The Business Growth Blueprint Ep. 3

Peter Leckemby (00:01)
Ryan, welcome. Glad to have you here.

Ryan Weston (00:04)
Glad to be here.

Peter Leckemby (00:06)
Looking forward to having a great conversation. Obviously the story of Weston landscape and what you guys have built and, you know, the plans for the future. we'll kind of just talk lessons learned, things that other business owners are going to be able to benefit from. You know, it's not just those in the landscaping industry, you know, probably won't give away too many secrets, but, you know, anybody in any business could probably learn a lot from the wisdom that you've brought, through your career and particularly since running and growing, Weston landscape. So.

I kind of want to go back to the beginning because it's kind of a fun origin story. Tell me about the beginnings of Weston landscape as it started.

Ryan Weston (00:45)
Yeah, definitely. My brother and I grew up in a suburb of Littleton, Colorado. you know, from about the time we were eight, nine, 11, we decided, you know, to make some money, mowing some lawns. We lived in a neighborhood that had about 50 homes and they were larger sized lots. And so I started mowing lawns when I was about 10 years old. And then Tyler, my brother started doing it thereafter.

And we started small, just 20 bucks a week for these big old lawns. And then it turns out one of the elderly ladies across the road, her husband passed away and they had a nice riding lawn mower. So we said, hey, we'll mow your lawn for free for the summer if we can have the tractor at the end. And then we built a little trailer and started putting our blowers and our trimmers and stuff on that. And then we drive around the neighborhood and get more business. And so it started out very organically.

And then my brother gets the credit. He took it and ran from there as I moved off to college, took a slightly different career path for a short period of time. He built the business pretty significantly as he recognized that, you know, it was just mowing, fall cleanups, things like that. And people would say, hey, well, can you fix my sprinklers? And he's like, well, I can figure that out. So he did. And then they say, hey, can you plant some trees for me? I can figure that out. So we did. And then one thing led to another. And then over the years,

The evolution turned into adding key individuals to our team that brought skill sets and experience in both irrigation, design, installation. And then in 2003 is when we actually officially incorporated and became Weston Landscape and Design. And over the last 20 years have grown into a premier landscape design.

build, install, and maintain company throughout the Denver metro area. We like to say that we can do anything and everything under the landscape umbrella in -house, which is great. And so it's grown. We support over 180 employees in the peak of our season, have thousands of clients and looking to grow and gain with each season.

Peter Leckemby (02:58)
Yeah, it is. It is something to say you can do it in house and you guys have built a huge capability set. And I love that origin story from, you know, kids mowing lawns, know, 20 bucks and growing and growing, you know, that mindset of if customers asking for it, we can figure it out. We're going to go figure this out. And, you know, you, talked about your different career path. I mean, your entire family is fairly entrepreneurial and that's something that's a lot of fun. It truly was a family business.

Ryan Weston (03:26)
Yeah, my mom has been alongside the entire time. She's done the books, the payroll, and as the business grew and scaled, she just pivoted and grew and scaled with us and was the driving force behind stabilizing and making sure we're taken care of. But she'd also hop on a mower and before we had driver's licenses, take us to yards that were outside of the neighborhood with our grandpa's help as well.

And then after my dad retired from his 30 year career, he came to work in the business and brought his skill set having been a leader in a large retail business, knowing how to manage people and brought a great perspective here. And then we built an ancillary business off of that, which was a material supply company that helped to feed and support Weston.

Peter Leckemby (04:12)
Yeah. And fascinatingly, you you talked about your dad's career. He had experience in retail. Your career path was in retail. Very young, running a very successful business, you know, $60 million retail establishment. That background, your background, how did that help you in when you came back to the business a decade ago? How did that help you in really taking it to the next level?

Ryan Weston (04:37)
Yeah, you know, it was funny because I enjoyed my time in retail, learned a lot of really great lessons, you know, coming from a massive corporation that has structure and foundational knowledge and massive amounts of resources and outlines and structures on everything from how to handle things in the HR realm to operational standards to employee training, all of those things.

Peter Leckemby (04:59)
Yeah.

Ryan Weston (05:02)
were things that I got a front row seat to and in running stores with a few hundred employees, got to experience the ups and downs and the positives and the negatives of all the things that come along with it, not to mention just having an ingrained service culture drilled in and trained into me on making sure that you do whatever it takes to make that customer happy, which corresponds to the way that we built Weston.

