Doing right by clients
Company: Earthworks
Founded: 1979
Location: Alvarado, Texas
Service mix: 95% commercial, 5% municipal
Customer mix: 60% maintenance, 23% design/build, 12% irrigation, 5% tree care
Annual revenue: $27 million projected in 2020
Chris Lee, president of Earthworks, lays out how the company builds trust with clients and, in turn, maximizes water savings.
The company was initially started in 1979 by my stepdad as a residential landscaping company called MC Lawn & Landscape. In 1987, we started to do more commercial work. The name was changed to Earthworks.
I came on in 1998. At that time, we hit $1 million for the first time ever. We had about 30 employees and 30 trucks.
We have built an almost $30 million landscape company without employing a single sales person. The only form of advertising we do is educational marketing. None of our account managers or techs are on commission.
We don’t want techs to be incentivized to give our clients bad ideas because there’s money in it for them. If it’s not good for the client, we don’t want to do the work. It’s great for the client to have that level of trust with us to know we have no incentive to do anything that’s not right.
Over the years, we’ve discovered that 95 percent of the problems we have with clients stem from a lack of understanding. The education started as a result of the economy going down in 2007 and 2008 because of the housing crisis. A lot of our clients decided to start repairing irrigation themselves.
There’s a potential for revenue loss, which is not good, but there’s also potential for frustration because if an irrigation repair is not done correctly, it’s easy for our guys to run over a head that’s not installed properly or for the client to not use proper nozzles so that things don’t get watered properly, and then we get blamed for why things are dying.
The initial idea was if we can’t avoid (clients) doing this, we need to help them do it right. We started doing these classes, but we found that once people got a grasp of how complex irrigation is, it dawned on them that they didn’t have any idea what they were doing.
We went in with the intention of helping them do it right but came out with a lot more business because they realized there was a lot to it. It’s not just screwing the sprinkler head on where the old one was.
We’d always done the classes in person. Since COVID-19, we came up with a digital version. We tailor them to an individual client. We bring breakfast and have an hour and a half of stuff to go through to help the managers of the client understand irrigation.
Our other big initiative with irrigation is pushing all our clients onto an ET-based irrigation platform. We’ve been under restrictions for several years, and the more precise you can be about putting the right amount of water at each location, the more effective you are at managing the landscape and the less capital loss you have to deal with.
We’re working it into our maintenance agreements as part of the deal. We’ve probably converted 60 percent of our clients to Weathermatic SmartLine, ET-based controllers, and it’s great for the clients, it’s great for the environment, but it also is great for our internal efficiency. Previously, where you had to have two guys in a truck to go change some settings, now an account manager from his phone can do the same thing.
We’ve incentivized clients by providing labor at no charge, which we make up through the contract. The manufacturer incentivizes with us with a lease program that allows us to get everything done with no money upfront with the client.
The reason it works is because we win, too. The client saves money and manages the property better, but we save money too. In this industry, it’s really important that we’re moving the ball forward on conservation.
