Find Your Landscaping Business Mentor
Wade Martin began his landscaping business in 2004 with just a pickup truck and a mower. Previously, he had worked for a large landscaping corporation but he always felt like just a number. Wade swore that the company he founded was going to be different.
Today, Martin Landscape Inc. has 75 employees and takes in approximately $7m in revenue per year. Wade credits his company’s core values for getting them where they are today: passion, pride, teamwork, and relationships. At Martin Landscaping, employees aren’t just numbers. They’re valuable team members and are compensated as such.
The most important investments Wade has ever made were hiring an HR manager, a marketing manager, and finding a mentor. Wade credits much of his success to the advice he got from working with a consultant. According to Wade, it’s so much better to reach out for help before you make a mistake. Asking for advice is not a sign of weakness. It’s a sign of intelligence.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Ty Deemer:
All right, everyone, welcome back to Green Industry Perspectives. My name’s Ty Deemer. And I’m your host. We’ve got a great episode planned for you today. We have Wade Martin on the show. Wade is the president of Martin Landscape, and we’re going to talk a lot about just his business and the things that they’re facing right now, and also providing some tips from his experience. Wade, welcome to the show.
Wade Martin:
Hey, glad to be here Ty.
Ty Deemer:
Yeah. Thank you for joining us. So Wade, we’d like to kick off every episode with the same question to just provide value to the audience right away. It’s pretty straightforward. And your experience with Martin Landscape or your career in the landscape space as a whole, what do you feel like are the top two to three things or common threads that have led to your team’s success?
Wade Martin:
[inaudible 00:00:50] Ty, that’s pretty simple for us. Number one, we do what we say we’re going to do. We don’t over promise and under deliver. We’re very upfront, honest with our clients that starts with me as being a strong leader and goes all the way down through my management team. Number two, we take care of our team. We definitely care about our team, strong leadership, training, lots of rewarding, rewards creating opportunities. Number three would be maintain and implement the latest practices, technology and equipment. All stars don’t want to work with broken down equipment. Even if it’s something old, we’re maintaining it so it’s in the best shape possible.
Ty Deemer:
Yeah. And we’re going to dive in to those threads as a whole, but I love how you just started that off because one of the things that’s unique to me about you and when I first came across the work you all were doing is your Instagram profile says career builder, in the green industry. And I think that’s going to be a huge portion of what we talk about today. Because I think that’s definitely a really unique way of addressing some of the issues that the industry as a whole is facing. And couldn’t be more aligned with you there. So Wade, Before we dive in to all the topics that we’re going to talk about. I like for the audience to have a background of who’s on the show and why they’re here? So let’s start with you, talk to us through how you really found your place in the green industry and then at Martin Landscape. And then we can talk about Martin Landscape as a whole later on.
Wade Martin:
Sure. So I started when I was 14 years old, let me start off first by saying my work ethic comes from my mother and my father. They taught me at a young age, the value of a dollar. I think that’s what people today are missing. No matter what industry they’re in, they don’t know the value of dollar. They haven’t been taught at a young age. Well, I was taught at a young age. I got into it at 14 years old cutting neighborhood lawns, but a buddy of mine. We were outside, it was hot. People me called crazy. “What are you doing, man? That’s crazy.” My friends were going to the pool doing things like that summer. But when we went to go get a snack, the gas station, I always had cash. So I learned that value of that dollar. And I was buying my friends Gatorades and the Snickers bar because I had the money because hey, they made fun of me. I was cutting grass.
Wade Martin:
And I really enjoyed it. I enjoyed making that dollar as I went through and got into high school, I worked for a larger company and I learned the good, the bad and the ugly. And I realized that there was more to cutting grass. I learned that it’s a people business and we sell labor because what we do. But I learned a lot from the larger company I worked for got lots of experience, but I felt like I wanted to do something different. That’s how I evolved and started Martin Landscape in 2004. I felt like you were either a number because the company was so big or I felt like you were just there to make the owner money and he didn’t care about them. He called them employees.
Wade Martin:
We don’t call anybody at Martin Landscape an employee they’re team members. You’re part of the team. Our core values are huge here. Passion, pride, teamwork, and relationships. We’ve started that because I wanted to do something different. I didn’t want to be like every other landscape company. I wanted to be landscape professional. So I opened up in 2004, started with a pickup truck and a push mower. Really it was tough. I’ll be honest with you. It’s very tough. Getting the work was not tough, but getting it done was really tough. I ended up working seven days a week, started doing irrigation as well. And before you know, we started growing, had our first team member and just grew from there and really just have a passion for what I do.