Peter Leckemby (05:20)
Yeah.

Ryan Weston (05:29)
And so during that time, during those years when I wasn't an active part of Weston, my brother and I would get together and we'd talk about things I was learning in my career and how that would apply to what he was building at Weston. And then it was after that amount of time that we, you know, always talked about, man, if we ever worked together, what an amazing team or what an amazing duo we would be. I had a great operator skill set, you know. I could find things, you know.

Determine what the inefficiencies were it knew exactly how to manipulate it to fix it and motivate people to do it along with me My brother was an entrepreneurial risk -taker who would say I think the business could do this or be this and This opportunity has dropped into my lap. I think we should go for it and I would be scared but like, Well, we'll figure it out and I'll figure it out. So in 2012 when we had the opportunity to get together I left my career joined Weston

And we haven't looked back. We've grown and scaled the business, acquired additional businesses. And so it's been a pretty exciting ride. But the experience that I had in that former life, really, I was able to take the best of the things that I saw and modify them to fit our business in a way that would support it. And there was a variety of things that I saw that I was like, yeah, that's not super value added. You know, it doesn't necessarily need to be a part of our business.

Peter Leckemby (06:53)
Yeah.

Ryan Weston (06:54)
and then we had hybrid models from there. But it really helped set me up with a skill set that my brother didn't have, having only ever worked for himself. So it really worked well.

Peter Leckemby (07:06)
Well, and that's a kind of a, important point, you know, business owners that haven't ever worked for somebody else, you know, finding where they can get that knowledge. You went out and got it you were able, you know, to come in and it's family business. You know, a lot of business owners don't have that. And so being able to go get the mentorship, the coaching, the advice, being part of communities where they can gain that knowledge is super important. And a lot of people don't have that. So it's a great thing that you were able to bring to Weston and for sure. You know, you talked about,

Tyler's kind of risk taking and just his comfort with risk. You guys, know, that's how you built the capabilities. Hey, we can figure this out. Hey, we can figure this out. When you were growing the business, there was nothing that you wouldn't try to take on. Tell me a little more about that.

Ryan Weston (07:52)
Yeah, you know, it was kind of funny because we've grown so organically and it's simply all the different ideas and the ancillary divisions of the company have been born from suggestions or really questions from a customer. What we found is that our clients in general like the idea of being able to call one person, one company that can handle everything outside the house. And so that has been one of the things that's

set us aside as we've tried to market it as such like, hey, call one person at Weston and we can take care of all the needs that you have. yeah, somebody would say, hey, do you guys do tree trimming? Well, we don't. Well, we put an Indeed out for an arborist and luckily found a great guy who was a former Marine, came with just an awesome skill set, was an arborist, had done tree work for a lot of other companies, came in and we...

We invested in some capital, bought a bucket truck with a four -sheet package, a stump grinder and a chipper and built a few guys around him. And there was born Weston's Arbor Division. We, in the earlier days, really found a niche, you know, no landscape, especially in Colorado, will survive without adequate irrigation. so finding and filling that specialty, that void in making sure that we have irrigation professionals who can make sure that things water appropriately. So we bought Blue Sky Sprinkler.

And along with that came some amazing technicians and folks that are still with us today, 18 years later, that have built out that version of the company. You know, we heard of a guy, a husband and wife team that she worked on the office, he worked on the design and install side, came from a huge competitor of ours that were looking to make a change. And one of our great friends who's been a vendor, our account manager for many years said, hey, we heard about these folks leaving where they were at.

these would be great finds for you. And then there was born that design installation and that kind of next tier of professionalism at Weston. So it really was born, all these ideas were born out of it. And a lot of it just came from our customers saying, can you do this? then, know, Tyler's saying, well, we haven't, but that's not going to hold us back. Let's go figure it out.

Peter Leckemby (10:08)
Yeah, it's such a brilliant strategy. If you're looking to grow your business, what are your customers asking for? What else do they want that you could provide? This idea of building additional products and services and being able to offer those to your customer. Adding the revenue, the average revenue from each customer, significantly more affordable than going out and acquiring new customers through traditional means.

