Finding a way to digitally track everything that goes into completing a project has helped Earthco Landscape add and retain customers, says vice president and co-owner Daniel Morrison.
Based in Santa Ana, Calif., Earthco Landscape landed at No. 141 on Landscape Management’s 2025 LM150 list of the industry’s top revenue-generating firms, experiencing 15-percent growth from 2023 to 2024. The company was founded in 1984 by Daniel’s father, Robert, a longtime landscape industry veteran. Two of Daniel’s brothers, Kyle and Will, also work with the company. Earthco offers commercial landscape maintenance, lawn care, design-build, irrigation and tree care services.
Digital foundation
While there’s more than 100 years of landscape experience at Earthco, there were still times the company missed opportunities with over- or under-bidding projects, Morrison says. To combat those issues, it revamped its sales and estimating process to use a data-based approach. Morrison designed an artificial intelligence (AI) system to improve bidding accuracy.
“We’re at an interesting time with landscaping where technology has a foothold and is taking companies to the next step,” Morrison says.
Coming from a tech background, Morrison had an inside look at what made companies run efficiently and saw there was room for improvement when he came to the landscape industry. He looked for a digital solution that would take a real-life process and put technology behind it. Earthco’s AI combines metrics like property size, labor time and materials to produce the bid amount.
“Because of that estimating process and data we can provide customers, it’s not just a shot in the dark. We can show exactly what it will take to get the job done,” Morrison says. “Not only has that helped us acquire new clients, but we’ve also been able to keep clients for the long term.”
Since instituting the new technology, Earthco’s retention rate for new clients has been 98 percent. Another component of its success has been ensuring all its work is profitable. For legacy maintenance accounts, that meant raising prices across the board to get them back to being profitable.
“If you’re just trying to hit growth no matter what, that leads to sales that have a small margin or aren’t profitable,” Morrison says. “There’s no way you can be cutting prices with how much things have gone up.”
On the back end, the company created a proprietary client portal app — available for download in all major app stores — for customers to submit requests, receive prompt responses, manage interactions and view reports.
Morrison only wishes Earthco had implemented all of the technology sooner.
“Technology is an ever-evolving beast. Every day, there are new processes available,” he says. “If you’re thinking about it or interested in implementing technology, you probably should have done it a year ago, so do it now.”
Next generation
Even with all the digital resources the company has created, Earthco’s success still depends on its team. To ensure it’s leading the charge with the industry’s best new talent, the company implemented a program to attract and mentor recent college graduates.
Over the course of 18 months, the graduates join the Earthco team to learn all about the industry, from entry level all the way up to management, Morrison says.
“Landscaping is such an awesome industry, but it’s overlooked by people going to school or college,” Morrison says. “We wanted to create an environment to bring them out of college and give them a taste of why it’s so cool. It’s been great to see people straight out of college who didn’t know anything about landscaping start to grow and want to learn more. That’s been super rewarding.”
