Navigating Challenges and Opportunities in Landscaping with Andrew Gross

Robert
Hi, everyone, and welcome to the I am landscape Growth podcast, where entrepreneurs help entrepreneurs grow faster, better, and stronger in the green industry. From leadership to sales to recruiting and operational excellence. We cover the topics holding entrepreneurs back and share how to get past those bottlenecks with the best in the industry. I’m your host, Rob Murray, co founder and CEO of Intrigue, a digital marketing company focused on helping landscape companies grow. So sit back and enjoy the show. All right, everybody, welcome back to another episode of the I am Landscape Growth podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I’m stoked to introduce Andrew Gross from the Mariani Premier group. Andrew, thank you so much for doing this.
A

Andrew
00:42
Oh, you’re quite welcome, Rob.
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Robert
00:46
You know, trying to think about his extensive background and his career of how I’m going to introduce Andrew today. And I don’t, I’m going to say it. I mean, I’m not trying to blow smoke, but kind of a master of marketing, a craftsman, if you will. History, from Unilever to Serta, and now part of one of the largest residential, construction, and landscaping businesses in the US. I mean, you’ve had quite the path. So I’m pumped for the audience to hear your perspective on today’s episode, but maybe you can give a bit more depth and a bit of a Cole’s notes of how you ended up coming from a place like Unilever to the Mariani Premier group.
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Andrew
01:30
Sure. Sure, Rob. And I’m really excited to be here today. Not to talk to you, but a chance to speak to everybody in the audience for this podcast. I guess if you talk about my career, I always knew I wanted to be in business. When I was in college, I actually had a summer internship with Pepsi, and I sort of got the brand management bug and knew I wanted to get into things related to brands. I knew I was going to have to get an MBA. So I went and worked in retail for a couple of years after school, got my MBA in Michigan, where I met my wife. And then we got a job in consumer products, originally with a company called Lynn Curtis that marketed hair care products like suave and salon Selectus and finesse some brands that aren’t around anymore.
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Andrew
02:14
And we got bought by Unilever and rose up the ranks there. And eventually I was running brand development for the hair care category. And that was bringing things like dove into the hair category. And I really love the opportunity to learn about consumers, build brands, build the programs around that lead teams. But I came to two realizations. One, I didn’t want to work for a $50,000,000,000.05 dimensionally matrix company. I’d done a lot of work on new products initiatives and really liked entrepreneurial teams. And at the time, were living in the Chicago area and we didn’t want to move. And working for big, multinational didn’t want to move, so you were going to have to move. So I ended up jumping ship and doing something different. I wanted to do something smaller, more entrepreneurial.
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Andrew
02:57
And I was recruited to come to Serta, the mattress company. When they were first bought by private equity investors, they were the number three brand in the market, and I helped them become the number one brand. We built the brand, built a famous campaign, the county sheep campaign, launched big innovations, grew the business, double the profit. And then went through some different ownership changes. We merged with another company called a bachelor’s company called Simmons. I was running the Certa brand, and I sort of realized at some point, it sort of became like Unilever all over again. It was big, and we didn’t want to. We were going to move the business to Atlanta. We didn’t want to move to Atlanta. So I wanted to do something different again.
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Andrew
03:40
And so I left there and did some consulting and advising working with startups and other businesses. And I was introduced to Frank Marianne a few years back when he had just started building what became the Mariani Premier group and talking about some of the challenges he was going to have. And as we brought these companies together, wanted them to operate as different brands underneath kind of an overall kind of company umbrella. Some of the challenges you saw on how they would continue to build their businesses, and it sort of dovetailed with some of the things I had done in the past, you know, working with multiple brands or businesses, working with different business partners, for instance, at Serta. And I really liked the business. You know, when I was a kid, my dad was very into gardening.
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Andrew
04:30
We had our own vegetable garden and perennial garden and rose garden, amongst other things. So I’d always had a little bit of a green thumb, and I never worked in a service business. That seemed attractive. And so Frank and team weren’t ready to hire someone like me. They were still building the business. And then about a year later, I was still doing consulting. They called me and said, hey, can you come talk to us? This thing is getting bigger now. We really need the help from someone like you. And that’s how I sort of made the pivot from being in the world of consumer products to being in the world of landscaping.
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Robert
04:58
Yeah, amazing, Marianne.
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Andrew
05:00
About 18 months, and it’s been great.
