Adding an additional service can unlock growth of your company

Local Roots Landscaping capitalized on the popularity of plunge pools in Pittsburgh by offering installations. (Photo: Local Roots Landscaping)

Have you ever struggled with a subcontractor and wondered, “Could we do this in-house instead?” Or had a client request that you per form a service you’re not currently offering? Or wondered how you could differentiate yourself from the competition?

If so, it just may be time to add a new service line. There’s a lot to consider before adding a new offering, so we turned to a handful of landscape professionals who’ve gone down this path to share the pros and cons.

“When you offer a very respectable service and people love what you’re doing for them, they want you to do more,” says Joshua Malik, CEO of Joshua Tree Experts in Stockertown, Pa. “We did have a lot of clients calling us out of the blue, ‘Hey, do you guys also do this?’ ‘Hey, why aren’t you doing this?’”

Diving in

Local Roots Landscaping in Pittsburgh saw an increased demand for pool installations as the perfect opportunity to dive right in, says managing partner Kenneth Deemer.

The operation, which also offers residential and commercial landscape design/build and maintenance and residential autonomous mowing, previously subcontracted pool installations.

“We realized that integrating pool installations into our in-house capabilities would streamline operations, improve quality control and offer a more seamless experience to our clients,” he says.

Deemer says Local Roots considered a few pool suppliers before landing on Soake Pools, a plunge-pool supplier. Deemer says the process took about a year from when he and his business partner, Patrick Murray, decided to add pool installations to when Local Roots installed its first Soake Pool. Since Local Roots serves clients in the Pittsburgh metro area, a pool with a smaller footprint was a natural fit for clients with small backyards.

“I knew there was a big niche for (plunge pools),” he says. “They were blowing up. No one in Pittsburgh was doing them. I was like, ‘This is a great window of opportunity for us.’”

Deemer says he and Murray researched the permits, equipment, training and certifications necessary to bring pool installation in-house. He adds that a critical part of adding pool installation is the relationships the Local Roots team built with crane, plumbing, electrical and shipping suppliers.

“These projects require a relatively high degree of collaboration and competency from your industry partners, and that also allows you to move into those things more quickly where you’re just filling a project management role rather than having to train your team to do all these complex tasks,” he says.

Deemer says pool installations boost Local Roots’ presence in Pittsburgh.

“Incorporating pool installations has opened up new revenue streams and expanded our client base, attracting customers who specifically seek professional landscaping services with integrated pool installations,” he says. “By diversifying our service offerings, we have strengthened our competitive advantage in the market and positioned ourselves for long-term growth and success.”

Resource management

The operations at Cherrylake, No. 144 on the 2023 LM150 list, include a 1,800-acre tree farm, a landscape and irrigation construction division and a landscape maintenance division in Groveland, Fla. To better compete within a tough landscape maintenance market in the Sunshine State, Cherrylake recently added sustainable landscape management.

“We were looking for a way to be a little bit different and to find a way to create more value for our properties and our customers,” says Timothee Sallin, co-CEO of Cherrylake. “Just to get out of that hyper-competitive environment and to find some niche services where we could stand out.”

Cherrylake added sustainable landscape installations and management to help distinguish itself from its competitors in a tough commercial market in Florida. (Photo: Cherrylake)

Sallin says Cherrylake’s leadership team believes in better resource management, something sustainable landscape management aligns directly with.

Crews no longer manage all clients’ properties the same and utilize native plants for landscaping projects. Gone is gas-powered equipment. Sallin says crews focus on pruning, weeding and general gardening. He says crew leaders develop crews’ horticultural skills to help them understand native plants’ growth cycles.

“We have to train our people to be very attentive to what’s going on with water,” he says. “That means understanding what’s going on with the soils and how the soils are retaining water and paying close attention to the conditions that affect water use.”

He says Cherrylake invested in research and trial gardens to learn how to manage and maintain these native plants.

“We’re finally getting some momentum with some big customers now,” he says. “It’s going to be a lot easier to get everybody’s buy-in because they can see not just the research and investment that we’re making, but now they can see there are some really big customers that are signing up for this.”

Green light

Grunder Landscaping Co. (GLC) in Miamisburg, Ohio, decided to bring its lawn care and pest control services in-house in 2022 after subcontracting the service for many years. Seth Pflum, president and COO of GLC, says a big driver of this move was to ensure its lawn care services were on par with the quality GLC provides through its landscaping, hardscaping and maintenance services for its 60 percent residential and 40 percent commercial clientele.

“Any time you sub it out, you lose a little bit of control, you’ll lose a little bit of what makes your organization unique,” Pflum says.

Pflum says it helped that GLC had a champion of the cause in Brian Davis, director of lawn care for Grunder Green, who wanted to bring the service under the Grunder roof. Pflum says Davis made applications in the first year to understand how the operation needed to estimate and price its services. Additionally, the company spent time integrating the new offering.

“The first year we brought in 15 to 20 properties in-house,” Pflum says. “The second season, we brought in all the properties we were subbing out — around 150 properties. We ran with one truck and tweaked it. We analyzed the numbers on the production side, to understand where we need to be on markups, on the materials and what our proposals are going to look like.”

GLC decided to establish the lawn care and pest control services as Grunder Green as a nod to GLC’s founder and CEO, Marty Grunder, but also to distinguish the two services, Pflum says.

“We can do it all out of one simple truck, one-stop,” Pflum says of pest control. “(Technicians) can fertilize the yard and handle the pest control around the perimeter of the home and any other services that we can add on.”