Wade Martin:
I think we’re special people you’re either cut out for it or you’re not. I’m a strong believer on that. You’re either cut out or not because people look at me, they look down on me at times and I just laugh. I’m like, yeah, man, this is what I do. But we’re either cut out for it or you’re not. And I happened to be.
Ty Deemer:
I love that. So where are we now from starting in 2004 with a pickup truck and a mower. Talk to us about Martin Landscaped, where you all are located, what services you’re offering? And if you’re comfortable sharing it, how big is your team and what revenues are you all accomplishing right now?
Wade Martin:
Yeah, absolutely. So we’re going to finish out between six and $8 million a year. I know that’s a big number, but we have some large landscape construction projects that we don’t know if we’re going to get to them the end of this year, the beginning of next year. So that’s why that number’s a little off. So we’re looking at that. We’re around 75 to 100 team members right now. We really need 100. We’re about 75 right now as we grow. We’ve got two branches, we have a corporate branch in Port Royal, South Carolina, and then we have another branch in Hartsville, South Carolina that serves our Georgia market. So we’re going in two different directions. We’d like to have a third branch in the next couple of years. And we’re working on that now trying to implement some new things and go from there. Sorry. Going on like that. Yeah, we Ty, I don’t know. You got to cut that out. I don’t know.
Ty Deemer:
No, you’re good. Keep going.
Wade Martin:
Lost my words here. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
Ty Deemer:
No, you’re more than fine, we’ll clean it up. So I think where you were going next is just you had talked about the services you’re offering, employee account revenues. I’d give it two backwards, but basically just finish out like yeah. In the services you’re offering.
Wade Martin:
Yeah, I got you. Services we’re all finished out. All right, great. So Ty, the services that we offer, we’re a commercial lawn maintenance provider. We like to make our property managers less work as possible for them and do a strong job. We do irrigation repair, irrigation installation, or landscape construction and landscape enhancement. Our enhancement work is going into a residence and we’ll rip out an entire front yard and make it look good because it’s dated or they want to change things like that. We also do street sweeping. It was a sister company of ours for many years and we have now merged that into Martin Landscape. It’s a good thing to add on for our commercial lawn maintenance clients. So we’re not blowing all over cars and things like that and we’re backing it up in the middle of the night.
Wade Martin:
So that’s been really good. So yeah, that’s just a few of our services we offer. Floriculture as well as big for us. We have a floriculturist and I think we pride ourselves in not wearing too many hats. If they’re doing floriculture, they’re doing floriculture and they’re really good at it. They’re doing irrigation, they’re doing irrigation and they’re really good at it.
Ty Deemer:
Yeah. I love that. And I want to ask a question about… I think your story is pretty unique just in the fact, starting from 2004, growing your business, just like that well over the last period of time, talk to me about some of the other people that are involved with your business. What are some of the key hires over the years that are maybe on your leadership team now? What’s your org structure look like there?
Wade Martin:
Yeah, absolutely. I look at my organizational chart probably more than most people do. Just because we’re always growing, we’re always changing, we’re always evolving. You never know where you’re going next. And if you land a big contract, you got to be prepared, but you also have to be prepared if you lose a contract, you know where you got to fall back and pick up the pieces. So some of our major hires recently I have a full controller on staff who handles all of our paying the bills, running our numbers, things like that. So I have upfront, I know those numbers immediately. That’s been a big hire for us. The next big hire we have is we have an HR director, problem I hear from my competitors or people that I mentor or my mentor or labor.
Wade Martin:
And the best advice that was given to me is, “Yeah, you’re having a problem with labor. What are you doing about it? How much time are you spending on that?” And it made so much sense and something clicked on me. I go, we don’t even have an HR director, here we are complaining about labor. Why do we not have someone who’s working on it every day? Also the way our company is structured, I have one guy who’s our office manager who’s in charge of all of our service. So he handles irrigation service department, floriculture and all of our lawn maintenance. And then we have a landscape construction, enhancement division where we have one guy that ever sees all that. So breaking down those branches, it felt extremely well.
Ty Deemer:
Cool. Yeah. I love, we actually had a podcast episode to go out last week where we talked to a guy and he said the exact same thing as you are hiring an HR manager was one of the biggest differentiators in his market to be able to go out and get new employees because across the board, not just in the green industry, but in some adjacent spaces like construction or HVAC and all those areas, a lot of those companies aren’t hiring like HR people to attract new talent and it’s a full-time job. And to do it well, you really do need somebody in that space.