Ryan Weston (10:31)
For sure, and then the control and the quality that you get by not having to navigate through a subcontractor or another business to get the work done is another huge benefit to that. Now I will say it's not without its challenges because there is something to be said for someone who specializes in a specific area and becomes really, really good at it. And we, in some cases, became really, really good at things and in some cases had some really significant growing pains.

Peter Leckemby (10:59)
Yeah.

Ryan Weston (11:00)
You know, so, you know, that's a piece that you have to, you know, weigh is getting into all the different pieces of the business really work for the complete package, but can you do all those really well? And, you know, what we've found is there's been a few cases where we've made most of all those things work, or we've gone and found a business partner or bought into a business that does what we haven't done well historically, but want to be a part of and essentially purchase that knowledge, purchase that reputation and brought it in.

to grow our business.

Peter Leckemby (11:32)
So that's one strategy is buying the knowledge and partnering with somebody that can deliver that. Are there any things that you have stopped doing? Cause you realized you, being a mile wide and an inch deep versus staying narrow and going a little bit deeper. What have you stopped doing? Anything?

Ryan Weston (11:48)
We really haven't stopped doing anything. We've scaled back the volume for which we go after certain things. So take tree removals and trimming as an example. When you have turnover in a key role and that person moves on, you lose a little bit of that stability. And one of the challenges is how do you make a role or a job or a division of your business sustainable without a specific person running it?

Peter Leckemby (11:50)
Okay.

Ryan Weston (12:17)
And that has been one of the challenges I think any business owner will say is, you know, it's great when you have that great person, but what happens when that person, you know, moves on or goes away or tries something on their own. So, like tree removals and trimming, for an example, we still have all the equipment. We still have a full -time crew devoted to it. But as opposed to going out and taking on a bunch of new business in a bunch of different areas, we're more or less just internally marketing and taking care of the clientele that we have. Communities we're familiar with.

that we're familiar with, customers we're familiar with, making that the piece of it. And then if there's anything that's really kind of outside of our scope, that's where I've got a handful of professionals that are the best of the best in their industry that do specialize in that. I'll reach out to them and work through them as a subcontractor.

Peter Leckemby (12:45)
Yeah.

Makes sense, makes sense. So your customers ask for things and that prompts you to take on or build a new capability. If I remember correctly, when you told me about how you got into snow removal, that was not the case. Tell me about the snow removal, how you got into doing that.

Ryan Weston (13:19)
Yeah, you know, running a seasonal business where April through October, you do a year's worth of business in eight months can be challenging. And then you realize, okay, well, in order to do that work with the great people that I have here, I've got to figure out some sort of channel of revenue to keep them on year round. so naturally, the inverse of green season is snow season. So, you you'd pivot.

and snow would fall and we'd go into it. So we broke into snow removal, honestly, by purchasing a little company that did more commercial maintenance. And then in addition to that, they had snow removal contracts. So we bought a few plows threw them on the trucks that we had. And we had all jumped in the truck in the middle of the night. And me, mom, dad, Tyler, whomever was around, grandpa helped many times.

You know those types of things just to get what we could and then as we grew we started to realize this is something that we could be pretty good at and when it's good if you're organized and set up it's a pretty straightforward business. You just have to be ready to strike while the iron's hot and then move on and then you know it's it's inconsistent so but it does fill the void from a revenue standpoint because as we grew cash flow and managing and balancing cash flow was always a

always a challenge because of the seasonality of the business. So you kind of ride through the winter on the money that you put in the bank and then you'd supplement it with the money that you gather from snow removal or holiday lighting we eventually dabbed into, you know, your maintenance fall cleanups and things like that. And then when you would come around to springtime, that was kind of depleted. And so unless you had a good snow year, so you always hope for a good snow year. And then when we had a good snow year, we'd be able to invest in, you know, newer trucks and

better equipment and stuff to kind of feed the whole year round operation.

Peter Leckemby (15:19)
Yeah. Hopefully anybody that's watching, listening to this is getting ideas because you you talked about when you first did it, you didn't have the opportunity to go hire a crew. don't have the money to hire a crew. Everybody that has an interest in the business is jumping in a truck in the middle of the night. That's sacrifice. You you have to do that for a season so that you can build the capability long -term. so hopefully they're, they're picking up on that. I was talking to a guy who, it's a smaller landscape company.

down kind of in the in the south a little bit more so they don't have the snow season and he was talking about similar strategy. He's really busy. He's got a smaller crew. He's really busy on the maintenance, the mow and blow during the regular season and he tries to push all of his hardscape work to the winter months so that he can keep his crews busy that way. So it's just being creative on how you build a year -round business out of a more seasonal business.