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Robert
05:02
Very cool. So, I mean, I’m pretty sure we could do episodes on each stage of that, but for the sake of today’s episode, because it is about the primary growth constraints holding entrepreneurs back in the green industry with, you know, and most people coming on the show are entrepreneurs in their own right. They’ve built their own landscaping business. A lot of times we have folks coming in from associations or business coaches that coach landscape entrepreneurs. You, if none have had, you know, in 35 episodes, the background you’ve had. So I’m really interested to hear your take on what you see as the primary growth constraint, holding entrepreneurs back in the green industry for lots of reasons. One, because of the background, but two, because of the position you’re in currently, you’re pretty deep next to dozens of entrepreneurs in the green space.
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Robert
05:54
So what do you see as the primary growth constraint?
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Andrew
05:57
Well, before I answer what the constraint is, I would talk about the strengths first. I haven’t come across an industry with as many passionate, resourceful, entrepreneurial, energetic, dedicated people as I’ve seen in the land. Yeah, right.
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Robert
06:19
Yeah.
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Andrew
06:20
Openness, the sharing. I think the collegiality while still being competitors is incredibly strong. And I see people and the focus on doing great work, doing right by clients, doing right by their associates, because this is a service business. So I’ve been in a lot of product businesses. So I’ve seen a lot of entrepreneurship, but. Right. Not in a world where, you know, ultimately you got to deliver that through people.
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Robert
06:51
Right.
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Andrew
06:52
Through physical goods, not just.
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Robert
06:54
Yeah. What you develop.
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Andrew
06:55
And so those are all tremendous strengths. And I think also that the commitment to lifelong learning, whether it’s learning from others, from different peer groups, from being part of associations, you know, the active role the NALP has, I think, in elevating the industry. I’ve been involved in other industry trade groups that have been more focused on sort of representing the industry to other parties, but as opposed to elevating the industry and all the people in the industry and also thinking about the future in the industry and how you bring people into the industry is fantastic as well. So those are all the strengths. I think the opportunity side happens, and it happens in any small business. Right.
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Andrew
07:33
Because you start a business, you’re wearing all the hats, and then over time, you have to figure out, well, here’s the things I don’t do well, and I need to start delegating them by hiring other people. And then the hard part comes, the things that I do well, that I actually do need to delegate so I can spend the time on thinking about the future growth of the business. And I think, you know, when you start talking about growth in a business, anybody that’s an entrepreneur is in a sales and marketing role. Right. Because they had to build their business.
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Robert
08:03
Yeah, they had to sell, Jeff.
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Andrew
08:04
Right. They had to sell. And at some point you come to the realization either I’m really good at this, but I need someone else to do it because I need to focus on other things to grow the business. Might be growing the infrastructure and the staffing of the business, entering new markets, new services, or I’m not as good as I need to be at this. I need to get a specialist. And so that’s kind of, I think, a sort of pivot or fulcrum point that I see with a lot of these companies. We see that with some of the companies that join our group at Marianne, Premier group, very successful. And they sort of hit a point where, you know what, I built a great business, but I know I could use some help in some areas to continue to grow.
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Andrew
08:43
And being part of our group certainly benefits them that way. So all that leads to kind of like your question about, so what’s the thing that’s holding them back? I look at it like, at a high level, and it’s about having a plan. And it’s one thing to say, okay, I have a business plan of certain ambitions. I want to get from 1 million, 3 million to 5 million to 10 million, but it’s breaking it down. Particularly when you think about marketing and sales into a detailed plan. It says, how am I going to grow? Where is that business going to come from in terms of clients, in terms of services, in terms of things I might be adding to business? And then what activities am I going to engage in that are going to get me to that growth?
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Andrew
09:24
And that will wrap into things about who you are, what’s your brand, what’s your message, what channels you want to deliver that to, where you get your leads from, what you’re trying to do with those leads. And the other day, it’s like if you ever saw the movie the Martian. Many stages.
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Robert
09:44
Damon, right. So, yeah, Matt Damon.
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Andrew
09:47
Matt Damon, yeah. Stranded on Mars. And at many stages, like, he faces like a series of obstacles to survive until, like, you know, they actually find out he’s still there and they can come and rescue him. But he constantly kind of says, well, I just got to put my head down, do the map. And that’s often what you have to do. In the business is you got to build the plan. You got to say, if I want to get, say, from 5 million to 10 million, where’s that revenue going to come from? How much it’s going to come from new clients, how much is going to come from increasing revenue from existing clients? How good do I need to be at retaining my clients? And what do I need to do that right?
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Andrew
10:23
And if it’s going to come from new clients, where are those new clients going to come from? Like, geographically, what type of clients? And then where the lead sources come from? Am I driving it from referrals, whether that’s from other clients or professional sources? Am I building relationships in the community, et cetera? And then also, what’s my marketing plan going to accomplish? And you kind of need to do that planning so that then you can activate your organization around what needs to get done in order to drive that growth. And if you’re working with a marketing partner, like intrigue, so they know what they need to do to fit that plan. Because I think it’s very easy. Sometimes companies will say, well, I’m not growing enough. I just need to hire a new agency. That’s only one part of your plan, right?