Wade Martin:
And if I can touch on that a little bit Ty, I have found out this is not just the recruiting, it’s the retention. Because if you spent that much time training someone that came into your company with no experience and you’ve trained them and you’ve got them doing things the Martin way, you got to hold on to them. That’s one thing my HR director has brought to the table. We celebrate milestones, we celebrate their birthdays. We have a safety campaign going on now, but yeah, we were always big on safety, but now we have a safety campaign where they can get something out of it. We have these things called culture coins that are poker chips that have a dollar value on them. They can buy paid time off. Everybody loves the date off. How about have a day off that is paid for? And they can buy Martin apparel, there’s just tons of things. We’re trying to be very creative in what we do, but that retention is huge for us. So it’s not just getting that they’re new hires. It’s retaining who you have and taking care of your team.
Ty Deemer:
Yeah. For sure. So let’s dive into that because we mentioned at the top of the show, it’s definitely something you believe in to be able to go out and say, “Hey, what does Wade consider himself as an?” It sounds like you consider yourself someone who is a career builder for people in the green industry and specifically people who want to be professional about it. Where did that inspiration come from for you over time? And then what does it look like to actually live that out day to day for you in your business?
Wade Martin:
Yeah, absolutely. Like I told you before people look at a landscaper, that’s what they call us a landscaper. We don’t consider ourselves that, consider ourself a landscape professional. We’re a very professional company. We just happen to do landscape. Going out being a career builder, it’s a lot more than just giving someone a truck, giving them a good salary and letting them go out. They got have a good leadership and I feel like what we do and what we provide here, not just for me, but leadership. It starts with me and I’ll take a lot of blame on some things that happen and things that don’t get done. I don’t think anyone needs to play a blame game, but in the same token, you’ve got to take accountability. People have to be accountable for what they’re doing every day.
Wade Martin:
So yeah, getting on that I physically go out to the job site, shake my guys’ hands, fist pump them, tell them good job. When they’re doing something that’s not correct, instead of screaming and yelling like I’ve seen owners do on a job site, we just correct it. We talked about it. What could we have done? I put the ball in their court. And then I do a lot of training. We’re going to hit six to $8 million in sales this year, but as the owner, I’m still training. I know guys who are smaller than me that don’t know other team members names. I do, I know their names. We keep frozen popsicles and freezers at both of our branches. We keep it stocked. Come grab one when they’re leaving out in the morning, grab one in the event. So I think what differentiates us from the competitors is I don’t look at other companies as a competitor, our competitor is ourselves. We’re very hard and our competitor is ourselves.
Ty Deemer:
Yeah. I love what you said there too about the leadership aspect of it because great leaders understand that, they just have to have ownership of pretty much everything. So that translates down to other people in your business. And I love the principle behind that. There’s a really good book called Extreme Ownership by a former U.S. Navy SEAL that he just talks about what it looks like to translate any type of failure to a business or in battle for his case. And you just have to own everything. How do you feel like you’ve been able to translate that to people in your org, as things go down from you and the other leaders in your business, do you feel like they’re able to pick that up from you, or is that a battle you have to deal with sometimes?
Wade Martin:
I think that’s part of the leadership from being a business owner. I think, yes, they take some of it up for me. But yes, they want accountability. We make our management team read a book called Winning With Accountability. I picked it up from a consultant years ago. And it’s a really good book. I make my management team read it and just live by it. If you tell somebody you’re going to do it and you’re going to put a date on it, put a stamp on it. I need it this Friday by noon. It’s not that you’re being firm, you’re holding them accountable and they’re going to get it done. I learned that from a consultant, I give him the credit on it. He helped me through a lot of changes and transitions and helped us get to the next level by things like that.
Ty Deemer:
I like that you bring up the consultant though. Because I think there’s a lot of times when I talk to owners on this podcast specifically, it’s all about training your team and pouring into your team and leading them, giving them resources. As someone who literally started a business from day one and seen it’s grown as that leader. How do you think about finding resources for yourself to learn and for yourself to grow? What’s been some lessons learned or maybe things that you’ve picked up on over the years?
