Ten years ago, I met Gene Freeman and Chris Strempek in Dallas, TX, right before we brought our group of GROW! 2016 attendees to their company, Complete Landsculpture. We were introduced by Jim Cali and Jason New, our partners in running our ACE Peer Group Program. Gene and Chris have become good friends since that.

This week Emily, Kennedy, and I were at McHale Landscape Design for the annual NALP Field Trip. It was a fast-paced 24 hours onsite with our fellow landscape professionals, but I'm back home now with a ton of notes in my OneNote and a lot of new ideas to make Grunder Landscaping Co. better. Here were my top takeaways:.

Earlier this year, we did an exercise with the entire Grunder Landscaping Team to talk about profitability and explain where all the cash goes in our operation. To simplify the conversation and put it into terms that are easy to understand, we used the trusted "Penny Exercise" or the "Where does $1.00 Go" method..

I've been selling landscaping for 40+ years now, and in that time, I've worked with all kinds of clients. I've sold to the engineers who want to talk about the specifics of the plan and see detailed drawings, the business owner who is worried about not having to worry about the landscaping, and the stay-at-home parent.

Being able to say you're an "Award-Winning Landscaping Company" is a nice feather in your cap, right? McHale Landscape Design uses the awards they win to drive their marketing efforts, and truthfully it's something we could do a better job of at Grunder Landscaping Co. so I've taken a special interest in studying how.

Earlier this week on our podcast, The Grow Show, powered by STIHL, we released an episode covering equipment purchases and detailing how we're planning ahead and making decisions on new pieces of equipment as Grunder Landscaping Co. (GLC) grows. You can watch that episode on YouTube here, complete with photos of some.

This month, our teams are working on updating our property maps for snow and salt services to ensure that we have all the information we need ahead of the first snow or ice event.

Across the country, we're hearing from our ACE Peer Group Members that sales are a challenge for teams this year. What we've seen at Grunder Landscaping Co. (GLC) is that the sales are out there, but our sales team is having to work a little harder to uncover them.

In an episode of The Grow Show, powered by STIHL, that will air later this month, I asked Lorenzo, one of our Group Leaders, if he'd rather work on a dirty jobsite or a clean one.

Grunder Landscaping Co. has grown rapidly in recent years, from $5M in annual revenue in 2020 to $15M in 2024. Nearly all of this growth has been organic, not through acquisitions, and we can attribute a lot of the growth to going after and successfully winning commercial work.