Ep 035 – Mastering Disruptive Growth in the Landscape Industry

Justin White ​[00:00:00] The Roots of Success podcast is for the landscape professional who's looking to up their game. We've got a brain trust of experts to help you nurture the roots of a successful business and grow to the next level. This is The Roots of Success. Tommy Cole: And welcome to another episode of Roots of Success Podcast. I'm your host, Tommy Cole, and we have a stud on the show today named Justin White from KND Landscaping all the way in the West Coast, California, How are you doing, Justin? Justin White: Tommy. What's up, brother? I am so excited to be on here. Roots of success. That's what we're talking about. And I'm excited to dive in and, and, and jump into some of these stories and lessons learned and you know, where we're headed from here. Tommy Cole: Yeah, that's great, man. I enjoyed our conversation a couple of years ago in Napa, California at our summit, man. We were at the bar just. Like juices were flowing, things were flowing. I'm like, man, I gotta have [00:01:00] this guy. Like, so I, as I watch him on social media and travel and. His plane, I'm like, I'm, I get fired up watching him do what he does best. And that's like run a landscape company and travel and coach and be a speaker. And I mean, there's never a dull moment in your life. It's just fun to Justin White: Oh, I appreciate that, man. That's what I try to set it up, right? I think we can design the life we want. And that's what I'm doing. We're raising the bar in the industry, inspiring and motivating others. And I'm excited for this movement. You know, this next wave of landscapers that are coming up right now. I mean, The juices are flowing. The vibes are high. Energy, the excitement, the opportunity. I don't think there's ever been a better time to be a landscaper than, than literally right now. We Tommy Cole: Totally agree. Totally agree. Like this is the cool, Like mowing grass. Design, build everything. Water management. We're getting cool again, right? I don't think it was cool back in the day, but we're cool now.[00:02:00] Justin White: now that I never thought I'd be going into this industry. I mean, growing up in a family business, I never saw myself as a landscaper, but here we are. And I couldn't be happier. I mean, I never would have dreamed that landscaping would open so many doors for me either. It's been awesome. Start of K&D Landscaping Tommy Cole: Love it. Love it. So talk about K and D landscaping just South of San Jose, kind of the central sort of Western part of California, right? Candy. How did he get started? What's been going on 35 years in business? Tell me a little bit about Justin White: Yeah. So we started in 1986. My parents, Kendall and Dawn, that's where the name K and D came from. We, they started out of a need to make a little more money. Just like many folks who started from the ground up. My dad bought a mower, a weed eater, and a blower started mowing lawns in the neighborhood. As a side hustle that grew to a point where in the early nineties, he went all in and by, you know, late nineties, 2000, he was doing a million a year. And that was his pinnacle of success. That's what he set out to [00:03:00] do. That's what he did. And we grew up in the business. I wouldn't say we had a lot of money, but. We had an opportunity to work and create more wealth for ourselves. So during the summer, as young as 13, we'd be out making money, you know, five bucks an hour, working in the field with the guys or working on the ranch or what have you. And as that started to grow and grow in about 2013 is when I really started to see landscaping as a career. I'll back up for just a second. I think it's important pointing out when I was 17 years old, I dropped out of high school. I just, I, I, I got what I needed from school and I moved into working full time as a laborer and I didn't really have a big plan for myself, but I just knew that that school and college wasn't the direction I wanted to go in. Do I regret it? Maybe, maybe not. Some days I do, some days I don't, but I wanted to point that out because I think it's like with my background and my history, if I could do what I'm doing, Fricking anybody can, Tommy Cole: Anybody Justin White: know what I mean? So 2013, I'm running in the [00:04:00] office. I'm project managing. I'm starting to see this as a career 2015. Boom. We got hit with a big blindside. We're about a million, million and a half. And my parents got divorced. My mom always did the books. My dad ran the office. So when that happened, it was a question of. Does this company continue or do we dissolve it and go in our separate ways? At that moment I was 25 and I decided, you know what? I've never really believed in myself as a leader or believed in myself as, as being capable of something great. So I went to my parents and said, let me take over CEO. I'll buy my mom out. Get her give her retirement and I want to come in as partners with my dad and let's grow this thing up That's exactly what we did So at 25 years old I took over ceo of a million million and a half dollar company that was In a good position to grow not a great position to grow I mean we were almost 30 years old at that point And we were doing a million a year like we always had been and I just thought hey if I could Tommy Cole: What's funny about this, Justin, what's funny about this is like, boom, wake up [00:05:00] call, Justin White: big time. Tommy Cole: Like, so what all landscapers do is just, let's throw them out in the fire and see what happens. That you kind of, Justin White: That's how we Tommy Cole: you got into it. Justin White: So I had, I had enough luck on my side and a business coach reached out to me. I hired that business coach in 2015 and we created the system and foundation that we operate on today. We rolled out EOS at a very early stage. We rolled out core values, the purpose of raising the bar. We rolled out a BHAG, big, hairy, audacious goal. 30 million by 2030, we rolled that out in 2015 when we were 15 employees and doing a million and a half in revenue. That was a big hairy audacious goal, right? 