Wade Martin:
Well, if I could give anybody advice, because I do it every day. I have guys that are starting either a power washing company or landscape company or something, I wish I would have had the same advice that I give to people today. Find someone who is a leader in your industry, reach out to them and get the advice before you go out and start making a bunch of mistakes. I made a bunch of mistakes in my career. When I opened in 2004, we started rolling. I had gone through the ups and the downs and we could eliminate a lot of stuff by a simple phone call and sitting down with somebody once a month and just lead me up. As you get your business up and rolling, hire a consultant, hire a consultant to help you put the systems in place.
Wade Martin:
We did that a few years ago and I got to tell you, it helps, it works. Lots of credit to the consultant that helped me and got us to the next level. And then getting in with your peers, get in with these larger companies, learn things from smaller companies. It doesn’t matter the size of your company. You can pick up little nuggets from small companies and large companies. It really doesn’t matter. So yeah, my advice is, get help early on in your career. If I had to start all over, I would have a mentor immediately, someone who I could pick up the phone and call and those milestones might pick up a big contract and you’re excited about it. You need someone to share that with.
Wade Martin:
But also when you don’t know something, pick up the phone and ask them, “Hey, what do I do?” Because nine times out of 10, they have been there. They’ve been down that road. So save that money, men get that advice from somebody that’s already been there and done that.
Ty Deemer:
Especially too with this industry, I feel like it’s as a whole, a group of people that like to help each other, especially when you talk about the category of landscape professional that you’ve been referencing. I’ve got at least my perception of it is everyone’s always very willing to help one another or at least talk through problems with each other. So you can just ask and I’m sure there’ll be people that will be supportive.
Wade Martin:
That’s right. That’s exactly right. And also join in an association for your industry, join that association, get as much information as you can, not only for yourself, but for your team. HR departments or as your company grows and gets to the next level that stuff’s out there, use those resources. And I would also say read, read books, but read books that aren’t just for your industry. Because like I said before, we’re a professional company. We just happen to be landscaped, but our industry is pretty much the same when it comes to recruiting and retention and things like that.
Ty Deemer:
Yeah. And I think that’s a really unique point because there are some aspects of the industry that with hiring in this space, you can’t really replicate what it looks like to hire as like a software company. And there’s a very unique model. It looks like to hire in this business and a set of challenges, but also on the business growth side or the way you market your business. I’ve been seeing over the last couple of years more and more landscape companies and tree care companies are just innovating and how they bring in net new business. And they’re just following models from outside the space. So I love that call out because lots of times people just want to find the gold standard of what someone’s doing in the green industry, but it’s a business and you can implement non-traditional green industry practices to grow.
Wade Martin:
That’s correct. Social media is huge. I never thought it was. And I laughed at people as it started going out. I’m old school pen and paper, and we have a marketing director now. I didn’t realize we’d get as much work from the internet as we get. I mean, we’re getting five to six leads a day from our website, just going in social media, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn just putting little bits and pieces, but it’s not just work. It’s recruiting, selfless recruit people from there. It’s helped do a lot of different things, get new vendors, just a lot of stuff, a lot of stuff. So social media is bigger than what most people think.
Ty Deemer:
Yeah. And I’ve picked up on that with even your personal LinkedIn. And you mentioned having a marketing manager or marketing director on your team, what led you to decide, “Hey, this is an investment we’re willing to make in our business,” because that is something where you talk to a lot of people and they probably just have their office manager maybe posting a few times a week, or maybe they’re doing it themselves. What led you to make that call?
Wade Martin:
We had our office manager doing it when she could and had time. And we didn’t understand all the analytics that went with it. Number one, number two, we had some phenomenal pictures done and I’m like, man, these pictures look good. And I started thinking about it and I was like, that’s because we hired a professional photographer. I don’t have my office managers and office manager. She’s not a social media, she’s not a marketing person. So I simplified it. And I went why are we asking someone who doesn’t like to do this and doesn’t have the time to do this, to do it? So that’s really what led us to that.
Ty Deemer:
Yeah. That’s such a good point too, because it is really one of those things. You either want to do it or you don’t do it. It’s either how your brain works. And just when you talk about resources and how you allocate them, you just pay for what you get every step of the way. If you try to save money on a videographer and have someone that doesn’t have a professional background in doing it, you’re going to get a subpar result. If you pay the extra couple of grand and have someone that’s a professional that knows how to do it, you’re going to have a video or pictures that you’re proud to share with everyone in your network, it all goes hand in hand.