Ryan Weston (16:11)
Yeah, yeah, would have picked an entirely different industry to be in than one that has this extreme seasonality, especially in Colorado, but we've learned how to navigate it as good as possible. And we do a lot of the same things, you know, as we've grown and especially our design and install part of the business has, we'll do that. We'll try to set aside and or set up in the queue good projects that are hardscape, things that don't involve planting or irrigation, work on those throughout the winter months and then knock out a spring phase to finish out the project.

It's, you know, the beauty of Colorado is you have your snow and then you have your freezes, but then we warm up for a while. And so you have these windows. You have to get agile and you have to be ready and able to pivot, know how to pivot effectively from snow operations, thaw time to, you know, basic operations.

Peter Leckemby (16:46)
Yeah.

Yeah. So we're talking about opportunity growing the business. I want to kind of pivot a little bit to something that I think knowing you during your retail years and it's part of the Weston reputation, this idea of service that differentiates. So talk to me a little bit about your mindset towards just exceptional customer service and how you really have set Weston apart that way.

Ryan Weston (17:21)
You know, there's always, I think it started with our dad who, you know, growing up in the grocery retail industry, customers always right 30 years in that business, hearing through osmosis, the woes and the challenges and the mentality couldn't help but overflow into, you know, home life. And both my parents actually worked in the same retail environment until we were in high school. Then, you know, starting with this and recognizing that,

everyone in my family, even going back to my grandpa, everybody had a service background. He was a meat cutter for 40 years. so making sure that your client was happy in earning that trust and maintaining that trust is the challenge. But once you have that trust, you shift your way of thinking to, can't lose this trust. And if I don't lose this trust and I maintain that higher bar, that level of expectation, the better off it will be.

We have our missteps, you know, and as you grow and as you scale, the toughest thing to do is how do you get everybody to look at the business and handling customer conflicts and resolving issues the same way without taking them personally? And retail did that for me, you know, spending 14 years in a retail environment where, you know, you blindly walked up to the service desk, you know, because someone asked for a manager and you didn't know what you were walking into. It could have been a compliment. It could have been somebody who was irate. It could have been.

you know, a suspected thief, it could have been a variety of different things. And so what you find is you get pretty resilient and not taking things personal, but just honing in on what is the issue at hand? How do you resolve it quickly and effectively in a way that everybody's happy and everybody wins? And so for us in the landscaping side, it's definitely a word of mouth business. So you do things well for your client and you make sure that that client doesn't have any reason to look elsewhere. The minute that they, someone says, man, your yard looks amazing. Well.

I use Weston and or where'd you get that work done or something as simple as, know, we don't really spend and haven't historically spent money in the marketing realm, but we spend a lot of money on vehicles to get to and from where we need to be and what we need to do. And one thing you'll notice is that 99 % of the time a Weston truck is clean. It's polished. It looks good. It's part of our culture because

Most of the time when I go out on a lead with a customer, it's, how'd you hear about us? I saw one of your trucks in the neighborhood. So that billboard does so much work. And then they followed up with, and then I spoke to one of your crews and they handed me your card and seemed really nice. And then I talked to the person they were doing the work for and they said, do a really good job and you have for years. And so therein lies the secret to how we've been able to maintain it. you know, like I mentioned before, there are always challenges and we are not perfect.

Peter Leckemby (20:14)
Yeah.