30 million people were like, what are you thinking? Tommy Cole: No way. Justin White: forward three years, 2018 we're doing 5 million fast forward another couple of years, 2020 we're doing 10 million and that's when everyone realized we're onto something like we have. Some kind of secret sauce. We've got the culture, we've got the people, we've got the market positioning, the branding, [00:06:00] and we've continued to grow since then. And here we are today, we're, we're running a 20 million run rate. We're highly profitable. We are paying amazing wages to our team. We're growing rapidly and, and our area, we kind of love to own the area, just North of LA, Just south of San Francisco. We don't operate in the L. A. Or San Francisco markets. Those are very exciting markets to us, but we like to be the medium fish in the small pond. And so we want to run in that that Monterey Pebble Beach market that San Luis Obispo Santa Barbara market and really provide that next level professionalism, raise the bar and step up the landscape services in those markets. And that's exactly what we're doing today. Tommy Cole: that's great. So all kinds of like, that's a snapshot of K and D. Tell me about, I got, I got two things to talk about that. Talk about the culture, like in order to grow that quickly, it takes amazing people Justin White: [00:07:00] it does. Tommy Cole: and doing amazing things. Like talk about How to develope a good culture in your business Tommy Cole: how you were able to, to get a good culture and everyone's buy in to go to that Justin White: Yeah. I think it starts with defining the culture that you want to create. And then it's, it's being relentless and what we call non negotiable with our culture. We've hired the best, some of the best people because of their skillset. And we've later fired those same people because their culture issues. So sometimes you have to let people go. And that says more than anything who are a great technical fit, the best salesperson, the best project manager, but you have to let them go because they're a bad culture fit. And when you make decisions based on culture, and sometimes you have to make them over profitability. You send the message to your team that this is what we're about, first and foremost, and then profitability, everything else comes second. And I think if you focus on culture first and you create a culture first company, all those other KPIs will fall into place. [00:08:00] We've, we've continued to double down on culture in October of 2023, we rolled out what we call the K and D way. And i'm holding up this card to you. Sorry to see but it's We took our culture we put it into words and it's 30 fundamentals It's not our core values But it's the fundamentals that guide us and every new employee every new client every new interaction we make We hand them this way card, which has all 30 fundamentals Rolled up on this thing the size of a business card and that's really Our next investment into culture is defining it at a very deep level. Tommy Cole: And then, does everybody Justin White: Yes, sir Yeah, we got an english and spanish and we we we use it every day every meeting starts off with it It's a constant focus for us. Tommy Cole: Love it. You know, that's the Ritz Justin White: That's where it came from. Yeah. Yeah, so I can't I can't take credit for creating this it all came from A man by the name of david who created culture wise And he created it off the Ritz Carlton Credo which a lot [00:09:00] of other companies have done this. Only a few landscapers that I know have used this methodology Shield Grounds Management, Jerry Shields doing it. And if he's doing it, then, then we're on board because he's created a pretty amazing culture over there. Tommy Cole: I love it. I love it. People mean everything in this business. We are a people, person, industry. And what I've said over and over is it's not the fanciest, best known piece of mower. It's not the facility. It's the people that operate all of that at the end of the day. Bye bye! And set the bar extremely high on people and have a great onboarding, a great experience, and you'll have these people for forever. I love that. One of the things I want to note, this is kind of a little funny side, Justin, but you hire really good looking people like going through your staff. Like, I think you gotta be good, like kind of good looking. Look good in black because I think Justin has set the bar pretty [00:10:00] high. So he's, he's, you gotta be somewhat good looking. Is that right? Justin White: think it just comes naturally. I don't know. I mean, we definitely emphasize fitness and culture and health in our organization. You know, we, we feel like