Wade Martin:
Yeah, that’s exactly right. And Ty, just to touch on this and move to the next, this is going to move us into something else. So you asked about the marketing director and what made us make that decision? The other thing that made us make the jump and get one is we started measuring how many phone calls and where they were coming from, was it coming from the internet? And we found a trend where, okay, this is all coming from social media. This is coming from Instagram. This is coming from Facebook and this is coming from our internet. So we started seeing that trend and I went, wow. So it’s not the people just calling the office or seeing the truck any more. They’re actually online. They’re actually researching you. So that led us to hiring that marketing director. We measure everything. So that was a little bit of advice I wanted to make sure I gave you as well. I don’t know if we’re going in that next or what?
Ty Deemer:
Yeah, we can definitely do that. So when we talked off air a few weeks ago, or maybe last week, one of the things that you mentioned was you had made a shift at some point in your mind as a business owner. “If I spent like, look like we have to make data driven decisions, we’ve got to know the metrics behind what we’re doing and then really implement those in our decision making process.” So I would love for you to share broad picture of that transition of what it looked like. Because it’s very rare for a company to start at that point. When you start it’s because you like doing the work, you enjoy it and you enjoy the end result of the dollar. But then as you start to grow, you can get to the point where you’re just struggling along and not even looking up to understand where your advantages are. So I’d love for you to share what that progression look like for you. And then we dive into some of what you track as well.
Wade Martin:
Sure. I told you, I’d tell you the good, the bad and the ugly. So I’m going to tell you some of the bad here. So when I started the company in 2004 and I’d get a lawn maintenance, I have to go out and get lawmakers quote, literally I was so busy. I’d ride by the job and I’d say, yeah, I’ll take it’s about an hour and I just put an hourly rate on it. So here you go, divide this by that boom, boom, boom, wouldn’t measure anything. Wouldn’t look anything, didn’t really see the importance of it. I was making money because it was just me. As the company grew and evolved, remember how I told you, you get a mentor, I got a mentor. It’s like, “How are you doing it?” And I kind of got made fun of a little bit.
Wade Martin:
And I told them but I was honest with myself. We’d go to a big bid and the numbers would be all over the place. And I was like, “Do these guys really know their numbers? They don’t, they really don’t know their numbers. So we started measuring, we measure everything. We go to a commercial property. We’re measuring linear foot of edging, acres per hour. We can cut with our mower. What mower is going to be cutting it? That way it’s streamlined everybody in your company can bid the same property and you will be within dollars of sense of, it doesn’t matter who bids it in your company.
Wade Martin:
Making that jump was huge. Making that jump has done nothing but help us make better business decisions. I’m not going to go out and buy a $65,000 box truck and all this new equipment, if we’ve underbid a property, we make sure we know what our margins are and how to get to that margin because we know how long it takes someone to string trim 300 feet of a hard surface or soft trimming or how many shrubs we have, fertilization. So now when we go out, we measure everything. The more data we put in the front end, the easier our job is maintaining that property. So if that client calls in and needs a mulch application, we know exactly how much mulch it is. We give them an estimate out faster, they sign off on it faster. And our sales go up.
Ty Deemer:
So with that being said, what does that look like for you all in terms of how profitable your business is? I think the one thing that it was set on our last episode where you get to a million in revenue by saying yes, but then you get to 10 million by saying now. That was a great little soundbite from our last episode. But a lot of that goes into understanding what work is good for you and your business. So how has those data-driven decisions changed? How you think about, how you price work or even what work you’re you’re saying yes to?
Wade Martin:
Yeah, sure Ty. Past, present and future. I think nine times out of 10 contractors not looking at past jobs, they’re done with them and they’re moving on, whether it’s landscape construction, landscape enhancement, or landscape maintenance that maybe they lost, or maybe they still do. We look at that data past, present and future to make our margins. We look at those weekly, we have a software program that keeps track of all this data and we look at it, I can look at my dashboard, I can pull up a, say, it’s a landscape construction job. I can look at the labor that went into it. I can see if we hit that profit margin, whether we’re super high or super low on it.
Wade Martin:
So we can say, okay, what did we do good here? What did we do bad here? What are we going to do going forward on the next job? That’s how your past, present, future. We look at all of that. I feel like that helps us make a lot better business decisions. And I’ll also share my numbers with all our account managers, operations managers. We share our numbers. We look at them, we look at a weekly and we know where we’re at, at all times.
Ty Deemer:
Cool. What does that look like for you to share the different metrics of the business with your team? Is that set up into a weekly meeting where you all go in and check the progress on certain things? Because that’s one thing that I’m glad you mentioned, because I feel like there are a lot of owners that care about numbers. They’ve worked with a consultant, the consultants told them like, “Hey, this matters for you. It’s your business. You need to be on top of that.” But how do you get the buy-in or the inclusion from your team on the different things you’re tracking?
