Kevin Scott (Muskoka Landscapers): The Hire That Mattered More Than Another Excavator

Rob Murray (00:31): Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of the IM Landscape Growth Podcast. I was just saying to the guests himself that I’m really pumped to have someone like this on the show. We got Kevin Scott, president of Muskoka Landscapers and the founder of the wealthy or partner of the wealthy landscaper. So Kevin, thank you so much for being a part of this.

Kevin Scott (00:49): I appreciate it. Happy to be here.

Rob Murray (00:51): We were just talking about how it’s really neat to have someone like you because you’ve not only done it yourself, so as far as I’m concerned, that gives you the credibility to teach others on how to do it. And I won’t get into others that maybe don’t have that. And now you’re helping others, so you get to see this in action across multiple entrepreneurs, not just yourself. So I think in terms of the value you can bring to the audience, it can be pretty amazing. You know, almost 30 years in the industry at some level, you know, moving dirt.

Kevin Scott (01:19): Sounds so long when you say it.

Rob Murray (01:21): I know, I know. Some really cool experiences along the way, so why don’t you give the audience a two-minute Coles Notes summary of how you started and what you’re focused on right now so they can get a sense of where you’re coming from in terms of your perspective.

Kevin Scott (01:33): Got it. Well, yeah, Cole’s notes are left high school in grade 11, took a golf course construction job, did that for three or four years, building some new golf courses, went back to school, got a horticulture degree. And when I came out, I took a job with a company called Gateville Malloy, which was a very small company at the time, not small, but we had 80 employees. And 10 years later, when I left, we were just over 500.

Rob Murray (01:58): Was going say not small today, that’s for sure.

Kevin Scott (02:00): Yeah, it was a big jump and that 10 year stretch from like 97 to 07 was just a crazy boom in the golf industry. So got to be a lot of great people and built some really cool stuff all around Ontario. I had a young family. I was always out of town during the week when I was doing the golf construction projects and it was just getting, I was just missing out on too much. So we moved back to Muskoka, which is where my family’s from and my wife’s family had retired too.

We had some projects on the go up here and I just knew it was time to make a change. And that was when we started Muskoka Landscapers 18 years ago. First year we had a company of four people, myself being one of them. And we ran like that for probably two or three years, like four to six to eight people. Colin, who’s now our general manager, was one of those people. He was running a crew, I was running a crew.

And things just kind of evolved. you know, we kind of fell into this right fit work through some golf course relationships, to start really building some great partnerships and building some really cool stuff on the lake. So high-end high-end lakefront projects. And it just kind of evolved that. Yeah. We’re in a great spot for that. And, and, and again, just like so many great relationships that really helped kind of kick it off and get us into that right fit work.

We just continued to build partnerships and relationships over the years and now we have a team of over 50 and things are chugging along and we’re loving it.

Rob Murray (03:17): And then you were like, I got some time on my hands, so why not start something else?

Kevin Scott (03:22): Right. Well, I’ve done that about 10 other times as well. Various businesses, mainly vertical, and that’s been a lot of fun as well. And it’s fun to be a part of other jobs that really support Muskoka landscapers as well and other companies. But yeah, the wealthy landscaper, that’s been a fairly new thing. We’re about a year and a half in now. Started out as a bit of information sharing in a community that we have about 270 people in now.

The community is great because there’s just this opportunity for people to get in there and ask questions of people that have done it or are at the stage that they’d like to get to or the next stage they’d like to get to. So I hope it’s been helpful, free community. And then I started doing the coaching about a year ago as well. And I’m just working with some amazing people. A lot of them are through Leanscaper, which has also been a big game changer in the past year. So yeah, I just…

Loving trying to give back a little bit. The industry has given a lot to me and to my family. Taught me a lot, learned a of hard lessons throughout the process. But feel like we’re just in this incredible age now where information sharing is just everywhere. And it’s kind of made the shift from knowing what to do to how to do it. How do I implement things? And that’s what I’m trying to do at The Wealthy Landscaper is just help other contractors save some aggravation and time and money.

Scar tissue. Missed family time and all the stuff that goes with it. So it’s been a fun ride and it’s only getting better. I’m loving it.

Rob Murray (04:42): Awesome. So with all that in mind, you have such a cool perspective on the main question of the show, which is what’s the primary constraint holding landscape entrepreneurs back in the green industry. And so I mean, like, you know, it’s kind of a two part question for you. One is like, what was it for you and how did you break through, you know, each of those ceilings? But then also like, what do you see today? So maybe we can start a little bit more on like your experience and then we can kind of, you know, lead that into what we’re seeing these days.

