Two Crews to Multiple Locations: Chase Mullin’s Journey to Landscape Expansion

Chase Mullin John: [00:00:00] The Roots of Success podcast is for the landscape professional who's looking to up their game. We're not talking lawns or grass here. We're talking about people, process, and profits. The things deep within the business that need focus to scale a successful company from hiring the right people and managing your team to improving your operations and mastering your finances. 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: Hey, Tommy Cole here, and I'm on site in New Orleans, Louisiana with my friend Chase Mullin Mullin Landscape. We are experiencing the Mardi Gras, experience, experience of a lifetime. We've had members here all week since, I don't know, the weekend, and it's Fat Tuesday post Fat Tuesday, and here we are. We're a little struggling, a little But we're Chase's volunteered his time to open up the doors and to a lot of peer group members that are sort of emerging and we're going to ACEs 2. 0. And Chase has fallen volunteered his time and all his business and his team to be here. How are you Chase? I'm Chase Mullin: doing great. I'm I'm happy as happy as I could be to be here on Ash Wednesday, the day [00:01:00] after fat Tuesday, I was joking. Before we started recording that I canceled our, our family ski trip to, to host you guys. Yeah. Proud, proud, proud to be hosted, man. That's cool. Always great to be partnered with McFarland and Grow Group. Tommy Cole: Yeah, that's great. So Chase, tell us a little about yourself. You know, landscape, the business, man, you hosted Grow in 21. I did. 21, it feels like an eternity. About Mullin Landscape Tommy Cole: Since we've been here, but tell us, tell us in general, if you're not aware of Mullen Landscape in your world. Chase Mullin: So tell us a little about yourself. Yeah, sure. So, and funny, you talk about hosting growth. So we did the first, I think post COVID grow, which is crazy, COVID five years ago now. So obviously no masks. It was great to shake people's hands as they walk through the door. So I started the business, you know, Mullen 2007 went to college for a while. It wasn't my thing. Really kind of started mauling in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. My initial vision was two crews. I thought we'd have a crew doing maintenance and a crew doing construction. And you're good. No, that was good. Yeah. I did some back of the napkin math and [00:02:00] like, really, it would have offered me like you know, good lifestyle. Yeah. And cool. I'll tie Marty Grunder into the story. So year one in business, I go visit Marty and yeah, I did a field trip at Grunder, which if you've never been to Grunder, like it's a great starting point. Yeah, it's a place. It's a sight to behold. And so, you know, going there, I think I was 22, maybe 23 years old and going to Grunder and seeing like all, you know, the green trucks and the uniform crews and everything had a place and everything was in that place. And I told Marty Grunder on that trip, I said, Marty, I'm going to go back to New Orleans. I'm going to do this. And he smiled. So the vision changed a little bit. Yeah, the vision changed. Yeah. Yeah. And and that was it, man. I really, I like came home and that's what I set out to do. It was very fortunate that, you know, in the early days, I guess I partnered with a couple of different landscape architects and quickly developed a list of like, I guess we'd say like clients in the right neighborhoods. And so we, we moved in what I'd call a kind of high end design build [00:03:00] company. And that served us really well for a number of years. So how long is that? So you started in? I started in 07, so we're in 2025, I think probably 2015, so that's eight, eight years into business, 2014, maybe we decided that instead of trying to grow, we wanted to continue growing. We knew that. And so we really came to the determination that to, to grow, we'd either need to move markets and expand that design build, you know. service area, or maybe grow in different segments inside of the market that we were in. And that's when we started pursuing more commercial business. You know, we knew that we were good at construction. We were doing some maintenance. We understood, I think, and started really learning about the recurring revenue model with maintenance. And so that's what we, you know, that's really what we set out to do was to grow our commercial business. We experienced in that period of time almost zero growth on the residential end outside of some just kind of plateaued with purpose, plateaued with [00:04:00] purpose. COVID gave us a little spike, you know, unanticipated spike, which, you know, we were there, people needed, needed things and wanted things. And, you know, we were willing to do them. But last year we took a really like hard look underneath the hood, I'll say. of residential design building versus commercial versus commercial. You're doing both, which is not, not the easiest and again, we really, we had built a foundation of resident, you know, built this company on the foundation of residential design bill. Not, I guess it's worth sharing. There's some things that we learned from Residential Design Build that we've carried over to the commercial services we offer and that I plan to keep forever and a lot of it's like the white glove experience. Totally, the