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Andrew
11:13
You know, your new agency can’t solve whether your people are effective at selling, whether they know how to do business development, whether you have the right services.
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Robert
11:19
Whether you show up on time and do a good job, whether you do.
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Andrew
11:22
The work and all that. That’s just one part of it. And so what I see often in companies is they may have a budget on paper, and they might say, next year we’re going to grow 10% and somewhat, we’re going to somehow get there, versus having a plan that breaks that down into your strategy and the actions that you need to take. That enables the people in your company to know what they need to do and accomplish and your partners, what they need to do for you.
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Robert
11:50
I love it. And it’s obviously something you’ve thought about because you articulated it very well. And if anybody’s listening to this, you should probably just rewind the last 90 seconds to 120 seconds and listen to it again, because what I think you did really effectively is lay out a bunch of the critical variables of what that plan needs to look like. And even when you said it, my first question I wrote down is, what does that plan look like? And then you just essentially answered the question. But maybe we can just unpack it a little bit by little bit, because there was a couple of things in there that I thought were, well, they’re all useful, but they go in different paths.
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Robert
12:30
One is something like how much of my new revenue is going to come from new clients and how much is going to come from current business and growing current business or keeping current business. Then there was this other piece around, okay, well, if it’s coming from new business, then where am I going to get that new business from? What activities am I going to engage in? And if it’s coming from current business, well, what new services are am I going to bring to my current customers? Or how am I going to increase revenue from my current customer base? So then if you were to start that planning process for somebody.
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Andrew
13:05
Yeah.
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Robert
13:07
So first question, how so you have an entrepreneur listening to this being like plans, I don’t know, how much time does it take someone to build a plan like that? I know it’s going to vary from person to person, but like, if you consider someone wants to build a plan, what would you recommend in terms of the amount of time that you need to put towards putting something like this together?
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Andrew
13:27
You know what I think a lot of this, if you can kind of get the right people in a room, you can do in a half a day’s work session.
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Robert
13:39
Perfect.
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Andrew
13:40
If you know your business well. And I should step back. I talked about building the plan sort of overneath. The plan is you need to know who you are and what you stand for. So there’s like two core principles that I always subscribe to. One is the brand. A lot of people talk about what’s your brand? Is your logo? Is it a tagline? Whatever the brand is, the experience is what your client experiences, all the every touch point you have. So you need to think about what your brand is and what makes it different. Right. And there’s various frameworks for that. I like to use a framework which is basically you should have a mantra or a key statement, a point of difference.
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Andrew
14:17
You should know then underneath that, kind of what are the points of parity, the things that you need to deliver to be competitive, and then what are the points of difference, the things that make you different? Maybe it’s a particular service offering or approach that you go after and you should define kind of what you think your values are. So that’s like the brand side of it. And then you have to think about marketing as a process. Marketing is a process of getting and keeping a customer. So that will get to your question. Right. What I just said is if it’s the process of getting and keeping a customer, then I have to figure out, all right, what customers and how many customers I need to get, right? What’s my retention, how am I going to keep them?
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Andrew
14:54
And then, you know, the other part of keeping a customer is how do I increase my revenue with them, sell more to them. And I don’t mean just take price increases, but actually expand more, value the services and value that I deliver to that customer.
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Robert
15:07
So what do you say, I mean, we’ll come back to a couple of pieces here, but what do you say to somebody who’s writing, let’s say a $7 million design build, don’t do maintenance. I’m like, does I build maintenance? Like, no, we don’t do maintenance. Like, so you just build these beautiful landscapes and then you give it away to somebody else to maintain.
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Andrew
15:22
Right.
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Robert
15:23
And they essentially say, yes. What do you say to them? Like, how can you help them see maybe things a little differently? I think it’s bananas, but I don’t necessarily want to tell them that. Maybe it’s not always bananas, but it seems crazy to always have to have new clients coming through the door every year.
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Andrew
15:39
Well, I think there’s a few thoughts about that, and that’s something that we certainly focus on in Marianne, Premier group. Right. You know, we like our business. We have, you know, strong design build components in our business. But also maintenance is very important to our business and it’s important because it’s recurring revenue and it’s building relationships with clients over time. And those relationships can lead to other relationships. So, you know, if I looked at a business that was design build only, I would probably say that probably a lot of their marketing has been more to kind of professional sources than directly to consumers because they’re probably looking at if they do, for instance, bid build, they would be talking landscape architects. If they’re doing just design build, they’re probably talking to builders, architects, interior designers, etcetera, to get into those jobs.