Kevin Scott (04:52): Right. Right. So I mean, I think it’s always come back to the same pinch point for me. And it was at different levels. It was certainly at the two and a half to three and a half mark. And again, probably when I hit seven, eight, and then a little bit again at 10, but it was always just not being the right leader, not having the skills, not knowing the decisions to make, not knowing what to do first. I was always good at doing the work. I was good at doing the work, showing people how to do the work.

But as far as running a business and when to purchase things properly and how to do it from a tax saving perspective and how to really implement systems and SOPs, I just, didn’t have that for a long time. And probably I’ve truthfully really took being a leader serious probably about the past eight or nine years. And that’s been, you know, we went from four and a half million to over 10 in a very short period of time. And I attributed a lot to just education, having the right people.
Being in the right rooms and just sharing that information like we touched on a few minutes ago. The information is everywhere now. So if you can harness it and lean on people who have done it and look for strategies to really implement things, because I feel like that’s the biggest struggle for everybody now. Back to your question, I think for me it was not being the right leader at the right time and having to suffer through the pain of one or two years of struggling to get to become the leader for that new step. And honestly, was probably implementation then too. I just didn’t know how to do it. One, I didn’t know what to do and I also didn’t know how and I feel like in today’s world, everybody knows how, they just struggle to do.

Rob Murray (06:41): Yeah, well, and on the flip side too, there’s almost so much information, it’s like, what should I listen to? Yeah. So if we go back to, you you referenced that first jump when you were not stuck, but you were at two and a half to three and a half million and you weren’t necessarily in a position to get past it in terms of the way, you you had set up your skillset as a leader, what were the symptoms that you were experiencing at that stage that when you look back, you go, yeah, I wasn’t really there yet?

Kevin Scott (07:05): Upset customers, not fulfilling what we sold, missed timelines, missed schedules by far on a lot of projects. And unfortunately, we were in this really sweet spot where before that we were killing it. We were delivering on time, we were making great net profit. The team was happy, the team was super functional. But then as I started to lack in leadership, I was still trying to run it as if we were doing a million and a half bucks or two million bucks. And we just didn’t have the people in place. Like the field team grew very quickly. It was easy to add people. could totally get my head around buying another excavator or skid steer or truck, dump truck, whatever. I could see that. I could see the value in it. I couldn’t get my head around hiring a bookkeeper, hiring an estimator, having somebody support from a design or sales perspective. I just kept trying to do all that.

And I didn’t do a good job at any of it because I was just so thin, right? Just running so thin. And I think that’s such a common problem at that stage. I’ve got a few guys that I’m working with right now that are in that spot. Right. They know there’s a hundred things they need to do, but they just can’t get around to stepping back enough to pick the four or five that they need to do now and getting those dialed and then moving on.

Rob Murray (08:17): That’s a really interesting perspective. talk about a lot about zero one mindset of like, I’ve got five things I gotta do. Don’t work on all five, work on one, get it complete. While it’s complete, we can feel the value of what we’ve completed while we work on the next one instead of having five jobs all 90 % complete in four months. have four jobs that are 100 % complete in four months. So if you go back to that, you you’re stretched too thin, you could see clearly the value of investing in the field. You didn’t necessarily see the value of in the office, what was it that, you know, hit you over the head or put you through enough pain to say, gotta do this different?

Kevin Scott (08:52): Well, one thing was my wife was ready to kill me because she was doing the books and helping me and the kids were now, you know, nine and six. So there was a lot of like sporting events and swimming and dance and all the things that were going on. And I like literally I’d finished dinner and I’d be back in the office. And for me, that was probably one of the biggest lessons I learned too is like, and this could just be me, but I feel like it’s it’s most humans.

The mind in the evening after a long day at work is not the same as it is in the morning when you’re pumping out estimates with clarity and focus. So I feel like there was a lot of missed opportunities with the way we were estimating. But I think it was just that gap of not seeing the value in hiring a part-time $40 an hour person to do my books. And the two of us fighting over it and her trying to chase me for money and taxes and all the things that go with it at that stage where cash flow isn’t always key or king. You’ve got things you’ve got to spend money on. And again, I just think there was so much confusion in our business at that stage. And it wasn’t until we hired somebody to come in and help with the books. And then they were also able to help with some of the estimating. They were helping with customer communication. That’s where we started to see a little bit of relief. And that was probably enough to get us to like the four and a half, five mark. You we had the right team. Now we had a little more support in the office. And then we actually added a full-time person and my wife kind of stepped away, which I think was also one of the biggest things that we ever did. And I know there’s a lot of successful people out there that are couples and run businesses and run great businesses together and do it in a way that’s very manageable and they enjoy and everything else. But we… I mean, not that we didn’t enjoy it. We just, there was just no time for us. We didn’t make any time for us. Certainly during the season.