Wade Martin:
Yeah, that’s great. We have dashboards in our software and if you’re an account manager and you’re running, I’ve got a couple account managers that I’m [inaudible 00:27:26] loyal office. They run their department on their dashboard. They’re not looking at everything. They’re looking at what they have sold, what they maintain, and we pay out a profit share on their enhancements and what they’ve sold and how they paid our profit share is off the net operating income. My guys know, and girls know where their numbers need to be because we’ve trained them and we’ve led them to what they do. And they take a lot of ownership in that. That’s that accountability aspect. They want to know where they’re at. At the end of the day, it’s a game, their measurement. They’re having fun. They’re joking with each other and they’re looking, “Hey, my bonus is going to be this.” And it’s a game they’re looking at it. They’re having fun with it. It takes a lot off of me as a business owner to know that I have a team that’s strong. That is backing me as we go forward.
Ty Deemer:
Yeah, that’s really cool. Speaking of like your account managers and your sales team. How closely do you track your close rates with the different deals that you’re bidding. And does that go into how you think about how you’re pricing things out? Because I know you’re in a pretty competitive market, there’s a good bit of companies in your area, and I’m sure you’re trying to find what the line is and all of these different categories if you’re underbidding or overbidding. Talk to me through how you work through your team with that.
Wade Martin:
Yeah, sure. So I have my dashboard set up. I’m a little OCD task. I do things that consultants will tell you not to do. I stay awake at night and I look at numbers and things like that, or I’ll wake up extremely early in the morning, 3:30, 4:00 in the morning, turn on my computer when it’s nice and quiet. And I go through it the way my dashboards are set up and the way the reports that I get at, I can look at the company as a whole, but I can break down by account manager. I can see what their close ratio is. I can see how many proposals they sent out. I can see what they’ve won, what they haven’t won, why they haven’t won it, we’ll make notes in there. And if I see a trend, I I’ll go out and do some leadership and say, “Okay, well here let’s look at this. You’re overpricing stuff. You’re trying to sell a client that has a $3,000 budget. You’re in here at $10,000. They just want a small enhancement, what are you doing?”
Wade Martin:
And I try to speak them out well, because had an account manager. I was trying to hit a home run on every job, he’s trying to upsell and just upsell, upsell. And his close ratio wasn’t good. And then I had another account manager who just wasn’t putting enough proposals out. He put 20 proposals out and he’d win half of them. Well, you’re not hitting your sales goal. So why not put 40 proposals out if you’re only going to win half? And I tried to train on that, that’s a leadership thing that comes from me and my ops manager. We train on that weekly. We talk about that in our ops meeting every week.
Ty Deemer:
Yeah. I really like that too though, because if you didn’t have that information, you’re just sitting there going, “Well, why aren’t the numbers where they need to be?” You’re going to them-
Wade Martin:
That’s fine.
Ty Deemer:
… and going like, “Hey, what’s going on?” And you could have a guy that’s busting his tail, get into a ton of jobs or bidding on a ton of jobs. But he’s just trying to do too much at each job. That’s one set of problems. That’s one problem, but that’s a very different problem than a guy that has a higher close rate, but it’s only offering 20 jobs at a month. And you can actually provide them the solution based off of information you have. That’s cool.
Wade Martin:
That’s right. It’s all about measuring. I’ve always said this from day one. If you put clean data in your books, you’re going to get clean data out. You’ve got to track everything. A mentor that I’ve listen to for years and years and years kept beating that in my head. And I finally get it, takes me a little while to pick up on it, but yes, I finally got it Ty, and I understand it. And it makes running a accompany a lot easier when you know, numbers of metrics. Yeah.
Ty Deemer:
Cool. You mentioned some of the scenarios with your account managers where maybe it’s guys weren’t bidding enough jobs or maybe they were just trying to hit home runs. What do you feel like when you’re coaching up your sales team or your account managers, what are the most common threads of mistakes that you see those types of guys make or girls and how do you coach them through those?