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Andrew
16:34
So that is a relationship component. But then, yes, but they’re delivering a great service to these clients. Wouldn’t you want to take advantage of that relationship by building recurring revenue component to that? So to me, that’s an opportunity for growth. If I was thinking about the strategy there is, how do I convert my existing construction clients to maintenance clients, then over time, now that I have a maintenance business, how do I leverage the strength that I’ve built in that maintenance business, assuming that I do great work to secure more maintenance only clients? And that could be through client referrals, could be building strong relationships or density in certain communities. And none of this, by the way, I’ve said, actually starts to get into what the marketing plan could be.
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Andrew
17:20
This is just about trying to figure out organically how I’m going to grow the business from a sales standpoint. So that’s where back to that exercise, right. If you do the work and understand what this current structure of your business is, what the opportunities in the market are, and then think about, all right, if I’m going to want to grow. Marketing is a process of getting and keeping a customer, which means in the end of the day, what I’m trying to do is drive behavior, trying to get people to do something right.
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Robert
17:49
High value activities, right.
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Andrew
17:51
It might be the sign, initial construction contract to convert that contract to a maintenance contract to get additional maintenance people to sell more enhancements to those are all behaviors, right. And so you start to define your plan. Well, what needs to happen there? And then how am I going to make it happen? What do I have to communicate to some, to whom, in what context, in order to be able to do that? So it’s sort of just working out that process, that’s what you’re trying to do in a planning meeting. I always subscribe to. I’m going to paraphrase this, because I don’t have it right in front of me, but Eisenhower famously said in World War Two that something to the effect that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.
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Andrew
18:32
And the point was, you create a plan and as soon as the ink is dry from your printer, it’s already obsolete. Something has changed in the market, but the process, like planning, that process is super important because now you have a framework that, yeah, when new information comes in, maybe something changes in the market, maybe someone changes internally, then you adjust the plan.
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Robert
18:55
You would 5% instead of having to create one to 100%.
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Andrew
18:59
Right. Right. Now you have a thought process and an approach that your team is aligned around. So some people will say back to your original question about, well, how much time will this take? Is that worth the time? It is worth the time because you have to think about, it’s not just about to produce a piece of paper. It’s really about engaging in that dialogue about how we’re going to grow the business and continually building on that dialogue.
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Robert
19:25
I totally agree. And one of the things we found, so we subscribed to a couple of different frameworks. We did the four disciplines of execution many years ago with Covey, and then we tried out the entrepreneurial operating system and then scaling up and scaling up has got this one page strategic plan. EOS has got this vision traction organizer. Anyway, they’re cool tools because they provide a framework with empty boxes, and then you and your team go in and fill the boxes. And what I found was that filling an empty box was actually quite time consuming and difficult. And there was a lot of debate and there was rigor. But once it was filled out, once going back and refining it was actually quite simple.
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Andrew
20:09
Yep.
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Robert
20:10
So, just curious, is there a framework that you would suggest someone to check out as a starting point so they don’t build it from scratch? Or how would you say someone kind of gets started doing something like that?
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Andrew
20:21
Yeah, it’s a great question. You know, I have looked at both eos and scaling up, or read both books, and it’s. By the way, it’s interesting to, like, delve a little bit into the behind the scenes war between, particularly Vern’s understudy. Yeah, Verne Harnish. And what he sees is his understudy, Gina Wickman. But that’s probably a whole other podcast.
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Robert
20:47
Well, the irony, too, is that Verne started Eo, and eos is more popular inside Eo than scaling up, which is just funny.
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Andrew
20:55
Yeah. Anyway, sorry, we’re going to get your audience a little bit off track there, but if you want to get sidetracked, subscribe to Vern Harness’s newsletter. It’s actually a lot of interesting stuff in there, but also subtle digs at EOS. And so I have tended to use, like, the framework I just told you about, like, existing customer, new customers, existing customers, retention, et cetera. The way I look at it is I try to build a plan on a page, and so imagine a piece of paper in the top. It says, okay, what’s the vision for my business? What’s my mission or purpose? What’s my goal for this year? That usually is a financial goal in terms of sales and profit. Then I recommend no more than four key initiatives.
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Andrew
21:52
I’m going to tell you three of them generically, which I just said, actually, I’ll go through all four if you’re in a design, build and maintenance business. Right. So those four generic initiatives are going to be all right for design, build. I want to get more projects or jobs, so how am I going to get those right? And then the next part will be the actions for that. For maintenance, I’m trying to increase my maintenance clients, right. The number of clients I have under contracted maintenance. I then want to have an initiative about how do I increase revenue per existing client and then the last sort of generic strategy is, how am I going to drive increased retention? And retention is super important here. If you haven’t done the most important, right. If you haven’t done the math, like, do the math on paper.