Rob Murray (10:36): So maybe you can speak to this because I talked about this a couple of days ago about the biggest issue I see with this hustle culture is that the grind is noble as opposed to a symptom that the systems aren’t supportive. And so it’s like as you see others going through it and look back at your experience. You know, at some level you have to grind it out. Like you gotta get this thing from nothing. You gotta get inertia from zero to one and you gotta move this thing into a place where it’s, you know, making money and you can’t just do it all yourself. But at what point, like if I’m listening to this thing as a landscape entrepreneur, say I’m at two and a half million and I’m like, yeah, it sounds great. I’ll hire all these office staff. But I’m not necessarily making the money I want or the profit isn’t necessarily as much as I want in the business. So I’m gonna say, I’m just gonna keep doing it myself, damned myself who cares just you know for because I have to but that that mindset was really limiting so what what’s the kicker there that someone has to like kind of shift their way they’re thinking about it

Kevin Scott (11:34): Yeah, I really think a lot of it is just, again, it is a bit of a mindset shift where you’ve kind of got to take a backseat to profit and look forward to systems, right? That implementation and bringing on somebody that can really support what you’re doing, even if they’re only doing it at 70 or 80%. You know, if you save 25 or 30 hours a week by hiring a new person to now focus on better operations or better customer experience, that’s only going to catapult you forward and yeah, it’s a short time, you know, I think a lot of people avoid it too because they don’t know how to onboard well. They’re not prepared when they hire somebody. They don’t really know like it’s a new position and they’re not really sure what they’re gonna do. So they don’t build anything out for them. Also doesn’t help with culture because now you’re onboarding somebody who maybe doesn’t really have, you know, a clear path on what they’re responsible for or how you do it and the way you do it. That was one of the biggest lessons I learned when we hired our first bookkeeper was like, she could get more done in a day and a half a week than we ever could in five days. And it was accurate and it was the accountant loved it. There was no back and forth wasting time and money trying to appease our accounting team. And I think that was the biggest takeaway. I think, honestly, it was a mentor at the time that was the one that said to me, the money you spend in the office is better sometimes than the money you spend in the field. And it’s not necessarily just a person, but it could be software, it could be how you estimate, could be technology that helps you with better systems. And I mean, I think about where we’re at today and what we were doing then, and if we would have had the same systems and equipment and programs like Leanscaper and LNN, have been, man, it would have been crazy, would have been crazy.

Rob Murray (13:16): So then speak to the, so this mentor says this idea of like sometimes, you know, hiring the office can be more impactful than hiring in the field. Did you believe him the first time? Were you just like, all right, yeah, I’m in, let’s do it. Or were you just like, I don’t know, Mr. Mentor or Mrs. Mentor.

Kevin Scott (13:30): I’d say I was at the point where I was like getting ready to crack and I still probably rode it out for six months after that before I pulled the trigger and was like, okay, I’ve got to, I’ve got to give this a try because what we’re doing is definitely not working. And what you tend to see, and I seen it more at the seven eight mark is your culture starts to become poor. You know, when you’re a smaller company and you’re working with the team every day and you see them and you’re working still or, know, you’re on the tools sometimes The culture is a lot easier to maintain then, right? Because it’s more like a group of people working together. You’re interacting with Yeah. Yeah. And you’re also helping them with like job setups and tracking and you know, you’re having a beer on Friday after work or whatever it is. Like as you grow, a lot of that stuff changes, but at the seven market becomes that much more important to have all those systems and the onboarding dialed in and everything else to not lose your culture every day.

Rob Murray (14:03): It’s like a voice of experience.

Kevin Scott (14:23): Yeah, a lot of it for sure.

Rob Murray (14:25): So what happened? What did you do about it?

Kevin Scott (14:27): We struggled with it for a year and a half probably. We had to let some people go that were a little bit toxic. Sometimes I take some responsibility for that because I think it wasn’t necessarily that they were toxic. It was that I didn’t have proper accountability. I didn’t have systems that gave them clear expectations. I didn’t have systems that gave them clear focus on a bonus structure or profit sharing. And again, I I just wasn’t, I didn’t know. I thought I knew, but I didn’t know. And it wasn’t until you, sorry, you go ahead.