Wade Martin:
Yeah. One common mistake that I see a lot is here we are pushing our account managers, sell enhancements, sell enhancements, sell enhancements. What we’ve got to remember, the way I run our company is these guys are also maintaining and managing these commercial maintenance properties. So how do you expect them to maintain a commercial property and do a good job at it and sell enhancements? So that’s why we pay a profit sharing on the enhancements that they sell so they can figure out how to do that. And I give them the leadership on that. If you’re on the property already, and you’re doing a walkthrough, grab that client, do that, walk through with that client, get face-to-face with them. Now day and age, people want to shoot an email or a text message that is great, but I’m still in the old school.
Wade Martin:
They want to see your face. They want to see that truck drive onto that property. That has been a common thread that I’ve seen that the guys, they’re making their salary, but they really want that profit sharing this month. So they’re going to do more enhancements. And then you look at the quality on the jobs and you’re like, “Oh, the quality slipping, because you’ve been selling enhancements.” That was a trend for ours for awhile, recently been stopped because now they get a profit off of the maintenance that they retain in our retention rate on our lawn maintenance has gone way up because of it. We were losing some accounts because they were looking bad. And I tell the guys it’s a lot cheaper to go fix that account. It’s a four-foot weed, go pull that thing and don’t ever have a four-foot weed again. It’s a lot cheaper to keep an account. It’s a lot harder to get it back. So do what’s right.
Ty Deemer:
Yeah. I like that point a lot. Talk to me through, you mentioned listening to mentors and it’s this probably isn’t what they would suggest you do. And we’ve talked a few times over the last couple of weeks, and it’s very clear to me that you’re someone who likes to bust it and you like to work and you care and you want your business to be successful. Talk to me through what it looks like for you to have balance in work and in life. And what are some of the ways you think about it and maybe what are some of the things that are hardest for you about creating that balance?
Wade Martin:
Yeah. So I have a good work-life balance. I feel like I have a good program set up for account managers, office staff, team members, team leaders here as well, because the good, bad and ugly from working for another company. I learned a lot that people want time off. They want to be with their family. I have a family. My average day, I get to the office roughly between 6:00 and 6:30 AM every morning. Routines, I get in routines and I stay in them. I stay in my lane. I do things like that. If it’s 4:35, I’m going home, whether my work is done or not, because I know that I have a family waiting on me, I have four children. I want to get home. I want to get home and see my family. I want to get to dinner. I try to turn that cell phone completely off.
Wade Martin:
So I can spend that time with my family. If my kids have a program at school or a sporting event, take the time off and go because I do it because I don’t want to miss that. I encourage my team to do that as well. Just give me a heads up, tell me what’s going on and go. Especially if you’re on our management team, they know the deal because I don’t want anybody getting burnt out. So I’m good with my work-life balance. Really good with that, early on in my career, I’d worked seven days a week. I didn’t take any time for myself. There would be weeks where I’m like, why am I doing this? Plenty of weeks like that. Why am I doing this?
Wade Martin:
Well now I try to work Monday through Friday. Encourage my team. “Let’s get it done Monday through Friday guys, let’s enjoy our weekends. Let’s enjoy our family.” We talk about family a lot here. We’re a family owned and operated company. I think that’s huge as well. You see a lot of owners, a lot of leaders that they don’t go to their company every day. I’m a hands-on leader, a career builder. That’s what I do.
Ty Deemer:
That’s really cool. Also like the point of how you work with your management team, about them being present at their kids’ events and their things it’s reminds me of, I think it was last year, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, their coach said if he found out that any player missed, one of their kid’s events, they were going to get cut. It’s like, you got to prioritize that type of stuff because you really only get that window to be able to go and do it. I really like that. And so your team appreciates it.
Wade Martin:
Yeah. And I carry that down all the way down to our team members. If a team member needs that day off and they give us notice or they need a few hours off and account manager will pick them up from wherever they’re at, they’re at a school, we’ll pick them up from that school and we’ll take them to the team. We’re big on that. If a kid is playing a sport, no matter who they are, management, team member, it doesn’t matter, they’ve been hired here for two days and they bring me a piece of paper, we’ll pay for their kid to play that sport. We’ll pay for the fee because I feel like that’s what’s lacking in the world today. I really do, parents need to be involved with their children. They need to teach them, it’s huge to me.
Ty Deemer:
Yeah. You talk about, it’s a lot cheaper. It’s a lot easier to keep a customer. It’s a lot easier to keep an employee too than hire a new one.
Wade Martin:
Yes, it is.
Ty Deemer:
And those little things of allowing just your team to be able to enjoy those moments of life that are there to enjoy. That’s got to pay dividends for sure.
Wade Martin:
Yeah, absolutely.