Ryan Weston (20:14)
It takes me a lot to be that. you know, we have turnover and some, some it's painful. My, my goal and coaching and just how we run the businesses take a very communication is the most important thing. you know, you need to show up on when you say you're going to show up, do what you say you're going to do and not change from that, that in and of itself. And then answer your phone. You know, those three things have really been the Weston way. and

those have served us and it takes many forms. But when it comes to conflict resolution, it usually stems from misunderstanding. so teaching my teams, hey, don't take this personal. They're not upset at you. They're upset at the process. They're upset at the results. And your intent versus the impact of what you're trying to do, there's a disconnect with our client. We gotta just make sure that we dive in tactically. Don't let any grass grow under your feet when it comes to how we resolve conflict.

dive in, actively listen, figure out where we went wrong, be humble, take and own the mistakes or the situation that you may have, come up with a solution and move ahead and nine times out of 10, you end up doing more. There's a great story that I have that I love telling is we did work for a homeowner, she sold her home. A couple of years later, gentleman bought it and had some issues with the patio settling that we had done work on. And this community was built on a

the shore of a lake. the houses that were built on piers are all in good shape and caissons and so forth. But lot of the landscaping was sliding. And so when we did the landscape work, we built it on top of a retaining wall that didn't have, or that was compromised. And so, you know, when the gentleman who'd bought the house reached out, it had been a few years since the work had been done. It was beyond its warranty period. He wasn't the original owner.

So our documents basically said, hey, you know, sorry, we're not gonna be able to do anything for you. Heard the guy out, didn't hear from him again, next thing you know, got served papers from an attorney. We were gonna be sued for faulty construction. So upon receiving that, I called him up and asked to meet with him and the attorney and I took our designer who designed the original patio and said, hey.

No offense attorney, but this is going to be easier to handle. You've got an entire landscape that's falling off the back of your property. We have a patio that consumes about 20 % of that that we will take care of, but let's work together and let's fix and engineer the landscaping so that it doesn't fail again. And in doing so, I can fix my portion of this and then you can have a partner in us.

that will do things right to make sure that that worked. And so come to find out, we end up coming to a good compromise. The attorney was happy. He's like, I didn't make any money off the deal, but this never happens in this industry. So I'm grateful to you and to my client. And we ended up developing a, you know, we found some new ways to do installations on things that were really great that we implemented here. So we learned from it. We knocked out a beautiful project. The client was happy. We were happy. Everybody made money and it was great.

Great deal.

Peter Leckemby (23:35)
That's a phenomenal story. Just the idea of what would be otherwise a frightening conversation to have to maybe go have. You just got served papers. You know, the, the knee jerk reaction is, you know, screw that guy. I'm going to go get my attorney and just go let them punch each other in the face and solve this that way. you went into the lion's den, so to say, and, and said, Hey, like, how do we make this a win -win? just a great story and a great lesson, I think for, for anybody is if you put the customer first, you mentioned earlier, active listening and.

and going into a conflict with the, hey, how do we take care of this? How do we make this, you know, beneficial for everybody? That's a super important lesson.

Ryan Weston (24:13)
Yeah, and as a result, we were referred to three other people on the street and have since done work for them. So, you know, it all works well. The hard part is removing yourself from the personal attack or the feeling of the personal attack, focusing in on the matter and getting it done.

Peter Leckemby (24:26)
Yeah.

You know, it's the idea like you're not going to, you will make mistakes. Customers don't care if you make the mistake, as long as you resolve the mistake, like fix the problem. They generally are going to be more loyal at that point because they give you a chance and you meet or exceed those expectations. You know, we've always talked about that, right? There's a baseline level of expectation and you set that in your company and you set the tone anytime you're able to deliver upon that above that.

cause something else you said that I feel like differentiates that as you talk about your crews being able to carry the message, hand a customer a brochure or something along those lines that, your, your employee doesn't have to know everything. They just have to be able to get some information to the customer. Yeah.

Ryan Weston (25:17)
Definitely, yeah. And we've tried to build a culture around entrepreneurial behavior and encouraging our team to go out, make decisions, take a risk, make the customer happy, take a leap of faith. If you make a mistake, but it was with the best of intentions, then we're both winning. Learn from that mistake, move on, customer's happy. We can always go make more money to cover up if you had a misstep in bidding something inaccurately or something like that. So that well -intentioned mistake is a...

Peter Leckemby (25:42)
Yeah.

Ryan Weston (25:46)
is a great thing that's worked in our favor.

Peter Leckemby (25:48)
Yeah, absolutely. So over the last couple of years, you mentioned the growth, you acquired other businesses, you were acquiring companies. Over these last couple of years that has kind of transitioned, private equity came in and you worked with them. I'm curious, key lessons, anything from that experience over the last, what, 18, 24 months or so.