Rob Murray (14:57): No, no, no, I’m not gonna lose it. I’m not gonna lose it.

Kevin Scott (15:00): No, I think it’s until you get to that point where you actually start believing in somebody who’s done it or seeing somebody who’s done it walk you through what they did. That’s kind of when the bulb goes off and you’re like, okay, I just got to stick with this. Because I think the other problem today and in today’s world is like our expectations on how quickly things should change is extremely high. And in business, it’s extremely unrealistic. know, there’s tremendous potential for change doing the right things. Everywhere and every part of your business as well. It’s more about harnessing a way to do it so that you have team buy-in, they understand it, it gets implemented and you move on to the next things. And knowing which things are the ones that you should start on depending on where you are in your business. Because the person at 2 million bucks is doing his first five things or their first five things is going to be much different than the person that’s at 10 or 15.

Rob Murray (15:52): There’s so much packed in what you’re sharing right now. So that’s why I kind of want to take it for a quick, I just want to break out a couple of pieces that you

Kevin Scott (16:01): I kind of get all over the place.

Rob Murray (16:02): No, no, no, no, it was all good. I said, there was just so much in what you just shared that I want to just unpack it so that people can get a bit, be a bit more like nuance inside of it. And, and like you just mentioned the idea of like the long-term mindset, you know, like it’s a marathon, not a sprint. this, and this age old adage that if you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, you go together. And then there’s this whole other thing about like, if you want to, if you want, you have to slow down to speed up and all these things I’ve heard forever. And I’m just like, I don’t know. Slow down to speed up. doesn’t make any sense. But then you’re talking specifically about getting systems in place, getting team buy-in, getting everybody aligned and then moving forward. And that’s a very practical example of slowing down to speed up. And so, I mean, there’s like three other ones I’m going to touch on, but that was the first one I want to just unpack for a second. When you’re running,

Kevin Scott (16:31): Right.

Rob Murray (16:51): Say you’re at six million now and you’re starting to see a decline in people doing things differently. Somebody says this is the right way. Somebody says it’s not. That creates culture clash at some level, but we’re still running. And so like we hear a lot of people say, we’ll deal with that in the fall. We’re too busy to deal with it now. How do you? How did you deal with that and what do you say to others maybe thinking that way?

Kevin Scott (17:16): Honestly, I didn’t deal with it. I kept doing what I needed to do to keep it running. And when I look back at it now, I could have fixed it so much quicker by likely getting rid of a few people that were a little bit toxic in the company. I could have done it by better implementation. And I think to your point, like as entrepreneurs, whether we read or we go to events or we’re part of a bigger picture, we get like, we get a hundred things going on in our mind all the time. What we have to remember is our teams don’t often, they don’t often look at it the same way. And no matter how much we try and teach them or train them, they’re not going to look at it like that until they’re ready to look at it like that, no matter what you ask them to do. So I think really being able to kind of compartment compartmentalize the things you’re thinking, but only releasing so much of it at a time is really important because it’s so easy to overwhelm your team. I mean, you’ve seen it at some of the events we’ve been at together. Somebody, young entrepreneur is going to leave that going, man, I got to do it. They’re going to feel bad. They’re like, shit, I’m not doing that. I didn’t even know I was supposed to do that. And then they get back to their team and they’re like, okay, guys, we’re going to do this, this, this, this. Yeah, exactly. And they dumped them all on.

Rob Murray (18:25): I got 68 Takeaways.

Kevin Scott (18:28): and they start trying to do them, but there’s no system, there’s no strategy, there’s no accountability, there’s no check-in points. And then once you go down that road, this is where I think young companies today have such a great opportunity. mean, certainly mature companies do as well, but the younger companies, man, do they have, like, they’ve got so much potential because they don’t have any bad habits yet. You know what I mean? They’re just building the right way. If they’re smart, they’re gonna just.. build it out the right way and it’s going to work right from the beginning. Where for years and back to what we were talking about, I think when you’re in that spot, we far too often think that we can’t replace the person. It’s too hard to hire that somebody that’s causing the issues. So you tend to coddle them a little bit to keep them around knowing that they’re not the right fit person, even when they’re a skilled installer. Whether that’s maintenance, construction, pools, whatever you build, if you don’t have buy-in from everybody and the team sees that you treat people a different way because you know they’re difficult, or you can only put certain people with a certain person or a certain crew or whatever, how that looks in your business, that’s the kind of stuff you have to nip right away. And it needs to be consistent. doesn’t need to be, you know, with… real confrontation if it’s done a little bit all the time. Like as soon as somebody’s not meeting the standards, correct them. As soon as somebody’s made a mistake, ask them what happened. Don’t jump on them. There’s processes and conversations that can be structured in a way that people don’t feel bad when they’re brought forward, but they understand that they need to maintain those standards.