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Andrew
22:48
I’ll give you a simple example. Everybody will cite different close rates, and they’ll say their close rates are like astronomy. 80 a 80% one. I’m just going to use a rule of thumb and say your close rate is probably 33%. And the reason it’s probably 33% is most humans, like, especially for any big project, they want to get three bids, and so they’re going to choose one of those. So say it’s 33% and say you have 100 clients and you want to grow 10%. So you need 110 clients. Okay, so. And so you’d say, oh, I just need ten new clients. So if I need ten tuned clients and my close rate is 33%, then I need 30 new qualified leads. Yeah. But now think about retention.
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Andrew
23:33
So if my retention is only 80%, I actually start from a hole, right, that I lose 20 clients. So actually, if I want to grow 10%, I actually have to add 30 new clients in total. Not ten new clients, 30 new clients. And if I. My close rate is 33%. Right, then that’s actually 90 new or 100. Yeah, sorry, 100. Right, yeah, sorry.
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Robert
24:04
Yeah. Qualified leads.
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Andrew
24:05
Yeah, 100 qualified leads versus, before I said a much smaller number. And then you think about, how much does it cost for me to get a lead? Like, your costs go up hugely well.
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Robert
24:17
And what’s fascinating in your example is if you have 200 customers and you do the same math, it just starts to exponentially become a bigger gap.
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Andrew
24:30
Yes.
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Robert
24:31
With an 80% retention rate, now you’re down 40, and if you want to get to 210, you need 50. And on that 33%, you do 150 leads, that retention rate being 90 plus percent. If you want to grow a business, that is so huge.
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Andrew
24:47
Right? So that’s why I’m saying if you build a one page plan, it says, hey, here’s my vision, my mission, my financial goals, and here’s four key strategic pillars in our business. Again, if I’m a DB and maintenance business, I want to add more design construction clients, I want to add more maintenance clients, I want to increase the revenue with existing clients, and I want to retain, you know, x percent of my clients. And you can define those with numerical goals. Right. We just talked about retention. I think in this business, your goal should be, you know, 90% plus retention revenue expansion per client.
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Andrew
25:24
You can set a goal there saying, you know what, out beyond price increases, I want to increase the revenue 5% or whatever your new growth is going to be based on what you think your growth role for the, you know, growth objectives for the company, both on the design, build and the maintenance side. And then from there you can say, all right, what are my actions I’m going to do with that? Right. Design, building one of my clients, it might be, you know, I’m going to build relationships with these professional groups or whatever in terms of sourcing the business might be certain. Advertising, maintenance, I’m going to, you know, increase my referrals, increase my conversion of DB to maintenance. Right. You can set specific actions. Right. And around that, and then you can then say, how am I going to measure it?
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Andrew
26:06
So how am I going to know that I’m progressing towards that goal? And you can get that all with the right size font and those that were watching online. I mean, you can get this one page and then what you do is, and that’s sort of the plan on page I like to build and then I have like two other pages with it. So it’s not entirely a plan on page. The second page is, okay, now I took those pillars. What do I want to do? What are those key things I’m going to do? How much am I going to spend against each of those? So you can figure out your budget. What’s the measure?
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Andrew
26:43
How am I going to know if I’m successful and who in my company is going to be doing this to make sure, you might say it’s all in one person, but sometimes different people. That’s your detailed action plan and budget. So you can figure out your budget. Because what I see often in businesses and what I’m outlining here when I talk about not having a plan, I see businesses that sometimes they have a budget, but they actually haven’t figured out their activities in a plan. They’re just like, you know what? We’re going to spend $50,000 in marketing next year.
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Robert
27:19
Oh, yeah, that’s so common. And even if they have that, sometimes that’s not even right.
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Andrew
27:23
I see people that have an activity plan. Here’s all the things we’re going to do. We’re going to place these print ads and we’re going to do this one event and we’re going to spend a little money updating our website and we’re going to print some new brochures and all that. And they have a list of activities. And here’s how much they cost, but it’s not a plan because they’re not tied to a business result. So why are you printing those brochures? What goal is that? Are you trying to achieve with that? Right. How are you going to measure placing that print ad? Right. So it’s not tied to. So it’s not a plan. It’s just, it’s just an activity plan. It’s not a, it’s not a strategic plan. Right.
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Robert
27:57
Yeah.
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Andrew
27:57
So that’s the second page and then the third page is simply, it’s a calendar. Right. One of these key things going to happen across the year. And the beautiful thing about landscaping, and it obviously depends on where your business is in different parts of the country. That’s natural cadence. It follows the seasons.
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Robert
28:18
The demand cycles are predictable.