Pflum says the Grunder Green team is still perfecting marketing strategies for these new services.

“We’re learning the different cycles of sales for that business,” he says. “It’s a lot different than selling landscape and landscape maintenance. It’s very heavy in the last part of the first quarter. In our eyes we’re learning — it’s so marketing driven — how to acquire new Grunder Green clients because of the volume that you need. We’re hitting our goals that we want to hit for this year.”

Meeting customer demand

Joshua Tree Experts, a residential tree maintenance, plant health care, pest control and lawn care company expanded its offerings in 2017 to include lawn care to meet customer interest and demand. The company also added interior and exterior pest control in 2020.

Joshua Tree Experts added indoor and outdoor pest control and lawn care services as a response to an increased demand from its customers. (Photo: Joshua Tree Experts)

Malik says adding lawn care didn’t happen overnight.

“It took us probably about close to two years, where we really put some plans together and really pushed the launch,” he says.

Joshua Tree’s leadership team talked about its target market and lawn size, the budget for adding new equipment, uniforms, goals and training. Malik says the company also realized the similarities between lawn care and plant health care.

“We already had a really good idea of what it was going to take to add lawn care,” he says. “In that time of talking about it, planning it, you’re making decisions (like), what style of trucks do you want to do? Are we going to do granular? Are we going to do liquid applications, or are we going to do organic?”

Malik says Joshua Tree sets budgets for each profit center separately to accurately keep track of expenses. Malik says one thing he learned the hard way was that his existing software program didn’t support indoor pest control. Malik says adding both pest control and lawn care helped his operation streamline its processes.

“It’s helped us become better business-minded,” he says. “It’s helped us prepare and plan better year over year. It helped us be able to structure pricing much better. It’s given us the tools and the ability to perform more efficiently internally.”

Synergy in services

Tony Nasrallah founded Ground Works Land Design in 2009 in Westlake, Ohio. As his residential design/build and maintenance company took on more projects, his team ran into product availability and subcontractor quality issues. He says Ground Works Land Design crews would nearly complete an outdoor kitchen, only to face delays in getting countertops.

“By the time the kitchen’s done and the patio’s done, we’re just waiting for countertops to wrap the job,” he says.

The delays in getting products and increased demand for his company’s services pushed Nasrallah to make a move. In 2021, Nasrallah purchased U.S. Marble & Granite and rebranded it to Granite Works Stone Design. Nasrallah also launched GW Capital, a parent company to manage multiple ventures, including Ground Works Land Design, Granite Works Stone Design and the subsequent additions of Purchase Green Cleveland in 2022 and Irrigation Works + Outdoor Lighting in 2023.

He says GW Capital creates synergy between Granite Works Stone Design, Ground Works Land Design, Purchase Green and Irrigation Works + Outdoor Lighting.

“We will continue to focus on vertical integration,” he says. “We are able to feed each other work. Customers are coming into Granite Works to pick out kitchen countertops for inside their homes and that leads to the opportunity to work on their outdoor kitchen and their landscaping and so on.”

Ground Works Land Design subbed out irrigation installations until it had a strong enough client base to justify adding Irrigation Works + Outdoor Lighting to the GW Capital portfolio. (Photo: GW Capital)

Nasrallah says setting up GW Capital also allows the different companies to access a controller, human resources, a marketing director and more. GW Capital added each additional business to address the pain points Ground Works Land
Design suffered.

Before GW Capital added irrigation services, Nasrallah says Ground Works Land Design subcontracted until the leadership team felt it had enough irrigation clients to bring the service into the GW Capital family of brands.

“We didn’t want to jump into a new line of work until we knew we had a good handle on it,” he says.

He says these additions paid off for GW Capital, Granite Works Stone Design, Ground Works Land Design, Purchase Green Cleveland and Irrigation Works + Outdoor Lighting.

“It’s leading to more work,” he says. “We’re creating that integration between all the companies. It’s feeding work all the way across the board. I do see Irrigation Works and Purchase Green Cleveland growing outside of (the Cleveland area).”

Back in-house

Sunset Lawn & Landscape, a commercial landscape maintenance and snow removal operation that serves New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware, recently brought pest control in-house this year.

Steve Dadura, vice president of Sunset Lawn & Landscape, Somerdale, N.J., says a goal of this move was to increase the number of property visits by Sunset Lawn & Landscape team members.

“When we’ve got properties in Pennsylvania or Delaware, the only time we get to see them is when we physically go to visit the properties,” he says. “But if we were doing the turf applications (and) pesticide applications in-house, then that would be almost like a guaranteed monthly site visit that we can do the service plus do our quality checks of the overall property.”

Another big driver is the risk with pesticide applications, Dadura says.

“When you’re dealing with pesticides and people and compliance, even though the subs are fully licensed and insured — and we’re insured and now we’re licensed — I’d just like to bring the responsibility back to us,” he says.

He says pest control applications are also a good opportunity to look for proactive upsells.

“We approach it as more of a proactive offering,” he says. “And the more you’re on the site, the more you have face-to-face contact with the property managers, too.”
Dadura says this process took three to five years to ensure the company had the proper state licenses, insurance and training. Currently, the company holds a license for pest control applications in Pennsylvania and Delaware.

“It’s expensive to add a service and do it correctly,” he says. “That’s a lot of upfront money and ongoing expenses. So you (have) to let your clients know that you’re doing that for them.”