Ty Deemer:
I want to, as we kind of begin to go on the back half of the show or the back portion of the show, I would love to hear about what are your goals for Martin Landscape? Where do you see the business going? And what do you want to see happen over the next year, five years with your business? And how are you thinking about growth around what you all are doing?
Wade Martin:
Sure. That’s a great question. And we’ve actually been working on this a lot lately. So right now we have two branches, one service in Georgia, one service in here, Port Royal, South Carolina Beaufort, Hilton Head area. We would like to have another branch in Charleston, South Carolina. We’d like to have three branches total. In the next five years is all I’m saying next five years. I can’t look too far past that. We would like for each branch to do anywhere from five to $7 million a year. We want to create opportunities for our team. So these people that we have, team members we have inside the company, we want to move them up. We want them to do more. We want them to learn more. We want them to feel more like this is a big deal.
Wade Martin:
So we’d like to do that. That’s one big goal. Another goal is we’d like to just overall create a even better place to work. Day in, day out, we tried different things day in, day out. We want to be a better place. We think we’re good now, we think we’re better than the competitors for sure. We want to be even better than the competitors. I want people knocking my door down saying, “Hey, we want to work for you.” We’re very fortunate. We have a very good core group of men and women right now. Great teams going out right now. We want to be even better. We want people to open that door down. That’s a big goal of mine, going forward.
Ty Deemer:
Yeah. I love that. And I liked the idea too, of how you’re thinking about going into a new service area or a new branch as not only is it an opportunity to grow your reach as a company and your ability to sell more work, but it’s also a way you can sell that to your team and be like, look “In three years, we’re going to have this location. And we want internal team members to be able to step up and go there and lead that location. Here’s what you can do to put yourself in a position to have that opportunity.” And especially in a younger generation, they would take less pay to start if they knew there was a path to grow in a company. It’s what people and millennials and below, that’s what they want in a job. It’s just so important.
Wade Martin:
That’s right Ty. I’ve seen that trend a lot. People want to see the next step. That’s great that you got hired on for this, but they want to see where they’re going. You’ve got to give them that path, because if you don’t give them that career path, I mean, what’s the point of even coming to work here? “I’m going to work here for what summer?” You don’t want that you want that person that’s going to come in here, “How do I get to the next level?” Whether it’s pesticide, licensing, whether it’s certified landscape technicians, whatever, what do you want to do with your life? We’re going to help you. And we’re going to create that path. And I see that trend happening a lot.
Wade Martin:
And that is another thing that sets us apart is we see the trend. So we offer it. We’re like, “Hey, what do you want? You want to do this OSHA training class. That’s great, because you’re now our safety manager.” We’ve got a spray tech, who’s moved into safety manager role. Yeah, it costs money, but in the same token, it saves you money. You’re going to save money at the end. A lot of people can’t see the end product. We can see the end product. That’s one thing that really sets us apart as well.
Ty Deemer:
Yeah. I like that a lot. So I have one last question before you and and then we’ll wrap it up. I always kind of like to ask this towards the end of the show, and it’s a little bit in line with what we just talked about, but what are you most excited about right now? What are you really thinking about your business? And you’re like, “This is going to be awesome or I’m really looking forward to see how this comes to fruition.”
Wade Martin:
Yeah. Great question, Ty. I’m a high energy person if you couldn’t tell. I’m very high energy and I don’t like it when a business is stagnant at all, I get bored with it. I don’t want to do it anymore. What I’m most excited about is growth, not just growth of the company, growth of the team, growth of the team members. Nothing makes me happier when I get a team member come in this company, get his a driver’s license because he didn’t have one, clean his act up, straighten his life out, come to work every day. Read the books, get certified, move him up. Nothing gets me more excited than that. I love seeing other people succeed because I feel like I have done my job as a leader. That fulfills me. That’s my satisfaction, that excites me. Is the growth internal and external.
Ty Deemer:
I love that. That thank you for sharing that Wade. And Wade, I really just appreciate the time we’ve spent today. We’ve covered a ton of great topics. Got to hear your perspective on what it looks like to lead in a green industry professional environment. And then also got to talk about how to approach just the numbers behind your business and a ton of other good stuff. I really enjoyed it. And look forward to seeing that growth that you and your team are going to have over the next couple of years.
Wade Martin:
Yeah. Thank you, Ty. I’m glad I got the invite to be on your show.
Ty Deemer:
Absolutely. We’ll stay in touch. Thanks Wade.
Wade Martin:
Sounds good. Thank you.