Rob Murray (20:03): I mean like this is a huge topic that comes up in a lot of peer groups and events, that kind of stuff. And, you know, we kind of coined this idea for ourselves anyway. It’s like, you know, it’s win happy, healthy. So it’s like, we’re going to show you how you win here. And we’re going to meet with you on a regular basis and review what’s going on to ensure that you’re winning. And if you’re not winning, we want to make sure that you’re happy and healthy. And if you consistently don’t win, eventually you’re stressed. And when you get stressed, you’re not happy or healthy. So you can’t win and you’re stressed and unhealthy. So we need to get you an environment that’s going to help you be awesome. And that’s not here probably. But like we’ve seen it time and time again when we start coaching that way people quit. They’re like or they get like going like my God thank God.

Kevin Scott (20:39): Right. Right, they’re relieved, yeah.

Rob Murray (20:47): Yeah, like I couldn’t quit, man, I don’t want to do this anymore. I love you guys, but this is hard. Like I can’t, I don’t, or I don’t, I don’t agree with the way you guys are doing it and that’s okay. I think that’s cool, man. You articulated it in a way a lot of people haven’t. So then one of the things that you’re kind of alluding to, and this is one of the notes I put down earlier, you kind of reference was this idea of systems and SOPs. And I know a lot of entrepreneurs just like either cringe when they hear those things or just like, yeah, great. I’ll write a document that nobody reads. Great. But the reality of situation is they’re the backbone of what create organizational value. And so we see it a lot where companies will have a lot of great people and the company’s doing great things. And then we see organizations that have great processes, great training, great systems. And it doesn’t matter who’s there. They do great things. And so what’s your take for folks that are maybe in between those things where they’ve got some really great people so it looks like the company’s doing great but if those people leave they’re like the IP of how to do things just walks out the door versus building these systems that create organizational value versus like all-star value.

Kevin Scott (21:46): Yeah, I think it’s bit of both and I don’t want to sound wishy washy on it, but I think the two kind of go hand in hand. Good people with good systems are always going to outperform good people with bad systems. Right? So I think if you build out your systems, they’re digestible, they’re not too many at a time, they’re implemented, they have accountability metrics in them, they have metrics that show if you’re succeeding in them.

Rob Murray (21:56): No doubt.

Kevin Scott (22:09): When all that stuff is clear and there’s that clarity for the team, I think it’s so much easier to implement. The other thing that I think happens is the team has also got to be part of the implementation. Certainly for any of the items that involve them, like the SOPs that revolve around your field techs, for instance, they should be involved in the meetings where you build them. Somebody coming with a new system and saying, this is what we’re going to do now, instead of, hey, what do you guys think about how we plant trees or how we do… Flagstone install. What are all the tools we need? What’s the ideal way to lay it? This guy likes to do his templating like this, this guy likes to do it like this. What’s the best way? A conversation like that to build a system that everybody agrees to and follows automatically creates accountability. Because they’ve helped build it, yeah. It makes it so much easier. To your question, I think both are important. Either one could be more important depending on your people or your lack of systems. If you’ve got really strong people that are technically sound and have been with you for a long time, they may not need as many systems. If you’re in a growth spurt and you’re adding a lot of new people and that information, or maybe those people aren’t great trainers, you need systems. So I think the two go hand in hand. Again, I think the… good people with good systems, I’ll perform anybody.

Rob Murray (23:26): Yeah, I mean, even great systems with good people can still create great work too, one of the things we’ve heard from folks too is like the idea that like, can I build an SOP for everything? And we’re like, well, we really would prefer if you just didn’t do everything. And you start saying no to some stuff and really start to find your lane in terms of where your superpower is. And a lot of people are like, I got a lead and they want to give me money. So I kind of want to do the thing even though I don’t have any system for doing it. What’s your take on like service focus?