to be a good high performing individual, you got to feel good every day. You got to eat good. You got to live good. So I think those values kind of permeate not only our company, but. A lot of our employees take our core values home. A lot of those team team members take those, those values into their family life. And I think that just creates this continuous momentum of raising the bar. And pushing it higher. But yeah, Hey, I I'll take that compliment. Tommy Cole: That's awesome. That's awesome. Well, your, your energy is, is really awesome, right? So you can feed off of that and people get really excited. We're working for someone like you and it just kind of spills over the entire company where people just are really ramped up and excited to come work. And I call that just the law of attraction. If you're eating it and breathing it and sleeping it every single day of this energy and this [00:11:00] momentum And this excitement and you're feeling good about yourself Physically and mentally then you can you got to be crazy not to jump on board with Justin White: That's it. And I think there's, look, people are only going to go as high as you go. People are only going to jump as high as the leader jumps. So if I come in with low energy, it's just going downhill from there. But if I can set the bar extremely high, almost unrealistically high, then my team can come in at 80 percent of that and still outperform the competition down the street. So yeah, big energy, excitement, focus. I mean, if you look at my LinkedIn right now, the first thing is going to say is I help people unlock their full potential. I think being happy in life is correlated to accomplishing your true and full potential in life. And so if people are, Constantly being held down by the leader above them or the CEO of the company. Tommy Cole: They're never achieving that full potential. I think that's why people burn out. That's why people are unhappy. So I just think it it's, it's almost an obligation for me to go all in. And, and [00:12:00] luckily I've been, I've been graced with this natural ability to bring energy to our team. Yeah, that's great growing into the CEO Role Tommy Cole: So you're the ceo Justin White: Yes, sir. Tommy Cole: That's quite the quite the task you've got that we talk a lot about ceos and things You Explain what your role is now as a CEO. That's, that's a bit tricky. I think people just kind of get that name just because they're the owner. But like, you've also had to sort of earn that responsibility. We also got really small companies that listen to our podcast a lot, and they're trying to figure out how to be the CEO instead of being the guy that still drives the pickup truck to go deliver equipment, to also estimate, to also do the morning rollout, to also buy the truck. Like they're involved in everything. They're like, Tommy, how do I get, like, how do I get going on these things? Talk about your role and talk about some things that you started doing that was probably lessons learned to get you to Justin White: I love the question. [00:13:00] And I've been there. I've been the guy delivering equipment. I've been the guy doing bids. I've been the guy on the tractor while I had the CEO title. And I've learned a lot on the way. And today my role looks dramatically different now that we're a 20 million organization versus when we are a one or 2 million organization. The CEO title and responsibilities do not change whether you're 120 or 100 million in revenue, the CEO responsibilities are the same. The thing you have to realize is when you're delivering the truck, when you're running the tractor, when you're doing these things, you're not acting within the CEO box. That's okay because you have to kind of grind and wear multiple hats. But don't try to be the CEO when you're driving the tractor. Be the tractor guy when you're on the tractor and ensure that you carve out enough time throughout your day and week to do strategic CEO level responsibilities. We call it working in the business, which is doing the operator work versus working on the business, which is doing the CEO work. Now, as a CEO, I look at it as multiple duties. First and foremost, you [00:14:00] have to be the visionary. If you can't answer concisely, where is our company going to be in five years? You've got some work to do now. Can you multitask? Can you be in the truck and thinking about, Hey, what's our vision? Where are we going? For sure. You can, you can. So just because you're stuck in the truck doesn't mean you can't be working on that visionary work. You just have to carve out time to work on the business regularly. I think you need an 80 percent on 20 percent in when you're in that 5 million and above mark. But look, when you're one to 2 million or even below 1 million, you're just hustling and you got to realize it's all part of the hustle, right? Another aspect of being the CEO is you have to learn rapidly. If you want to grow your company from 1 million to 10 million or from 10 million to a hundred million, you have to stay one step ahead. One year, one move ahead of your company from an educational standpoint. So you better be reading books, listening to podcasts like this. So if you're listening, you're, you're, you're doing it and just ensure that you're staying ahead of your company's growth, otherwise the company is going to outgrow [00:15:00] you as a leader and you're going to get