Culture isn’t a side project; it’s the whole damn foundation.
You can have the best vision, the sharpest strategy and a killer product, but if your culture is weak, none of it will stick. It’s like trying to build a skyscraper on sand. Growth doesn’t happen because you want it to. Growth happens because you’ve built a company where it can happen.
At K&D Landscaping, we’ve spent the last decade proving that principle. We’ve scaled fast, broken records and expanded into new markets not because we chased numbers, but because we built a culture that supports high performance and demands better.
So, how do you do it? Here’s the blueprint.
Create a vision worth following
You can’t expect your team to build something great if they don’t know what they’re building. At K&D, our growth culture starts with a clear 10-year BHAG — a Big Hairy Audacious Goal — a focused three-year horizon and five annual goals that anchor our actions. It gives our team direction, purpose and a reason to show up on fire every day. This isn’t fluff; it’s structure. It’s the concrete slab on which everything else stands.
Define the rules of the game
Without a clear identity, culture drifts. And drift kills momentum. That’s why we obsess over our fundamentals — our core values, behaviors and standards. It’s how we coach, hire, fire and promote. We’ve learned the hard way: If you don’t actively shape your culture, it will shape itself, usually not in your favor.
Hire like your life depends on it
Because it does. Every person you bring on either strengthens or weakens your foundation. B players hire C players. And when you let C players stay, you send a message that mediocrity is OK. It’s not. At K&D, we always recruit, offer competitive compensation and invest in the A players who want to grow with us.
Grow your people faster than the business
John C. Maxwell’s “Law of the Lid” is real. Your business can’t grow beyond the capabilities of your team. So, we coach, we train, we challenge. If someone’s not keeping pace, we step in early. If someone’s thriving, we accelerate them. You can’t scale a company if you’re not scaling your people.
Build a culture that embraces change
Growth demands agility. New tech, new expectations, new challenges … they’re coming whether you’re ready or not. A stagnant culture resists that. A growth culture leans into it. At K&D, we teach our teams to expect change and see it as an opportunity, not a threat. That mindset shift is everything.
Prioritize organizational health
Culture needs systems to thrive. Without a framework, even the best team will eventually spin out. That’s why we use an Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS). It’s our system for alignment, accountability and clarity. Culture is the heart, but EOS is the spine that keeps everything upright and moving forward.
Culture isn’t something you hang on the wall. It’s something you build on. It’s the soil where everything else takes root. Do you want explosive growth? Do you want high-performing teams? Do you want to lead an industry? Then stop outsourcing culture to HR or the annual kickoff meeting. Own it, shape it and defend it, because the best companies don’t grow by accident. They grow by design. And that design starts with culture.