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Andrew
28:20
They’re predictable. The tulips are going to come out of the ground at the same time of the year. And maybe it might be a couple of weeks earlier if it’s a warmer spring. You know, the drive periods, particularly on the maintenance part of the business. You know the drive periods, you know what you need to be selling when, whether it’s selling new existing clients or new services to existing clients, you sort of know the same thing in terms of design build when you need to cultivate those big projects. Right. So you can lay out these activities against the plan. You know, there’s no, you should be able to go into the season knowing, again, plan on paper. Once the ink is dry, yes, things will change. But you should already know exactly when I’m going to plan to do things.
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Andrew
29:00
You know, I’ll give you a sort of semi related example. I was talking to someone, candidate for a role that we haven’t hired, that we didn’t hire this candidate that was working on a, she had a role in pool care business, pool chemicals. And her job was they had an activity plan for pool chemicals that was granular to the day for the, for the season, because obviously it’s a seasonal business. But they knew exactly from marketing standpoint what messages they were going to deliver when even down to what emails, what social posts, everything was calendar out going into the season.
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Robert
29:41
Yeah.
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Andrew
29:42
Now that, you know, now they left space, like if there’s, you know, major storms or other things that they would need to adjust, but they knew what they were going to do as they went in the season. So that’s the third part, is having that calendar. And the calendar should follow the natural calendar of your business. It often leads your salespeople. Right.
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Robert
30:03
Well, and a lot of times people try to, like, they’re, what are we going to do this year? What are we going to do this year? It’s the same, it doesn’t have to be reinventing the wheel every year. Like a lot of times folks forget that consumers make this purchase once as much as we do it all day, every day. A lot of people don’t see the stuff that you had in market last year. You don’t have to be verbatim the exact same, but you can leverage the same approach to content and what you’re doing from a calendar perspective.
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Andrew
30:29
I think it’s really, absolutely. We tend to, as internal people in business, and particularly marketers, we get bored with our stuff much sooner than our consumer because they’re not paying attention and we’re paying attention to it every day. And so you’re absolutely right. The other thing is like, don’t reinvent the wheel. Yes, you always want to continue to improve and you should experiment, but when things are working, don’t say, well, we should just change it because we need to change it because your audience is not, especially in business like this. This is not a fashion business. Right. So in that sense, yes, trends change, but there’s a lot you can learn from the previous year, what worked and apply that going forward.
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Robert
31:13
Well, and like, you know, a lot of people also forget 3% of a market’s ready to buy.
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Andrew
31:18
Right.
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Robert
31:18
And so if that, so 97% of the people that you’re putting stuff out to probably don’t know that you said anything. So, yeah. Anyway, that’s, we don’t know.
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Andrew
31:30
And you need to be, but you need to be available. That’s why, for instance, that’s why we work with intrigue, because we know, for instance, then when people are in the market and they express that demand, for instance, through search, we need to be ready to communicate to them. And I stress also to our companies, like, you think about social media. A lot of people like to think about social media here and now. How did my last post perform? What kind of reach and engagement it gave, especially for younger people? Social media, Instagram and TikTok are search engines.
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Robert
32:06
Yeah.
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Andrew
32:07
And so you also have to think about the content you’re creating that people might pull it up months later because that’s when they’re actually interested in. Right. It’s not like someone is following every project that you post in social media that day, but then they can, in your company, then they might go to your Instagram and say, I’d like to.
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Robert
32:22
See their work, and then they get to know somebody who’s doing how to stuff. They build a relationship with the group and then all of a sudden they inquire eight months later.
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Andrew
32:29
Right. So you always have to think about, back to your point about we get bored with that stuff, but we’re always continually building and adding to our story for the future, for when that prospective client wants to come and discover us.
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Robert
32:42
Yeah, that’s cool. One of the things you said earlier was if you get the right people in the room, this should be a half days workshop. Can you talk a little bit more about what the right people would look like again, in the shoes of the entrepreneur, trying to figure out how to make all this happen. What do, what kind of people should I have around me?
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Andrew
33:05
It’s a great question. I think you certainly want people in a sales client facing role that understand what’s going on in the marketplace and what clients are saying and what they’re responding to. You want, if you’ve got a marketing, obviously you’ve got a marketing team member, you want that person in that meeting. If you have somebody, whether it’s in your company, that sort of can be objective and sort of call b’s and stuff, or you need to bring someone in from the outside part of that meeting that you trust. I would do that.
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Robert
33:39
Well, and that’s a separate point altogether. Having a mentor or a trusted advisor as an entrepreneur that’s outside your business, keeping you honest to your b’s and pushing you forward with accountability, whatever, is just a good idea. Sorry to meet interrupt, but that’s a side note.