into that burnout mode. You're going to get into that frustration mode. The other aspect of a CEO is I mentioned it earlier. It's you are the ceiling to your team. No, one's going to outwork the CEO. No one's going to out strategize the CEO. Everyone's going to kind of fall in line below you. So you set the tone, you set the energy, you set the culture, everything you do, you are on stage again, whether you're one or a hundred million. You were on stage. So you have to make sure as a CEO, when you show up to the office, I don't care how stressed out you are. I don't care how bad your relationship at home is going. I don't care what's going on. Put on the face, walk in. If someone asks you how your day is going, don't say it's okay. It's I'm getting by just be like, it's fantastic. Tommy Cole: I'm excited to be here. How are you doing? So I think, I think I don't mean to be unauthentic. I just think you need to be positive and optimistic as a CEO. And as you grow and get more stressed out. It's just going to be harder and harder to do that. You just got to dig deep and find a way to [00:16:00] make it happen. Yeah. I love that. Like, listen, we've made a decision to get into this business as an owner. Like I honestly just don't want to hear any complaining because the other alternative to that is what just quit and go work for someone, but no one wants to go do that. So at the end of the day, It's all about hustle nonstop every single day. And if it's seven days a week for five years, it's seven days a week because you have opportunity. What I don't want people to get tricked into is they get duped into like a million dollar company. They're like, they think they've got it made because really they're not an owner. They're just highly paid person. In a business that has a flexibility to kind of take off when they want. The idea is to kind of like get out of that sort of high paying job and create the process and the systems and be a CEO right as you're doing the estimating, as you're driving the truck and as you're doing the morning [00:17:00] rollout. I love the 80 20 rule because that's a good takeaway for small companies. To Justin White: Oh yeah. You can put that in place today. And I think to your point, how do you get out of the weeds? How do you, how do you elevate yourself as a company grows? I'm just going to say it. You listening to this are holding onto your business too, too tightly. Your need to let go of the vine. You need to let go of the rope and let your team run. Yes. They will make mistakes. Yes. You will lose clients. Yes. You will make bad hires. Yes. It's part of the growth process you go through, but if you're constantly having to micromanage your team and every decision's got to run through me and everything else, you're never going to get to where you want to go. Now, like I said before, Tommy, right? You need to know what your five year plan is. And if your five year plan is to stay at a million bucks and that's all you want to accomplish, There's nothing wrong with that. And, and that's going to lead to a little bit different of a piece of advice, but I think most people listening to this podcast, they want to grow. Tommy Cole: They want to be part of something bigger. They want to create something bigger. And that's really who I'm talking to [00:18:00] here. The guys who want to scale beyond the owner operator, want to get to a real CEO level where they're knocking down, you know, seven figures of profit a year, not seven figures of revenue a year. correct. Love it. Love it. What is your Management Styles Tommy Cole: What is your management style? My management style, hire amazing people, give them the tools they need. And stay out of their way. I love it, you know, like hire Justin White: I don't want, I don't want to be the smartest guy in the room. You know, if I'm on my leadership team, I'm looking around, right. And we're working on this hyper growth strategy right now, going from 20 million to a hundred million over the next five years. And I am the smartest person in our leadership room. I have a major issue on my hands. I need someone who's smarter than me in sales who's smarter me in finance Who's smarter me in all those areas? Tommy Cole: love it. Love it I love that because You didn't get into this business To be status quo, especially dropping out of high [00:19:00] school, especially not going to college, especially your parents going through divorce. You're like, I'm going all in on this 100%. So your styles do like not hold people back and bottleneck your entire team. Your style is like hire really awesome people, good move the Disrupt the Industry Justin White: also i've got a chip on. my shoulder I've had it since I was a kid and and that's just been my mindset, you know It's always you know me against the world kind of mindset and growing up in like this skater surfer culture in santa cruz You know, you kind of have this You know this mindset that that is you against the world Now I've got a growing out of that and I've gotten to more of a networking and collaboration mindset. However, that has still been a core part of our team. We've got this idea. We are the next generation. There's a book my coach wrote called The Disruptive Disruptive Successor. It's a great book. If you guys want to pick it up on Amazon, it's the candy story. You know, he worked, he still works with us over [00:20:00] 10 years now. And he wrote this