A few years ago I had the pleasure of meeting with a large privately owned lawn company. The owner is a charismatic businessman and has grown his business from nothing to over 15,000 customers over many years. He started his lawn care profession as a manager for a large national lawn care company and decided he could do a better job on his own than with the restraints that come with corporate lawn care. As he grew, he needed help to manage and maintain his business. Here is where the story gets interesting:

During the meeting, the owner was absolutely enamored with what our products could do for his business; his fellow advisors however, were not. Why? We solved many of the problems that they use as a profit center. The colleague’s exact words were, “I know that we create these fungus issues by applying too much nitrogen, but I make over a million dollars a year fixing problems that I create.”

Wow.

The most interesting thing about this conversation wasn’t the lack of interest; that colleague understood the benefits, the cost savings, the ease of use and even the results, it all came down to “create and kill.” This is a major issue in our industry. Many operators do not understand that they are creating the issues that they battle every day. The ones that do know this however, are profiting greatly by their disservice to their client base. If the word of something like this spread through a lawn care companies’ clients, the fallout would be disastrous. So what do we do?

Solve rather than create problems. As a “Lawncologist” you must properly diagnose and treat issues that face your clients’ properties and do so in an ethical and sustainable manner. Here is an example;

Let’s say that you have a new client whose lawn can only be described as “WeedZilla.” The best thing to do in this situation is to explain the cycle of death and growth that is about to take place with your customer. Because, when you kill the weeds, there will be gaps in the density of whatever turf may actually be there. The first thing that will happen when the soil is exposed is a magnification of heat; this will cause both carbon loss and nutrient loss. This action causes the otherwise healthy turf surrounding the gap to suffer. When this happens, more weeds will grow in the die-back areas that weren’t coated in weeds before. The only way to prevent this from happening is seeding or sodding barren areas, and fertilizing the depleted soil. Carbon and nutrients must be added back to the system for a lawn to recover quickly. Customers MUST understand this part of the process and that you will need time to give them the “Award Winning” lawn they all want.

As you can see from the above example, you cannot take something out without adding something else back in. Everyone wants to have a beautiful lawn; it’s your job to make sure that happens and to keep you customer in the loop on the progress. Otherwise, you are creating the “Spiral of Death” which, of course, will end up with you getting bad reviews on Yelp…

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