Jim Campanella has a simple goal. He wants to be the dominant lawn care provider in his region. “The Northeast, that’s our footprint right now,” says Campanella, owner of Nashua, NH-based Lawn Dawg. Lawn Dawg, which operates in four states, has made four acquisitions since 2009 — the most recent one just last month. And Campanella is certainly not alone... read more
It finally happened! It took two decades, but I eventually won the outlaws’ (inlaws’) McNamara Fantasy Football League this year! Strike that. Actually, we won it — “we” being our oldest son, Mickey (17), me (the clueless Old Man helping run the front office) and the talented team we drafted, refined and fielded on a weekly basis. A perennial bench... read more
I was 15 years old when I experienced my first merger. Three years earlier my division had been spun off from the whole company. I was 12 when my parents divorced in 1978. Our “company CEO,” my dad, moved about an hour and a half away, so I essentially had one remote boss, while our division president, mom, ran the day-to-day... read more
By now you have closed out your 2011 financials and you might be asking what this thing is worth? It’s a metric you should quantify each year regardless of your perceived “exit” timeline. Growing a company’s enterprise value requires planning, people, and perseverance. Great deals don’t just fall into an owner’s lap overnight. It takes planning and involves execution, typically... read more
Provided you’ve been paying attention for the past couple of years, you know the marketing landscape has changed pretty drastically — and continues to change by the day. If you haven’t been paying attention, prepare to have the rug pulled out from under you very, very soon. Social media has turned the focus of marketing away from the hard sell,... read more
Robert Maffei, president of Maffei Landscape Contractors, remembers the day he went from a contractor running a small operation that would make him enough money to put himself through school to a full-time Green Industry business owner. “We were working on the street corner at this nice insurance company that was having us put a new lawn in,” Maffei recalls.... read more