service. High level, high level service quality work. I'd like to think that, you know, we're producing quality at the top end of the commercial market. So anyway, so last year we took a hard look underneath the hood, we'll say, of Residential Design Build and really spent some time analyzing. Not just [00:05:00] the people that fell inside of that division, but also some of the people that may have been costed to another division But we're spending a lot of time on it. Yeah And what we learned is that we really weren't making very much money We weren't making much money and we knew that it was a pretty big strain on the business Nothing against any, you know residential design build businesses, but for us, yeah, you know for us It was difficult. It was difficult revenue to produce. I feel like a lot of the team here, not every single person, but a lot of the team, we've kind of like got the feathers in our cap, so to speak on these residential jobs. We've done some absolutely beautiful, incredible jobs for some great clients. And I think in a lot of ways, we like accomplished what we needed to accomplish. And so, you know, kind of like Jim Collins talks about in his book, good to great, you know, we have, we really embraced the hedgehog concept, which we talked about. You know, so once we did those analytics on that residential design, build department. We made the, you know, in a lot of ways, tough decision [00:06:00] to, you know, I keep using the analogy, like, turn it off like a water hose. And so on January the 6th, we turned it off like a water hose. Shut it off. Shut it off. You know, we, we reached out and made some connections for some of the team that we let go to make sure that they'd, you know, land softly and find new employment. Yeah. We had just the thought of a landscape architect, a guy named Benton Williams, I'll give a bit of a shout out. Yeah, and yeah. You know, we're sending a lot of business to Ben, and he started his own Haas Landscape Studio, his own small design shop. So, you know, we're happy that we're able to send, you know, what would have been our work. We don't have to just turn the clients away. We can send them to him, and, you know, it's helped in the last two months. I think he's starting to build a nice, nice foothold in the market in terms of high end, you know, residential landscapes. So let me ask you Tommy Cole: this. This is a really good, really good question. Or not people, but business owners start to reflect after many years in business, right? Things can change, which is, which is totally normal. But talk, you saw this vision of, of residential [00:07:00] commercial. And you thought of this vision of like going in on all commercial. How Chase got His team on board with Commercial Maintenance Tommy Cole: But there's also some challenges, which people are like not aware of, or it's a headache. It's like, how do you get the team on board? Like you're, you're going to have some. Yeah. Oh, why do this? Why, why, you know, we, I thought we were doing good, but how do you get the team motivated and on board to say this is what we're going to do and moving forward? Yeah, that's a great question. Chase Mullin: So I think that some of it is A, like having the right team, but B, like you said, even if it's right people in the right seats, they still aren't always going to buy into it. Not always, yeah. So what we did, some of it with intention and some of it almost unintentionally was over the period of several years. We, we just talked about it and we, what we talked was the truth, right? Where we experienced difficulty with residential sales, where we experienced some difficulty with different clients. We've had a lot of commercial wins. We've done well, you know, we opened a branch in Baton Rouge. We, we bought a new facility in Baton Rouge a little bit over a year ago. It's [00:08:00] almost a year and a half. That's, that's been thriving. And so again, it's like the people here were able to really just like observe and listen to what we talked about as a team, right? Like sending out the message of truth. And I think it helped kind of prime and prepare them for what was to come. I, I, even I talk about Ben and you know, we had Ben and I had the conversation about us, you know, dissolving the division that he was running. He said he knew, you know, he's like, I knew at some point, I didn't see this. What happened as a team, it was a surprise, but not a surprise. Right. And you know, it's, like I said, it's really hard decision to make because we've done some really cool jobs and work for some great people and I've made some like, you know. Long standing friendships as a result, but ultimately we had to look at, you know, like what's best for the team. What are we best at? What do the clients get the most value from, right? What's best for the long term? And I also think you Tommy Cole: got to look at your market too, right? And so, so As a company owner you got to look if you're still growing you got to find other Opportunities to grow because you got to keep elevating your team.