book around how the next generation is disrupting industries. And and that's really our focus is we want to come in, want to disrupt it in a positive way. We want to create a new alternative to how landscaping is done. And look, we want our people to make a ton of money doing it. I think that's a core focus of landscaping. Tommy Cole: That's been left. We want to make really rich people in the landscape industry, which historically hasn't been the case. And we're excited to be moving towards that goal. That's great. That's great. Establishing a Brand Tommy Cole: So talking about when I mentioned beautiful people that work for K& D, I also learned you're a huge branding person, whether it be the logo, the shirts, the attire the trucks. All of that. Why? Give us some reasons how you learned that. Is it something that you just inherited? Is it something that you saw in another company? Was it the parents? Was it? Who was that? Justin White: My coach, Jonathan Goldhill is a master brander and [00:21:00] marketer. I just have this, this hustle mentality. I mean, you know, my background in high school and everything else, I, I had to hustle a lot of different ways to make money and you always had to market and network. As I grew up, I realized who is the best at marketing sports teams because their fans pay money to wear the jerseys of their favorite sports team. Like they literally will pay money to get a Giants jersey or pay money to get a Cowboys jersey. And I'm realizing this idea of fandom, this idea that if you create fans, they will wear your gear. And if you have really strong brand guidelines, colors, logos, et cetera, you can. You can multiply your branding throughout beyond your team beyond just the small community you are So we kind of created this idea of fandoms, raving fans is what we call them And then we just make sure we get our gear out there Every truck's got huge logos on it every team member. We give them a ton of swag [00:22:00] beyond just their uniform We give them shirts hats sweatshirts to take home to their kids I mean we even have the onesies for the newborns that we send home for anyone who has a kid Tommy Cole: Nice. Nice. Justin White: Exactly. Get them. into the system. And so we just were big on branding and, and as you can see, I'm water, I'm wearing this candy water management and we knew water management was going to be a key part to our future success in 2020. So we rolled out a new brand called candy water management. It was simple. We took our two leaves and we just turned to blue. And, and we tell, we tell our clients, it's easy. Hey, if you see the blue leaves, that's a certified irrigation technician on your site. And they're, they're saving you money. If you see the green leaves, you know, we're maintaining your property, we're costing you money. But you know, that's what we're doing out there and, and that's our ROI on, on water management. Tommy Cole: go hand in hand. Yeah, I love that. Whater Management Goals Tommy Cole: So talk about real quick. There's you you're in california. Heavily restriction you know, we've we've heard all about the water [00:23:00] issues in the entire west actually across the u. s It's becoming a massive deal, you know along with the blowers and all these sort of mandates What what is your what is your goal with Justin White: Our goal for water management is to save our clients 33 percent of their water use as compared to what the standard water would be based on E. T. and industry standards. I. A. provide some really good data behind that irrigation Association. So we basically take what they would say. Hey, this is your baseline. This is what you should be using based on turf versus plants versus location. And we want to cut that by a 3rd and return that R. O. Y. back to the client. So we're creating a recurring revenue. Service model that provides an ROI on our service and basically is a net zero cost. We're kind of utilizing that solar solar module. If you can, you know, put a solar system on it offsets your energy bill that pays for your monthly solar bill. Then there's no reason why a person wouldn't sign up for solar. So if we can charge a hundred bucks a month per [00:24:00] controller and save you 200 per a month per controller, there's no reason you're going to say no to us. So that recurring revenue model, it's adding to our value creation, which is super important to us that EBITDA that, that, you know, potentially, if we need to raise money, that ability to do that and creating a sustainable business that's ahead of its time. So we're, we're a little early on water management. We were, we're now the industry's catching up. But one of the things we did talk about Brandy is we, we hold an annual water management summit. We invite people from all over the country to come speak. We invite all of our competitors, our clients, our potential clients, municipalities, and we talk about the state of water in our county specifically, very localized. And this year in March, we had over 200, 200 people attend, which is an amazing conference. Contractor put on and. Tommy Cole: So that's kind of our water management mindset and, and where we're headed with it, Yeah, that's great. That's great. I love the idea that you can become very, you can become the [00:25:00] professional educators. For this industry and educate everyone, anyone out there and say, this is the model that we need, have to