Kevin Scott (23:51): Yeah, I think it’s so important. You know, I think one of the things that we all struggle with is having places for people to grow into depending on the size of our business. And sometimes there isn’t a clear path to what happens next or a position to put them in their right fit slot yet. So I think it can be tricky depending on what business you’re in, or sorry, what stage of business you’re in. But… when you can set somebody up doing something they like to do, or they’re really good at it and they like it because they’re good at it, that’s obviously the ideal win. I think in our industry, it’s sometimes hard to do that all the time. No doubt. I think when I look at people that are in sort of management positions within our company, they love 70 % of what they do, and 30 % is part of the job. Which is You know what I mean? Yeah.

Rob Murray (24:35): What about from an organizational focus though in terms of leadership and strategy? is, did you at some point narrow the focus of work or did you expand this focus of work?

Kevin Scott (24:46): Well, we’ve definitely expanded it, but I think we put key people in each of those areas to kind of be the owner of it. sometimes to a fault back two years ago, like one of the things I was definitely guilty of was moving people into roles because I didn’t have anywhere else for them to move. And they’d been with us a long time and we’ve become friends and we put them in a role that they were maybe okay at, at five million, but they’re not any good at a 10. You know, so being able to identify those and have a system in place, like a survey during your evaluations to have those conversations about what works well for them. We’ve used predictive success a little bit too, to try and isolate what people are good at, what they like to do, who they work well with. That information as your company grows is invaluable as well. You know, you’re not building crews that are all the same personality. Yeah, I don’t know if that answers your question, but from an organizational perspective, I think it is important to try and put people in the right fit role. It’s just hard to do until you have that role. Right.

Rob Murray (25:44): I think to you, like once you’re at 10 million, the ability to have a key person to lead or own a new line of work is a lot easier to do than when you’re at two. And you’re trying to do everything yourself with helpers. So then what is the biggest thing that you see in, you know, in yourself looking back or now, or even with the clients you’re coaching on the $10 million plus entrepreneurs, the way they think versus say the two million dollar entrepreneur, what’s the biggest thing that’s noticeable from your point of view that shows up in the way that they act?

Kevin Scott (26:14): I would say that a lot of it is just the belief in the vision. I think when you’re the $2 million owner, you want all the same things as the person at 10 million. You want to have all that success, the accolades, the type of work, the team, the profit, but you don’t really have a strategy on how you’re going to do it. You just want it. When you’re the $10 million person and you’re in the right rooms and you’re constantly educating yourself and you have a mentor group that you can speak to and learn from, you not only have a vision, but you have a path to get there. You can build yourself a roadmap. that’s mountains different in the two people from two to 10. Because now they know what they need to do to execute. They’ve likely been through enough to know what the struggles are gonna be. They’re able to lean on other people that have already done it. And that just creates more clarity. And that’s why I think you see, you know, the small portion of our industry, the landscape industry that is above north or north of 7 million, say, is a very low percentage. Like I think it’s under 5%. But the reason those companies grow very quickly beyond seven, is because they have that vision, they have that leadership and it’s probably not even just one leader, right? It’s a group of leaders now. So you just, that strength compounds, the knowledge compounds, the vision compounds.

Rob Murray (27:33): Yeah, so it’s like having mentors and peer groups and folks you can lean on is like scaffolding. It’s going to help you build higher, faster, safer. So you mentioned earlier, a mentor mentioned to you invest in the office. How did you seek mentorship or what made you pursue that?

Kevin Scott (27:48): I think probably just because of my struggles. Pain creates behavior change. it totally does and it usually does it quite quickly. I think the harder part when I was in my mid-30s, late 30s, when I was going through that real struggle time, the information was harder to find. The industry didn’t share as much as it does now. So I definitely I look to events a lot. I would go to a lot of events, would hear a lot of great speakers, I would do some two or three day seminars, I started reading more. And again, now with the amount of volume online of what to read if you’re in this situation, what to read if you’re in this situation, it’s so much more helpful. I likely read quite a few books that I wish I would have read in a different order because they can kind of compound a bit as well.

Rob Murray (28:33): Would you mind being specific a little bit, like were there a couple that just came to mind?

Kevin Scott (28:36): I mean, I think in the past three or four years, know, good to great class is a great book. No matter what stage you’re at, it’s also a great book to just read again. I can’t remember when it was actually written now, but it, ⁓ it doesn’t get old. You know, everything in there is fantastic. I was looking more like for accounting and tax sort of books when I started because that was the part I felt like I didn’t understand the most. Yeah. Yeah. And that part of the sharing, like not very often people were sharing their numbers then, right? Or like what sort of net profit they were making the revenue per hour. Like all that information was so protected 15 years ago that that made it a little bit difficult, more difficult. But I think about books like, um, the Mark’s really a book and I can’t the mountain is you buy back your time, Dan Martell. There’s so many good ones out there that I can think of that have really made a big difference. And same sort of thing we were talking about earlier. Like when you read stuff like that, you come out of it with hundreds of ideas or hundreds of I should do’s. So it’s just really important to be strategic about which ones to do first and how they’re going to affect you and your team. And where’s the low hanging fruit? Love it. Yeah, so then find that structure.

