general contractor of their backyard. And nobody really wants to manage five vendors to take care of their property. And I think in a lot of parts of the country, they do, you know, they have a turf care service, they have an irrigation service, and they have a weekly lawn maintenance service. And then, if they want to put a patio in, they probably are going to have to call a whole other company. And so, you know, key serves, you know, ideas. We really want to take care of the entire property. We want to take care of everything from the doors out for you. We actually have a commercial business in Birmingham, Alabama, which we acquired in April. And he’s got such great relationships with his property managers.

23:10
Jeffrey Domenick
For example, if they need an air conditioner replaced in one of their facilities, hey, can you do me a favor and get your subcontractor to replace this air conditioner? And you know, we’re putting, but we’re making their life easier. A lot of times, these property managers are not local; they don’t want to have to manage the process, and they don’t want to have to set up a new vendor. And so it’s just easier for us to do that. So, so you know, making sure that, you know, we’re doing everything we can to take care of our customers. And then, the fifth cylinder is projected. And I always say the difference between a good year and a new boat kind of year is projects.

23:49
Jeffrey Domenick
And whenever we sell a big project in our organization, you know, we always tell the person responsible for that, hey, look, go home, you know, take your dinner out, your wife out to fan what? Your wife and your family are out to dinner. Have a good time. And then, when you wake up tomorrow morning, I want you to worry about how you’re going to replace that revenue next year. Right? Because we’ve got to grow every year. So if you take those five-cylinder engines, hang on to the five-cylinder engine, hang on to what you got, sell something new market share, growth plans, and projects, and you put it in a column and you’ve got a growth number, you’re going to grow, you know, you want to grow by 20% or $200,000 this year. Where do you think that growth is going to come?

24:39
Jeffrey Domenick
How healthy is your annuity? How much growth are you going to get out of your annuity through pricing this year or through attrition? Right. Or retention? Right. And so that’s going to be a number. You know, you’ve got some ideas on new products to sell. How much do you think that’s going to add this year? How much market share are we going to get? You have to think about market share in two ways. So, if we sell a new account in July, that would be okay. We start maintaining that in July, and we’re going to get incremental revenue. July through the, through December. Okay. That’s going to be new revenue for that year. Well, guess what? We’re also going to get six months of incremental revenue next year because we didn’t service that property. January, February, March, April, May and June. Right.

25:26
Jeffrey Domenick
And then in July, that annuity is really a trailing twelve months. It’s a rolling twelve, you know, in terms of where that new business is. So when you look at your market share, it’s not just, Hey, I think I can go out and get 10 new customers at, you know, a thousand dollars apiece. It’s hey, I sold 20 new customers at a thousand dollars a piece. And 10,000 of that’s going to be incremental this year. And then I’m going to go out, I’m going to sell 10 more customers, and that’s going to be another 10,000. Right. So, that becomes, you know, really important, you know, in the process. And then, you know, growth plans, what is the growth plan activity, and how much can it add?

26:09
Jeffrey Domenick
To me, growth plans are not super important in terms of driving a ton of new revenue. They can be right. To me, it just creates a stickiness with your customer. So, we learned this at NDS, and we had a lot of different categories. You know, everybody knew us for drain boxes, but we also sold valve boxes, flow control, drip irrigation, and commercial landscape products. And you know, the more categories we sell to a customer, the more sticky we are. We were the same.

26:43
Robert Murray
Yeah. And it reinforces, hang on to what you got. Right?

26:46
Jeffrey Domenick
That’s right. The same thing was True@site1. If we had a contractor that only bought irrigation from us, they could go and buy that irrigation from an irrigation-only distributor with no problem. Right, Right. They bought Hardscapes, an irrigation nursery agronomy.

27:00
Robert Murray
They’re lighting whatever flies now.

27:02
Jeffrey Domenick
We’re now a lot harder to replace. Right. And so that’s what that growth plan is really important from that perspective. And then projects, right? You know, how much, you know, you may have had a million-dollar project last year that you’re not going to sell this year. You might only. So now you’ve got this big delta in terms of growth. You know, the last thing I want to hear from a salesperson is oh, but I had that big project last year, so I’m going to sell less this year. That, that’s not how that works. Right. We need to sell more every single year. You know, we want to have, you know, high single-digit organic growth every single year regardless of the outside influences, regardless of the economy.

27:46
Jeffrey Domenick
And when you start thinking about it in that five-cylinder engine component, you know, you can really frame up, you know, how you’re going to get it, and then that how you’re going to get it really dictates your activities.

27:59
Robert Murray
So, and the resources and allotments of what you’re putting your focus on.

28:02
Jeffrey Domenick
Absolutely, absolutely. So if you’re like, hey look, I want to add a hundred thousand dollars in landscape maintenance this year through market share, well, guess what? That really changes your activity, right? That really changes where you’re going to spend your time. But if we’re not looking to add more maintenance accounts, we’re just looking to add, you know, other components of it, and then, you know, that changes your activity. So it’s really just a simple framework in my mind that sellers at all levels, and, let’s face it, people who sell in the landscape industry are usually landscape industry professionals. So they don’t have a lot of, you know, I’ve never known until I got to nds. I never had any professional, you know, sales training. I, I, I never, we, we.