doubt for all landscape companies moving forward. Cause if we don't do that, we're going to have way more restrictions, way more issues than you can ever ask for. So you're kind of like getting that head start right now. So different in the trades industry. I love it. I mean, AC, plumbing, heater, crafts, masonry, landscapers, irrigation. It's the foundation, literally foundation of our industry and in the, in the country we live in to be very masterful at our craft. So the, by the way of taking charge of this master water Justin White: we do just to speak on regulations in general in California. I get constant, I'm a big networker. So I'm always talking to landscapers, not even, not just in our area, but across the country, and I'm getting constant complaints, California is [00:26:00] regulating us to death. We've got small equipment bands on gas powered equipment. We've got water regulation. We've got, you know, we've got a 1099 regulation on who's a subcontractor versus W2. It's a massive advantage for companies that are in the forefront. For companies that are innovative and in onboarding the next level technology and raising the bar every day, these regulations only provide an advantage to professionalize the industry. So we're constantly spending time in Sacramento understanding what's coming next, so we can out innovate the regulation and when, when they ban gas powered equipment. Okay, so what we've already been going to electric for the last five years. Okay, when they're banning non functional turf and you can't water your water turf. Tommy Cole: No problem. We've been working with our clients to remove non functional turf for the last five years. So we're kind of that we're trying to be ahead of the game and ahead of the curve, if you will. We don't always accomplish that, but that's the, that's the, that's what we thrive for. like you mentioned earlier, be one step ahead, right? [00:27:00] And I want to take one step back when people hear that gas power is going out when we hear, you know, water management. And when we hear like the 10 99 and all these 95 percent of people complain, they complain about this. How come this government's doing this? And how come the, you know, the regulators are doing this? And how come they're, Okay. Dude, you can sit here and complain all day long, but what you going to do about it? And so, I want to work with someone like KND that says, boom, that's an opportunity. We can sit here and complain all day until we're blue in the face, but you're not going to do anything. So seize the opportunity, get your butt in there, get educated and execute. And that's, that's what I see in Justin White Justin White: A hundred percent. I mean, you're picking up on our strategy here and, and one level further, one level further is get involved. I mean, NALP and state associations are a great place to understand what's [00:28:00] coming down the pipe. I mean these regulations like the non functional turf AB 1572 that came out last year. That was not a blind side. That's been in the works for five years. Not only do you, by getting involved, do you understand what's coming down the pipe? You can influence it. They're looking for people, especially people under 50 who have a voice and want to share what should be done at the state and federal level. So no matter if you're in California or Texas or Florida or New York. You've got a seat at the table and you need to take that seat. And so if you can apply yourself there, now you're ahead of the game. You can educate. And when the new, you know, AB one, five, seven, two, or whatever comes out. You're ahead of it. Tommy Cole: I mean, when it goes live and you do a press release, you do a YouTube video, you do education, you're, you educate your account managers and you have a solution ready for the problem that the government's creating. I mean, what are we doing business? We solve problems. So when the government creates more problems, more opportunities to create a differentiation in our industry. Yep. That's us. We're problem [00:29:00] solvers at the end of the day. We can take care of that. One of the great things that, one of your coaches told me about that says you're in an extreme growth mode. And I, I actually, let me back up. Let me say I found a one more, one more little comment, one more little comment. It's right here. It says he's the master connector and networker. And I think you hit it a little bit earlier. Which makes you great for extreme growth right now. What is Extreme Growth? Tommy Cole: What is extreme growth for KND and you and your team? You've, you kind of pointed out some revenue things, but like get a little more granular, like what does that mean? I know that's some top line, but what are some other things that you need to build Justin White: love it. And I want to be clear, top line revenue is vanity. Profit is sanity. Cash is King. So we use top line to express a lot of growth goals because it's the easiest as an industry to grasp onto, but we do not talk a lot about top line revenue within inside our organization. When we talk about extreme growth, [00:30:00] our first metric of extreme growth is how many people did we promote in the last three months, how, how, how much additional training hours have we given our team? I mean, our goal is to do 10, 000 hours of training this year, across 120 employees. You can do the math and realize we are investing hundreds of hours per employee in training. High extreme growth is not just about top line revenue, but it's growing our team. It's growing our market share and it's growing our brand. So. If you can help raise the bar in the industry, increase professionalism, increase your team's ability, it'll naturally lead to top and bottom line growth, but what will be nice is you're doing it for the right reasons. You're doing it to better the industry. You're doing it to better your team, backing into it. We live in. Santa Cruz County was voted the most expensive place to live in the entire world in a recent study based on how much the average median income is an average median home price. I [00:31:00] mean, our medium home price is 1. 