The motto–and marketing message–at Sun Valley Landscaping, featured in the July 2015 LM cover story, is “Landscapes for Life.” The company has parlayed that maxim into a partnership with the Omaha Storm Chasers, the Kansas City Royals AAA affiliate, which plays at 4-year-old Werner Park. For the last three seasons, Sun Valley has sponsored the team’s pregame show and has... read more
Another venture from Patrick Crais, founder of Blue Watchdog Conservation—which was featured in the July 2014 cover story of Landscape Management, Blue Pandas is a water conservation software company started by Crais and two other engineers, Martin Grant and Tom McKenzie. The software automates Blue Watchdog’s water management tasks, allowing the company to manage sites more efficiently and enabling its customers... read more
It’s 6 a.m. on Friday, June 20. I pour a cup of coffee and sit down at my kitchen counter to check my email on my smartphone like I do on all workdays. It’s probably a bad habit, I realize, but I like to clear out the clutter so it’s not waiting for me when I arrive at the office... read more
There’s hardly a contractor who’s not concerned with pricing challenges and the negative impact they have on gross margins. The competitive environment has put enormous pressure on service companies to find savings wherever possible. As a result, many maintenance companies take the easy way out. They cut hours and force crews to do more work in less time. This is... read more
My partners and I gather the financial data from many of our clients nationwide, dump the information into a big cauldron, stir it around and run some interesting benchmarks to provide you a report card about the successes of 2013. This year we isolated the predominately landscape maintenance firms—30 of them—totaling $251,481,724 in annual volume for fiscal 2013. The range... read more
The U.S. uses more gallons of water outdoors per day than there are people on the planet. The ratio: 9 billion gallons to 7 billion people. More startling than that is 50 percent of that outdoor water is wasted due to overwatering, according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) WaterSense program. It’s landscape and irrigation professionals like Kurt Thompson who... read more