[00:09:00] Your team is like wanting to grow so Quite frankly, I think what you realize is like, there's not an opportunity to grow and expand. We kind of own the market where we are. And you can't necessarily really expand that high end residential much further than what you've already worked. So one of the avenues was commercial. And this isn't just like commercial shopping centers down the road. This is like commercial, you know, really well thought out, highly, you know, landscape architects, designers, interior designers. There's a lot whether it be a warehouse or museum parks, which still has that touch. So it's, that's, that's your awareness to see growth, to elevate the team difference than 2021 now in 25 years, we get it down the road. Exactly. Yeah. So, so now you're full commercial, right? So you've opened a new branch a year plus ago, which was a big, [00:10:00] awesome, exciting thing. Tell us about, Opening another branch Tommy Cole: you opened a branch, but one of the things that, you know, owners struggle is like, how do we get the same brand in our branch here at the Mothership, which. Most of everyone is, but how do you get that same brand in another physical location? Did you, were you able to bring people from here? Did you hire within somewhere else to continue the brand? Did you set up the same similar operation as you did here, as you did in Baton Rouge or what? I'm glad you asked that question. I was hoping you would. Yeah. So Chase Mullin: we started, you know, initially in Baton Rouge, which is about an hour west of us. We started sending trucks from, From here from here. So essentially it was more or less a loss leader. And that was primarily we were following customers that asked us to do work for them Eventually, it was probably three three and a half years ago. We leased a small yard. It was not a pretty yard It was not a nice part of town put a jobsite trailer in that yard. It was not a pretty trailer It was candidly like almost embarrassing to pull up to we moved, we had a really [00:11:00] strong, he's a 15 year crew leader, we, we sent over there. So he's running, you know, one of the crews, he's been really instrumental in kind of like onboarding a lot of these crew members and like the Mullen way, he'll move around crews at times to train, but we had this, you know, really just not sexy. Tommy Cole: Well, that, that's the best part about this. I'll interrupt you, but. Like, it's not like you need this awesome new place to start. You're kind of like getting your foot in the water, foot in the door, testing things out. It might be a longer commute. It might not be the sexiest. It's just a container and you've got a few drops, just to test out the process. And then after you evaluate it, you take the next foot forward. Then we take the Chase Mullin: next step, right? We go from dipping our toes in the water to like getting in the water. So we knew that we wanted a facility. So we believe Baton Rouge. That market is big enough to stand up like a full branch. You know, we think that, that branch will be in the six to eight million dollar a year range once it's, you know, fully built out. So we didn't want to just have like a satellite yard, right? So we looked for a [00:12:00] proper facility where we could take something similar to this, but on a little bit of a smaller scale, emulate it, build it there. So, A, like the, just the culture, the feeling, the atmosphere in Baton Rouge at this point is very similar to St. Rose right now. It's a pretty office. It's a nice space. Everything's well organized. The trucks are clean. The trucks are organized. And what we've done is we've brought several managers, we've moved several managers from New Orleans to Baton Rouge and we recruited a branch manager who trained here in New Orleans for an extended period of time. We still have a lot of influence from like the New Orleans management team. Like you heard Paul speak earlier. He runs our maintenance division. He spends a day a week in Baton Rouge. Paul's incredible. So we're making sure that we've got like the right influence there. Nubia, she spends time in Baton Rouge. And once again, like, it definitely, I'll tell you like one of the, not cons, but You know, one of the, variables or things we have to contend with in opening other branches, it does start to, like, dilute a [00:13:00] bit the team, right? So, in my opinion, you need to have the right team, and the team's got to have the bandwidth to do that. Because if the team doesn't have, like, main location running the right way, and you try to start open location 2 or 3 or 4, like, as that team becomes watered down, I think you, you know, in my opinion, you could really lose, or we could lose. Some of what we've, you know, built our reputation on here. That's something that we're, like, keenly aware of as we look at, you know, location 3, ahead. Tommy Cole: Yeah, I love it. The best part, the key takeaway here is start small when you expand out. Very small, jobsite trailer, container, small yard, not sexy, probably not the best location, right? Fill it out. But I like how you brought a few timbers from the main mothership. out to this location, get a little more business, get a little more business, and then you open a facility. And I love that part. I got, I got two more things to discuss. Changes fter Hurricane Ida Tommy Cole: You experienced sort of a horrific event [00:14:00] in a hurricane. We're, we're in the middle of hurricane country, but, you know, I feel like every so often a big one comes. Tell me about what happened there and what was the morale like as a team coming together? This is sort of an epic event. You didn't have a roof here. I mean, you're like, we still got to do work. We got to, we have