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Andrew
33:54
That’s a good idea, especially when these kind of planning meetings, because it’s very easy for us to sort of get wrapped up in our own world. And so you need a little bit of objectivity there. And then it’s also good to have somebody that knows the numbers because we’re going to start trying to put some numbers together to this stuff. And listen, a lot of our entrepreneurs, people did not get into the landscaping business because they like spreadsheets, right? Most cases typically, yeah. You know, a lot of people, you know, Ken, or even when you talk about sales, they got in this business because they like their horticulture plants, they like creating landscapes.
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Andrew
34:30
So you have to recognize what you’re good at and you’re passionate at and then make sure you’re kind of building a table for this conversation that can kind of bring different skills to the table, but they all have to be open minded and willing to contribute, right? Yeah. So that’s, that’s the way that I, you know, try to encourage people when they think about kind of planning meetings.
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Robert
34:52
Yeah. And then the last thing I want to add to that planning meeting piece for the audience and you can speak to the statement in a minute here. But I find a lot of times when people start these off, they schedule a planning meeting. Everybody comes to the meeting, they may or may not have an agenda and they start to have the meeting. Yeah. It’s from my experience working with it ourselves and with others, giving people prep work and a very clear agenda of what’s going to happen and when that prep work needs to be part of the meeting makes it so much better.
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Andrew
35:26
Yes.
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Robert
35:27
And if it’s your marketing and sales person, where did all our new business come from in the last twelve months? You know, what didn’t we win and what was the common reason why? Marketing person, what was our best lead source? What was our worst one? Where was our best cost per lead finance person, where are our margins on the project? Which ones were good, which ones are bad, you know, whatever it might be. But getting people engaged in work prior to coming to a session like that, super important.
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Andrew
35:51
Yeah, pre work is important. So like what we, you know, and you raised some things. So when we, when, you know, we haven’t talked a lot about, you know, my role at Marianne Premier Group. Right. We’re now a group of 20 of the finest residential landscaping companies across America and continuing to grow. And these are all fantastic, successful businesses, all bring great things to our group and also have things that they can learn from each other and learn from the group. And my role is to help them elevate how they’re going to perform in the market so they can continue to beat the industry in terms of growth. So when we go and work with companies, and I work with particularly their marketing teams on their plans, this is exactly what we do.
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Andrew
36:31
We try to say, all right, let’s build a plan against this framework. We need to look at some of the data and the inputs to see what’s working, what’s not working. We need to understand the strengths and weaknesses and what drives your business. But doing all that kind of pre work before we start to build a plan is super important. It gets people thinking and also make sure that we stay grounded in the data and that’s something that we’re still working on with some of our companies. We’re putting a lot of effort into implementing better systems and processes. We’ve been putting this, as you know from your work with us, a lot of work on implementing a sales CRM.
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Robert
37:08
System so we can, so the information is accessible.
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Andrew
37:11
Right. Accessible. And we can consistently track sales, lead sources and results in a common way so that we can share that learning across companies, but that data and making sure that the folks that are coming to your planning process come armed with having done homework is super critical. But I will also stress, you don’t want to overdo the homework. There are people who, like, already arrived at the solution before you get to building the plan. That’s cool, because you got to let the sparks fly.
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Robert
37:42
Yeah, that’s cool. All right, so let’s do that quickly then. Can you just give an overview of Mariani Premier Group and when I was talking. So one of the things Frank’s always been talking about is raising the standard of professionalism in the industry. Met with him down in Mexico and, you know, within the first two happiness speaking, there’s raising the standard of professionalism in the industry. You know, it’s just like this mantra. And then working with you folks and all the different companies and going through the onboarding process, it was pretty common thread. Everybody was looking to increase the standard of professionalism in the industry through the actions of their own company. So what is the Marianne Premier group all about? Can you just give us a quick overview of what this whole initiative is and what’s going on?
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Andrew
38:29
Well, first of all, I mean, I think Frank will certainly speak to it much better. And he’s been out there on several podcasts recently talking about his inspiration and genesis of the greek. Right. And I think originally he brought the group together. I think for a couple of reasons. One, he personally was looking for a succession path as he thought about the development of Marianne Landscape, then the largest residential landscaping company in the country. He was thinking about other successful entrepreneurs and owners like him that had built their businesses and how they can continue to ensure that those businesses thrive and continue to grow beyond their time with those companies. I’ll make this the third thing. And then Frank has been a major advocate, as you talked about raising the professional standards in the industry.