Rob Murray (29:49) So then, so kind of on a similar idea, like we work with, know, most of the clients that we have are between say three and seven, want to go to 10 plus. But we talk to, you know, everybody, tons of people under a million bucks. And we hear a lot of things like, you know, I really want to work myself out of this business and they’re at $800,000 in revenue. And, you know, I don’t want to tell them at the time, I kind of use this platform and the podcast to let people know what I think about these things. I’m like, you’re in it. You’re not out at 800K, a million isn’t the out. Like there’s no way you’re out if answers need to be, or questions come into you. So when, at what stage in the growth of a business do they really need to start looking at like installing management and leadership? Because it’s like, what we see is, okay, I’m gonna do everything myself, I’m gonna do everything with some helpers, I’m gonna find someone that can take care of some core responsibilities. You know, so I don’t have to, but I’m still working with them. And then eventually, okay, I’m gonna find some people that can take ownership of things. Can you just like give us a bit of a stage gap? Like when does that kind of stuff happen from your perspective?

Kevin Scott (30:50): Yeah, there’s definitely a difference between maintenance and design build or construction. In the design build construction and you can get pretty far. You can probably get to two and a half million with you being the primary person generating most of the sales, especially if you’re in the right fit areas where a lot of your projects are north of 200 grand or 150 grand with the odd, you know, $600,000 jobs sprinkled in. You can operate like that quite cleanly with a really clean crew with some clarity on how they do the work and what type of work they do well. Maintenance is a little bit different. know, once you get to the million dollar market maintenance, you likely need somebody else for support and customer care and really make sure that that customer experience is on point. And back to construction, yeah, once you get north of two and a half, that’s where the wheels start to fall off if you don’t have support. You you now need a full-time bookkeeper. You likely need somebody who does a bit of sales, as well as estimating, helping close projects, helping make sure that that customer comms are high so that you, you know, that again, that customer experience is as good as it can be presenting estimates, everything that we were touching on earlier. The ideal situation, I think for the construction guys is you get somebody who can do sales, a bit of design and help with estimating. That’s like the first person you hire in that position and then as you get to a four or five million, you add a full-time designer or you add a full-time salesperson and just keep building it out. But you can get far on your own. But I would say that two and a half mark is the pain point or where the pain starts.

Rob Murray (32:20): Yeah, you start holding all the ropes to keep this thing together.

Kevin Scott (32:24): Everything revolves around you all the customer relationships revolve around you and the longer you’re in business more of the more of those customer relationships you have where you’re starting to now get all those little calls that you eventually upset them on because they have little small projects that they want done and you’re just putting them aside because you don’t have the time you don’t have the time to connect with them you don’t have the time to send a small crew there that was the pain point like that’s what happened for with us is we just I’ve done a good job of building up a customer base and then we probably blew 20 or 30 % of it by disappointing them later.

Rob Murray (32:54): Yeah, well, mean, that’s a whole other subject. could probably have an entire episode around design build maintenance. you know, right, it’s there. You just did the thing anyway. But one of the things you touched on was customer experience and tight comms, know, responsive, clear, frequent. And we were talking about this before and we hear this a lot and see it a lot where customer communication and customer experience in a lot of people’s minds starts when they sign an agreement and what we’re trying to help people see is that it starts when they knock on your door. But that lead response, lead intake, lead follow-up, estimate, visit, quote, design, presentation, it’s all sloppy. The communication isn’t tight. Not for everybody, of course, but for the vast majority. So what’s something that you can leave the audience with in terms of how to look at sales communication and customer experience before they sign a deal?