to, people need a paycheck. And tell me about that sort of high level of what, what happened. Chase Mullin: Yeah. So Hurricane Ida in 2021 came more or less like right over our office. It also came over the homes that live a bit west of here. Came over our houses, created, you know, a lot of damage, wind damage. So it was like a blessing and a curse, so to speak. We did a lot of hurricane cleanup work, which, which was a blessing from like a revenue standpoint. Ultimately like what Hurricane Ida did by ripping off a piece of the roof and blowing water into the front of the building, is it, it created an opportunity for us to not only, obviously we had to repair the building, but we knew that we were outgrowing the space. So we built into the warehouse. [00:15:00] and did some renovations, hired a great architect that made some really great suggestions on how to better utilize the space. So that, that was the blessing part. It did help us come together as a team. You know, again, like we have parishes, not counties in Louisiana, we're in St. Charles Parish. So. So, we did a lot for the parish. We, you know, we provided meals and water and cleaning supplies and other things to parishioners. We had a parking lot service. I could drive through it. They could drive and load everything up. I mean, it was awesome. I had people like Greg Herring drive in a U Haul truck from Texas full of supplies. So, it was really just a great opportunity to support the community. Ultimately, I think in a lot of ways, the team did. You know, we kind of rallied together. On the downside, it is a lot of stress. I mean, you have people, not only the experiencing issues at their, you know, here, they're experiencing issues at home and their families having issues, their kids might be out of school. So I think it was really a time where it [00:16:00] made us, in some ways, we were rushing to try to get things done and make stuff happen for our customers, but we also had to be really of how people felt and what they were experiencing with their families and their housing and everything else. So while there were, you know, there was certainly like some stress as a result of that, particularly like in the moment. I think as we came out of it, on the back end, people really realized like how much we care. And you know, the fact that like, you know, if it wasn't Chase Mullen himself willing to do something, it was, you know. Somebody else in the office wanted to take their job for them. And we literally had landscape architects driving trucks to go clean up sites. And so everybody came together as a team, banded together and made it happen. That's true. Tommy Cole: It's very impressive. I saw a lot of the social media stuff and everyone was just pitching in where they can. You know, and sometimes they had to go back home early to take care of stuff. Everyone sort of donated their time, build revenue. Got paid. Essentially this community is great. I mean, [00:17:00] they, we have, we have to be, we have to be like sort of glued together and everyone helps each other. Along the way, I get this question all the time, Chase, and maybe you can provide some insight on this. You've evolved from going like I need two crews of successful business to now a CEO of a rather large business, multiple locations. What are you looking at as a CEO? Tommy Cole: What? , what are you looking at as a CEO? I mean, you're not putting bits together, you're, you're not continuously looking at jobs and loading trucks and things. What does a CEO at Mul Landscape do on a sort of regular basis if there's like two or three things that you can recommend to our audience, audience of, of, of running the team? Yeah, I think that's a great question. I think, I think Chase Mullin: that, that there is some level or view. Let me back up and say, like, I'm absolutely a visionary CEO. Yeah. I think there are two kinds, too, right? I don't think the visionary is, you know, I think there's some really tactical CEOs. Yeah. And some people who probably do both great zoom in and zoom out. I have the ability to zoom in a bit, but [00:18:00] I much prefer to be zoomed out. But I've learned that zooming in on certain things is really important. So I have a dashboard that I look at every week. I love that. I look at the dashboard. You can see the metrics of how everything is working. I review a cash flow report with our controller. I want to know everything about cash for that week, for the week previous. I want to know everything about AP and AR I know a lot about AR, I've learned that through, Tommy Cole: and through experience. You didn't sign up for something like that with two trucks, right? You just had to, just jump in. I mean, we get in this business of landscaping because we like, we like to mow, we like to touch, we like to build cool stuff. But like, you had to jump in and learn these things because otherwise, you'd be, you would not be in this spot. Chase Mullin: That's right, yeah, a lot of them I've learned through trial and error, I've made some errors. And so I've learned what's important to look at. But you hear cash is king, like cash flow is king, particularly when you transfer from residential where they're paying on completion to commercial where, you know, it's not atypical for, you know, 90 plus days on some of these [00:19:00] jobs before, you know, receive our final payment. So the other thing that's really big