Archives

Finding talent  for the green industry is challenging. People are often not on LinkedIn, the local talent pools are shallow, the job titles mean different things at every company, and most owners are too busy to run a real hiring process. In this roundtable episode of Roots of Success, host Barrett Chow sits down with…

Control can look a lot like leadership. But it’s control. In this episode of Roots of Success, McFarlin Stanford facilitator Kevin Keim tackles one of the most expensive blind spots in the landscape industry: owners who have accidentally trained their teams to wait for permission on everything. Kevin walks through what real delegation looks like…

The best salespeople don’t just fill a pipeline; they close it, and then they hand it off well. In Part 2 of this Roots of Success conversation, host Chris Psencik and Melissa Blake of Bates Landscaping break down why deep association involvement beats showing up once a quarter, how to ask discovery questions that make clients reveal exactly what they need and what…

Melissa Blake, with Bates Landscaping, looks at a laminated sheet listing her dream clients, and she carries it with her every single day. In Part 1 of this conversation, host Chris Psencik and Melissa dig into what commercial maintenance business development actually looks like on the ground. It’s time-blocking your week into create, advance, and close new clients, and using LinkedIn to get ahead of relationship changes. She also shares how she knows when to…

Every growing landscape company hits a wall. The owner is doing sales, operations, and admin all at once and the business starts to cap out. In this episode of Roots of Success, McFarlin Stanford Founding Principal Jason New breaks down one of the most common owner blind spots: not having a hiring roadmap. Jason walks through exactly which roles…

Investing in your team and leveraging their strengths really does pay off. In this episode of Roots of Success, Tracy Wallingford sits down with Steve and Anne Scarcella, ACE Ambassadors of the Year and co-owners of Brothers Lawn Services in Youngsville, Louisiana, to walk through three years of CliftonStrengths work, annual team off-sites, and what it actually takes to build a 65-person team where…

What does it look like to build a company the right way — not the fastest way? In this episode of Roots of Success, host Chris Psencik reconnects with one of his oldest friends in the industry, Kyle Cahill, founder of Grown Company in Houston and newly elected Chair of the Texas Nursery and Landscape…

Forty hours. Fifty. Sixty. Somewhere along the way, “busy” became something to brag about. But what if the busyness isn’t a sign of hard work or it’s a sign of the wrong habits? In this episode of Roots of Success, host Kevin Keim sits down with Dauphin Ewart, a McFarlin Stanford PACE facilitator and second-generation owner of BugMaster, an 80-person pest control company…

What separates the companies people want to work for from the ones they can’t wait to leave? In this episode of Roots of Success, host Chris Psencik sits down with Ryan Malone of Malone’s Landscape in Seattle, Washington — a second-generation owner, ACE Chairman member and endurance athlete — to talk about one of the most important assets in a growing company: culture. From monthly culture rallies and…

Most business owners think they’re great communicators until things fall apart. In this roundtable episode of Roots of Success, host Chris Psencik is joined by McFarlin Stanford coaches Kevin Keim and Tracy Wallingford to tackle one of the most common and costly problems in growing landscaping companies: communication breakdowns. From choosing the right tools and building meeting cadences, to mastering one-on-ones and leveraging CliftonStrengths,…