28:50
Robert Murray
We present to thousands of landscaper entrepreneurs every year, and less than 1% of them have been professionally sales trained.

28:56
Jeffrey Domenick
Yeah. And to be honest with you, I know it’s professional sales training. What I have found is that I’ve been through a lot of professional sales training, but the thing that really changed was a real aha for me. I went through sales management training, and there’s a great book out there that I would recommend your listeners to read. It’s called Cracking the Sales Management Code. The whole premise of the book is that you can’t manage a result, so you want to grow 10%. So what? Not so what, that we don’t care, but so what are we going to do about it? So, to grow 10%, you have to have very clear sales objectives. And then, for each one of those objectives, you have to have the activities that will drive that growth. And the only thing you can really measure in the process is the activities.

29:49
Jeffrey Domenick
So we know if we have a 50% close rate on our proposals and we want to grow a hundred thousand dollars, we have to go out and sell $200,000 or propose $200,000 worth of work to get $50,000, right? Yep. And if we want to go from a 50,000 or 50% close rate to a 60% close rate, well, that might be a different set of activities. So it really is. You know, there’s a lot of science involved in selling, but there’s a little bit of an art form to it as well. And what we want to try to avoid is if you look at a company over a five-year period, you don’t want to have what I call an EKG sales. You know, you don’t want to have a good year, bad year, good year, bad year.

30:34
Jeffrey Domenick
You want to, you know, you want to see that growth trend, and you want to know why you’re growing. You know, as soon as you understand how to make your business grow, things get a little bit easier. And in my experience, initial reactions to, you know, good sales management or hey, I got big brother looking over the top of me, he’s telling me what to do. And man, I’ve been doing this for a really long time. But if you’ve got the right people and you explain it the right way, look, this isn’t me telling you and keeping an eye on you, making sure you’re working. What I want to do is make sure that every available selling hour to you is a pre-productive selling hour. Yeah.

31:19
Robert Murray
Make you more effective.

31:20
Jeffrey Domenick
Yeah. I mean, and I would say that, you know, on our end, our industry because a lot of our salespeople have some operational responsibility. You know, you probably only get four or five hours a day where you can sell, and it’s usually in the middle of the day. Right. It’s kind of from 10 am to 3 pm or something. You know, you get your cruise started, you know, now you can go out, and you make your sales and then, you know, you got to, whatever sales call you made now you have to get proposals turned around and those sorts of things. So it’s really creating the discipline. So, measuring things like how many in-person sales calls did you do this week? How many proactive account management walks did you do this week? How many proposals did you turn around on the same day?

32:04
Jeffrey Domenick
How many proposals did you turn around in 24 hours or less? You know, what is your deadline for closing? You know, we’re measuring and you know, we’re measuring the, the time it takes to close different types of sales. So grounds maintenance tends to sell a lot faster than major design, build products, projects.

32:30
Robert Murray
Yeah, because there are fewer decision-makers, it’s.

32:33
Jeffrey Domenick
A lower price point, and they just know that they need to have their property maintained, and you gave them a price that you know, in their mind, is a good value, and that’s a little bit easier to sell with existing customers. Things like, you know, if they call and say, hey, you know, I want to have two new oak trees installed, and I want to have the whole property mulched, well, the average salesperson is going to go out there, they’re going to take measurements, and it’s going to take them three days to get that proposal turned around, right? Well, a lot can happen in three days. But if you get that proposal turned around while you’re in front of the customer and say, hey, does this look good? Yeah, well, hey, look, I got room on a crew next Tuesday.

33:12
Jeffrey Domenick
If you sign this now, we’ll have it ready to go on Tuesday. You’re probably going to get it signed because they called you out.

33:18
Robert Murray
The likelihood, at least, is way higher. Well, and one thing’s for sure, from a scientific point of view, you can’t get a sign-off if it takes three days on the same day.

33:29
Jeffrey Domenick
That’s right.

33:30
Robert Murray
So it’s just that efficiency of getting people. And I think it also goes back to the idea of making, taking the friction out of the buying process, making it easy for people to buy. That’s a big deal. Jeffrey, if somebody wanted to reach out and say, what’s up? How would they do that best?

33:45
Jeffrey Domenick
Yeah, you can email me at [email protected]. I’m on LinkedIn. You know, I do my very best. You know, it’s a big industry, and there are a lot of opportunities out there. You know, I like to tell people there are no secrets I’m not willing to share because the execution is so goddamn hard. So I, you know, love to talk shop. I love to talk to other, you know, industry veterans and I also like to help those who are just getting started and see if they can avoid some of the mistakes that I’ve made, and the list of those mistakes is pretty long, so.

34:24
Robert Murray
Well, and that’s the whole spirit of doing this podcast, which is to try to share with the audience from people that have been through it, maybe avoid some scar tissue.

34:33
Jeffrey Domenick
That’s right. That’s right.

34:34
Robert Murray
Awesome. Well, thank you again for doing this. Really appreciate it, everybody, for listening to another episode of the IM Landscape growth podcast.