1 million here. That's a starter home. You get into a regular home, you're talking 2 or 3 million. We need to create earning opportunities for our team. And what I'm super proud of is over the last three years, we've doubled our company went from 10 million to 20 million. And our employee count has increased from 110 employees to 120 employees. Like we literally increased our employee count by less than 10%. While doubling our revenue and we're pouring all that additional gross profit and dollars back into our salaries, back into our comp plans, back into training to continue and elevate our team. So we're doing it for the core reason of raising the bar. And that backs into our people that backs into financial income. Tommy Cole: And at the end of the day, extreme growth is so much more than revenue. Capture it's really about your people and that's where it starts. And honestly, that's where it's going to end too. Yeah, I love that. It's not the top line and people always look at that. The [00:32:00] top line, the top line, the top line, but instead of focusing on top line is great to talk about because that's kind of where we gauge because we were saying, Oh, you have a landscape company. Always. That's the role. What's the size, right? You got to give them the dollar value, right? It's sort of kind of like a weird deal, but really what it is, yeah. Is getting in tune with your team and growing them and then as they grow, then the company grows. So, a hundred percent, a hundred percent agree with you. One last thing, Justin. One last thing I want to talk about some advice for anyone that's out there and we'll always end it with something that says, man, I'd love to sort of a, a quote that I'll live by or a book that I, that I read all the time, something. Something that when I was 17 year old and I dropped out of high school and this caught my eye, like talk about someone that's been doing this for 35 years and talk about someone that's just getting started. What do you live and die by besides, cold plunges [00:33:00] that you do at your house, Justin White: got it you got to do the cold plunge you got to create discipline, you know, look, yeah Okay, this Tommy Cole: And then what's next? Justin White: i've got a few I you know, i'm trying to pick i've got a bunch of different things to talk about But I think Focus on Self Mastery Justin White: first and foremost You need self mastery You know, whatever you're going to do in life. And this transcends, this transcends business, but the idea is you need self mastery, you need to understand what you want, what you need out of your business, out of your career, and ensure that you're focusing on those things, you're creating discipline within yourself. Look, business is a professional sport. Business is a professional sport and it is hard to be successful at it. And if you want to be in the top 10%, if you want to be in the top 1%, look, there's 30 million small businesses in this country. Okay. So there's massive amounts of businesses. If you want to be in the top, you need to create self mastery and you create self discipline. You need to work at it. So I think that's a first and foremost, it does not get easier as you scale. Just because you [00:34:00] go to one to five to 10 million, you think you're going to be able to sit back and just, okay. Watch your money pile up. That's not what it is. Now, maybe you go to chairman of the board, you hire a GM or CEO. Great. I think you need to create self mastery. I think you need to create discipline. The next thing you need to do is you need to keep. You need to get the right people on the bus. I need to get the bus going in the right direction. You need to create vision in your company, a strong vision and a CEO that is dedicated to that vision will outperform strategy 10 times out of 10. I mean, culture will build around a vision. So you need to have a vision that'll lead to the culture that'll lead to getting the right people on the bus and driving the bus in the right direction. And then finally you need. To create an amazing sales team. This is so overlooked in business. And I think if I could go back to 1 million in revenue, I would have focused more intensely on my sales team than just knowing that [00:35:00] referrals were going to come and we're going to grow through word of mouth. Tommy Cole: Yeah, that's great. But you're not selecting your clients. You're just. Taking what you get, what comes to you. I think you need to outbound sales team. As soon as you hit a million and I say team, it could be one person. And that's an area that the more you put time and energy into that area, the quicker and more quality growth that you're going to