Kevin Scott (33:46): There’s many, I know at Muskoka Landscapers, have about 120 step process from initial call or email to one year warranty inspection. So there’s a mountain of things that happen in between, but obviously the key parts are initial meeting, turnaround time, comms to close, comms after close are important as well. That’s a big gap in the construction industry that I think a lot of guys miss is they, I read a study actually last year, but there was a…high percentage of people becoming unconfident in who they selected and deposited with because they’re three or four months to construction start, there was no comms or the comms between sales and project management were done poorly. And some of that handoff information was not connected. Sales feel like they’re done. Project manager hasn’t started yet and customers are now reaching out to people, they’re getting less response, they don’t know who that person responding. You know what I mean? Like that whole handoff is. Yeah. Right? This is it, this is it. It’s likely one of the biggest steps that gets missed. then estimate presentation, I believe is massive, even on small projects, having that extra 15 or 20 minutes with a customer to walk them through why you’ve selected the products you have how you install them, what your warranty’s like, what maybe you do that’s different than your competitors or most competitors, what your warranty, the one-year warranty has been a massive one for us. We go back a year after the project’s completed and revisit it, check out anything that needs attention, ask them about, know, now that they’ve had it for a year, what do they like, what don’t they like, what would they have changed, is there any dark spots on the property? And often we’ll just go back the next day and tweak anything that needs tweaking. No charge. A little different because our jobs are quite big. So to go back and spend an extra day to tweak it is hassle. It’s also a sales call. And what I love about it is we try and do them mainly in the spring so that we have the whole summer of being fresh in their mind again at every dock party, at every boathouse party. When somebody brings up landscaping, they’re like, Hey, did you talk to these guys? So not only that, I think it just, it makes such a difference. think so many. So many contractors are great at the first 95 % of the job. They can get the job to 95%, they fumble it in the last 5 % and disappoint, whether that’s timeline or they pulled too many people to go to another job. Whatever the reason is, I think that last 5 % gets fumbled a lot. And then the aftercare really gets fumbled as well. And that meeting one year later, even if it’s just like a really well put together email as a follow up with some before and after photos or something like that. Is there any areas on the property that are not up to your expectations? Having those types of conversations a year out will bring them right back again.

Rob Murray (36:25): And raving too, right? Because it’s just like, yeah, it was this little thing. I didn’t really want to bug you guys about it because I was like, you the overall project was awesome. But now that you’re asking, it’s actually right here. And you’re like, yeah, OK, we’ll take care of it tomorrow. What? Have you talked to Muskoka? We.

Kevin Scott (36:35) Right. Right. Yeah, this is it. And like our weekly reporting, I know is a big, big win for us as well, where we get like creating that opportunity for them to say, Hey, I don’t really like the way they did that last week. You know, having opportunity and it goes the same for maintenance. If you don’t create opportunities for them to speak, often people get frustrated for months at a time before they say something you’ve already lost a little bit of confidence. But if you’re asking them all the time, you know, are there any other areas, hey, this was something we’ve seen that could use a little more attention. If those conversations are happening all the time your success rate is so much higher.

Rob Murray (37:11): Yeah, they go from a satisfaction of nine to eight to seven to six over like a three month period But if you find out there are nine and the next question the next time you ask there at eight What happened? Well, it’s nice. All right, let’s fix it And I mean that goes back to good to great right like know the harsh brutal reality of your situation so you can deal with it Anyway, you’re the best. If someone wants to get in touch with Kevin Scott, what’s the best way to do it?

Kevin Scott (37:31): Yeah, pretty easy to find on socials, LinkedIn, WealthyLandscaper.Community, MuskokaLandscapers.ca, LinkedIn, I’m in there, Instagram.

Rob Murray (37:39): Are you on coaching clients or community members? what’s the, what should someone, if they’re listening to this, they’re like, you know, I’m kind of interested in doing something like that. You know, what kind of person is it that is a good fit for the group?

Kevin Scott (37:51): Right, yeah. Honestly, my focus is mainly leanscaper customers because the way they’re building the platform, it’s very easy to coach with it, which is great. And I would say businesses kind of north of two and a half, three. Like once the guys that are getting to the pain point, those are the ones I think I can help the most and hopefully I can help their teams the most. And right now I’m really looking for one more. I’m still heavily involved at three or four different companies that. I’m partners at and Muskoka Landscapers obviously is a big part of that. So I’m really only doing, you know, two to 300 hours a year right now of the coaching. That’ll likely change in the next five or six years. Probably do a little bit more. But for right now, yeah, one spot open and… Yeah, love to have somebody new.

Rob Murray (38:29): Cool, and then check out the wealthylandscaper.community because it can be a really cool place to get answers, be part of something, ask people what’s going on.

Kevin Scott (38:39): Yeah, there’s lots of good sharing in there, lots of good stuff for people to find and being able to reach out to people that have gotten to where you want to go. think it’s a great way to just have a conversation and DM them and try and make a connection.

Rob Murray (38:50): Epic. Thank you for doing this. And thanks again for everybody for listening to another episode of the IM landscape growth podcast.