is, is really just motivating and keeping the team aligned. Like I've got people, like we just mentioned, Paul, who they're great at running like their segments of the business. And ultimately, like they, they are the ones who run the business. But I've got to keep them motivated and in line, like I just said, on like where we're going, what's next. I find that, and you know, we've got some great people and they've got the ability to pull up to and like really think about visionary things with the business. But I think that it's really helpful. It's like part of my responsibility to make sure that I'm pulling them out of the weeds at times and helping them think about what's ahead. Like we just talked about it. You know, future locations. Well, a big part of that, you know, they're dealing with the tactics of what are the numbers look like and when, when exactly are you going to get there? And I'm the one that's facilitating the meetings on like, Hey, let's build these things out and start putting dates and targets and goals to what, you know, when and what, when it's going to be and what they're going to look [00:20:00] like. So you're a visionary. Tommy Cole: What do you, what do you do to have, to unveil the vision for the team? How to share the vision with the team Tommy Cole: A weekly meeting, monthly, quarterly, town hall, leadership, you have a leadership team to sort of unveil those things and then they trickle down to everyone else. Chase Mullin: So we have a leadership team, they're responsible, they meet with their divisions on a weekly basis. So they really push a lot of what we talk about, we meet weekly as a leadership team. Each leader meets with their respective division on a weekly basis. They push a lot of that stuff down on a bigger scale. We have a quarterly meeting that's relatively in depth. I send a monthly, like, very detailed email with financial information to the team. And then we do an annual, we do an off site that's typically two, two days, two days and two nights. We really spend a lot of time, right, recapping the previous year and talking about what's coming for the, for the current year, in the current year. And from that, I think it gives us a lot, a lot of opportunity on those, in those monthly emails or those quarterly [00:21:00] meetings to talk about like, Hey, you remember guys last month or last quarter, we talked about who we're going to do these things like we've done them. Here's where we are. They're in progress. While the team is not necessarily like holding us accountable, they, I think they kind of are holding us accountable. At least I operate like they're holding us accountable. And that's what's great. So I feel like we've got to communicate with them and keep them updated. Even, even when it's not the kind of updates we want to provide. Hey, we ran into a roadblock, but here's what we're doing. Tommy Cole: Love it. So to wrap up, this, this is great. What, what's the vision from all of now? I mean the sky's the limit without giving us too much information, but. I know you got a vision. You've got the mothership here in New Orleans. You've got the Baton Rouge. I'm sure Baton Rouge has got some more growth plans, but what, what else is on the horizon for you guys? Yeah, Chase Mullin: great question. So once again, like Baton Rouge, we've got a lot of energy and, and focus and momentum with. We've got really lofty goals there. And as we look westward, you know, all the way into like the East coast of you know, like a Southeast, we'll call it [00:22:00] Texas. Yeah. We've got a ton of opportunity. You know, we're currently we're working, it's an hour west of Baton Rouge, small market Lafayette. We've got a number of jobs there. We've got a number of jobs in Lake Charles, which is another market an hour west of there. So I think really for us, it's like, it's the right jobs, the right clients. It's places where we believe that we can bring value, right? Like if we're bringing value and they respect the value that we bring and they're willing to pay, you know, pay for the value. Yeah. You know, because they, They're, they're looking for like best possible outcome, like that's the kind of jobs that we're going after. So you know, once again, we've got a hungry team. We've got some great people. You know, we, we plan to continue to grow, but we also plan to continue to provide great service where we are. So we definitely, we want to grow, but we are not losing focus, right? Some of the primary responsibilities and who we are. Tommy Cole: It's kind of where your clients take you a little bit, right? You're kind of dabbling your feet once again in certain markets and as opportunities come up in these markets, then you can establish a little more [00:23:00] presence, a little more presence. And then that could be your next thing on the horizon. Well, it's an unbelievable setup. You know, what I like about this place is Chase, it's just a square building. It's simple and it's clean. It's got concrete floors, as you can see. It's got some openness but you utilize, you can see these awesome, you know, pictures of displays of things going on. Listen, it's not, it's not amazing. It's, it's no sort of like high level of detail. It's just simple floor plan. You've added on some here throughout the facility and it makes great presence. John: Ready to take the next step? 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