experience. Love it. So self mastery. Okay. Self discipline, right? People on the right bus. And where's the bus headed? You can put the right people on, but if the bus is making a circle all the time, well, that's, that's the CEO's fault. Right. And then amazing sales team. I did a show the other day with someone that said, The sales and business development was the key is for success because they started out with pounding the pavement nonstop, selecting clients they wanted to work with and for at the end of the day. And they set the bar really high and knew exactly what their client [00:36:00] was. And when you, when, and then we said, listen, the sales team, this is a marathon and it's not going to happen overnight, but if we're consistent and we're disciplined, we're self mastery, this has gone on to explode and now Massive commercial maintenance company. So I Justin White: So I just want to end it there. Value Creation Justin White: You know, I just want to say this one other thing is, is I think a lot of companies look at growth and building and everything else. And they, they step over this idea of value creation. And I think it's really important to not just look at profitability, which is part of value creation, but the quality of business that you're building. And no matter if you're looking to exit next year, next month, or in, in 25 years, You should always be checking and reviewing your value creation Quick plug on the ace peer groups and and what you guys do at mcfarland and marty grunder's company grow in our peer groups We're constantly talking about value creation We're constantly looking at our profitability from a benchmarking standpoint and we're looking at how do we create our businesses? To [00:37:00] be more valuable because you should always be thinking exit, whether you want to run this business for the next five decades, or you want to sell in a, in a few years, value creation's huge. And as a smaller 1 million company and below, I think we kind of overlooked that and our growth process. So I think, I think that's just a quick plug on a peer group and something that's helped us. I mean, we joined the peer group when we were 10 million and now we're 20. So I'll just, Tommy Cole: that's great. in there. Yeah. A little bit, a little bit in value creation. Like I talked to, I was coaching someone the other day. What value does your company bring besides the total at the bottom of the page? Right. What is it? And they're like, I don't, I don't understand. I don't know. Like, okay, so let's talk about what you do. Great. I don't know. I have a uniform. We pay for uniforms. We have a legal staff. We have logo trucks. We have insurance. We do once a month site audit reviews. We do enhancement problems. We also have a tree care. Like, [00:38:00] we do training 52 weeks a year. Like, look at all the value along with the total that's at the bottom of the page for our services. Right? And that's the difference between everyone on this podcast, or even the ACE peer groups, or the people that you meet across the country as you're traveling is What value do you provide for Justin White: it. I completely agree. And I think that is a, it's like a marching drum to your team. Bigger than one person. It's bigger than profit. It's the value you're giving to the world. And I talk about the why, you know, our why, like I said, is to raise the bar in the landscape industry. I think people need to ask that question to themselves. Tommy Cole: What would be missing if we went out of business tomorrow? And you get your team together, your entire team. And you ask that question, you're going to end up with a list, 40, 50, 70 items long that you're going to write out. That's the value you're building. Pick your top three and see if you can improve those by 10 percent and then watch your entire company change. Yeah. [00:39:00] Love it. Justin, you are an inspiration. I think I'm ready to just jump through the screen and give you a big hug and possibly just keep through going through a brick wall because you're extremely motivating. If this doesn't work out, if Justin White: I Tommy, I'll echo that, man. I see you at all these events and I always have a great time catching up and talking shop with you, man. So this has been absolute pleasure to be on your podcast and, and love what you guys are doing for the industry. I think, I think we are in a revolution of sorts. I said at the beginning, it's never been a better time to be a landscaper. Tommy Cole: I wholeheartedly believe that. And what you guys are doing over there, McFarland Stanford roots of success is exactly that we're raising the bar, brother. Yeah. Raising the bar. I love it. It's good stuff. Justin, we'll have you on again. We'll get an update. Next year at some point, but we'll see you on the road. Keep hammering down and keep that energy rolling because it's a Justin White: you Tommy Cole: super contagious. John: Ready to take the next step? Download our free Profitability Scorecard [00:40:00] to quickly create your own baseline financial assessment and uncover the fastest ways to improve your business. Just go to McFarlinStanford.com/scorecard to get yours today To learn more about McFarlin Stanford our best in class peer groups and other services go to our website at McFarlinStanford.com And don't forget to follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. See you next time on the Roots of Success.