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Andrew
39:21
How can you continue to develop and transform landscaping into an admired and respected profession on par with other professional groups? And that’s where I think his role, for instance, with NALP. When Na LP became the National association of Landscape Professionals, a lot was about sort of elevating the profile of the industry. And there are super fantastic talented people across all the disciplines in this industry, whether it’s in design, construction, installation, maintenance, that are true professionals at what they do. And so I think those were all themes that are part of thesis of saying, well, no one had ever created a national platform in residential. Residential is very fragmented, market by market. Certainly there was a lot of more consolidation in commercial than residential.
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Andrew
40:11
And the approach was not to take the approach that has been done with some of the companies in commercial, where essentially it’s sort of a consolidation or roll up of local brands into one national company, which sort of becomes a little bit impersonal and commoditized. This was, how do we maintain the spirit of a local brand and the relationships they’ve built, but make them part of something bigger where they can share the professionalism and expertise that we can build across the companies? And that’s sort of what we’ve been building with Marianne Premier Group. Our vision is to be the world’s premier outdoor land, outdoor living company. Our mission is really to kind of transform landscaping through the combination of creativity, technology and service. And how we kind of go to market is as a house of brands.
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Andrew
41:02
Each of our companies operates as their own brand in their market, but they’re supported by the common infrastructure of Marianne Premier group, whether that’s in technology or human resources, or finance, or national procurement programs or sales development or in this case, in terms of marketing, how to elevate how they go to market to reach both their existing clients and new clients. And we’ve been fortunate to work with Rob, you and your team, with several companies in doing that. So that’s sort of the story. And I think by doing that, we’re contributing to elevating the professionalism in the industry by sort of creating an entity that really hadn’t existed before, 100%.
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Robert
41:44
And I think one of the things that’s neat, there’s lots of what’s going on, because having engaged you guys for the better part of eight months, ten months, nothing’s deviated from that. That’s been the initial part of our conversations all the way through to what we’ve experienced. And there’s just no question it’s happening. But I think one of the things you’ve got going is that you guys are going to start setting massive precedences about how you can leverage this type of stuff to help support the growth of these companies that really are professionals in the industry and really have amazing businesses. Okay, so as we wrap up a couple of resources, what would you say in terms of speakers, authors, just points of inspiration, maybe one or two resources that you think people should check out?
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Andrew
42:33
That’s a great question. I mean, well, we talked about, for small entrepreneurial businesses, we talked about eos and scaling up. I think they’re both great in different ways and I think they provide different frameworks there. The approach that I sort of outlined to planning sort of ties in a little bit to what those companies do. And then it’s interesting because I’m not going to talk specifically about planning, but in terms of a lot of companies struggle with figuring out their brand story. So I am a fan of the story branding framework and Donald Miller’s books. That’s helpful for a lot of kind of companies like this. It sort of takes, you know, thinks about their brand along the lines of the hero’s journey.
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Andrew
43:28
And since we’re in kind of in a company client relationship, remember that we’re the client is the hero, we’re just the guide. I think that framework is super helpful to companies in this space. And so to me, you know, that is an inspiring thing. And I think if you want to really get to the source material there, then you can go back to Joseph Campbell and Hero, thousand faces and things like that. So those are, those have been some of the things that have been most inspirational to me. There are certainly different blogs and newsletters that you can follow in the space of marketing. You can sort of get overwhelmed with that a little bit and like, you know, kind of get into sort of the trick or trend of the day. I’m a big believer.
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Andrew
44:20
You got to get the fundamentals right and they’re timeless. Enduring right. Those are timeless. I have a former colleague of mine, a gentleman named Mitch Duckler, has just written, he’s written a couple of books. One sort of like how to build brands. The other one right now is sort of on sort of how to approach marketing in the current era. And I had a recent conversation with them about a lot of this still comes down to enduring principles that we learned decades ago. It’s just applying them in new medium, whether that be Instagram, TikTok, or what might be coming next. For a lot of the companies, I think it’s be careful about the bright shiny object and make sure you really understand the fundamentals of who you are and how you’re going to attack your marketplace.
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Andrew
45:08
And then you can figure out the appropriate media to do that.
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Robert
45:11
I love it. I mean, and a lot of things in all the stuff you’ve mentioned, whether it’s Gino Wickman’s Eos Ferns scaling up, Donna Miller’s story brand, Joseph Campbell, and I bet you Mitch Shuckler talks about this stuff is just don’t forget, it’s about the customer. It’s not about you. It’s about the customer. I find that when people just use that as an orthar, a lot more things fall into place properly. You’re the best. Thank you so much for doing this.
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Andrew
45:43
Well, Rob, thanks so much. Thanks so much for the time. Really enjoyed working with you. And folks can find me. You can find me on LinkedIn. Reach out to me if you want to learn more.
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Robert
45:55
Andrew Gross, thanks, man.
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Andrew
45:57
Thank you.