In 2018, I found myself in a situation at Grunder Landscaping Co. that I think a lot of owners will relate to.
We had been stagnant at just under $5 million in revenue for years, and our team was getting frustrated by the lack of growth and opportunities. We were stuck. I had team members who wanted to grow, and from my work at The Grow Group, I knew the steps that we needed to take, but we were falling apart on the execution.
In 2025, we did nearly $18 million in revenue, and while there was a lot of hard work that got us to that point, I think the biggest lessons learned came from the changes made in our organizational chart. We had to focus on getting the right people into the right seats at the company, whether that meant finding new talent or rearranging the team that we already had. Here’s what it took.
Find your team’s strengths
It starts with looking at your team’s strengths and figuring out if the role they’re in is really maximizing those strengths to their fullest potential. In the years since 2018, we promoted heavily from our crews when we saw potential. Today, those folks are:
- Salespeople (four members on our 11-person sales team started on a crew)
- Director of lawn care
- Director of production operations
- Procurement manager
- Group leaders managing our production crews
The various paths within our company came from understanding the team member’s unique passions and skills and finding a way to let them do more of that. Brent Grolnic was so good at finding enhancements, for example, that he was a natural fit in sales. Amanda Collins really loves plants and does a fantastic job as procurement manager. Lorenzo Lopez Valenzuela was so good at teaching teams to mow well that he now has more direct reports as a group leader than anyone else on the org chart.
Take ownership as a leader
A hard lesson to learn as the leader of this company was that it was nobody’s fault but mine that we weren’t growing. I was the bottleneck on too many decisions, causing problems by managing too many sales accounts on my own and missing the potential in our team. I foolishly thought that team members would speak up if they wanted a promotion or had an idea, and I learned the hard way that this wasn’t true.
Looking back, bad attitudes were also preventing us from growth, and I can’t blame anyone else but myself for that. We needed to look at new ideas or challenges as opportunities, get out of our comfort zone a bit, and just go get work done instead of talking about all the reasons we’d fail. We took a hard look at our company culture and made changes to reward team members with the right attitudes, redirect conversations to keep them positive and train our managers to be strong leaders.
Equip your team with the knowledge they need
As we’ve grown, we’ve done a lot of things for the first time. We did our due diligence and asked our network for guidance, sent team members to industry events to learn from others who were already doing that work and invested in training for everyone from the top all the way to the field.
I’m not going to lie and tell you it’s all been roses: We’ve had some hiccups and run into challenges, but we would’ve made more mistakes had we gone into this growth without that education, training and network to go back to. You can’t scale up without the right structure, and that comes from setting a smart strategy, getting the right people into the right seats and going into the year with the right education, too.
My team and I will be at GROW! 2026 in Dallas on Feb. 10-12 to continue our education, share the knowledge we’ve accumulated and network with other industry pros. We always come away from this event with so many new ideas and takeaways that will make Grunder Landscaping Co. better, and I’m especially excited for my team to see what the team at Complete Landsculpture, this year’s tour host, shares. I think it will set us up for success in 2026 and beyond.
Will I see you there? Visit here for more information.