Ryan Weston (26:08)
Yeah, absolutely. You know, we were approached by a couple of large companies that were in really desirable areas that had great, great reputations, great staff, did amazing work, very analogous to the type of work that Weston did, approached by these owners that didn't have succession plans, that didn't have, you know, a child or a spouse or a business partner that was interested in taking the business of the next generation, but needed an exit strategy.

You know, they were past that retirement age and worn out and ready to move on to the next best thing, but had these amazing businesses they spent 40 plus years building. So we ended up working out and doing some handshake deals and acquiring and more than doubling the size of the business over a three year period, which was fantastic. What you find when you do that is you need to set up some infrastructure to support that.

hindsight's always 20 -20. So thankfully these companies that, and then word of mouth kind of spread, these were highly sought after, very unique companies in mountain resort -y areas where it's hard to retain talent, it's not super affordable to live, but these businesses made it work and they had great base of business, great operating principles and so forth. So we went into it thinking, okay, let's figure this out as it grew.

And after we wrote our first million dollar payroll check and thought, boy, this is going to happen every other week. This is a, we got a big pool to fill, you know, and the business was rolling in. We were in the height of COVID when the world was shutting down and everybody was locked in their houses. They were turning to the outside of their home and spending their discretionary income that would have been spent on traveling or new cars or things like that on enhancing their outdoor spaces. And so we saw this.

upward trajectory that was just insane. But as a result, yeah, when you grow big, gotta, there's, things that you gotta look out for. You gotta, you know, finding the right systems, knowing how to navigate, you know, how laws change, knowing how to navigate things like benefits and, all those different types of eligibility that as a small business owner, you have to wear all the hats where we made a conscious decision to say, there's people out here that help businesses do this.

let's find a good financial partner who can help us not only sure up and ensure that our future moving forward is very successful and stable. And when that million dollar payroll check comes, you know, there's money in the bank to do it. But also along with that came guidance, it came support, came some perspective in building and scaling, growing a business that I've never had exposure to, my brother never exposure to.

Peter Leckemby (29:00)
Yeah.

Ryan Weston (29:01)
so along with that came, you know, an introduction to yet another level of how we run the business, more opportunity. And then as a result, you know, that, that investment that we had this, this, investment partner was looking to tap into the landscape industry, to the green industry. And we were a vehicle or conduit to that. then kind of open the flood gates to building something bigger modeled around what we did.

Peter Leckemby (29:22)
Yeah.

Ryan Weston (29:29)
and then bringing more companies into the fold and maintaining that legacy brand, that legacy reputation with each individual branch, but then taking it and streamlining things in the back office, accounting, benefits, operating systems, staffing and hiring so that all that support you didn't have to get individually from each individual company, but you were able to find the subject matter expert to simplify a process and make sure that there was compliance.

Stuff like that. it was a three years of intense growth, intense scaling, and stuff like that. Now we're rounding the corner on a couple of years of stable benefits packages and HR function and team, stable payroll processes, operating systems implemented. And so now we're just kind of looking to how do we continue to take the smaller principles of

great customer service, employee training, reducing turnover. How do you do that on a bigger scale? And so that's where we've kind of come full circle back to, okay, what got us here was that amazing service and that loyalty and that reliability. How do we make sure that we don't compromise that as we continue to grow? And there's been some cases where we've compromised it where, you know, relationships that we've had for a long period of time have lost a little bit of faith in what we've done because we got a little big or the person they've always called wasn't answering anymore or something.

Peter Leckemby (30:32)
Yeah.

Ryan Weston (30:55)
So it's kind of honing in on that back to basics mentality and with the support and the background and the foundation now to help us grow and move forward. So it's been a massive learning experience.

Peter Leckemby (31:11)
Yeah, it sounds like it. And it, you know, there's a little bit of a full circle to that. know, you're getting refocused on the service aspect of it. You've, built the operational knowledge. Now it's reinstalling that operational foundation. you mentioned something about the hiring and retaining good talent, in the landscape industries, but you know, any, any home services, trade type business that that's probably a bit of a struggle. what have been maybe some of the, key lessons learned that have helped you.

deliver on how you keep talent around a little bit longer.

Ryan Weston (31:44)
mean, first and foremost, make sure you never lose a good person. And for us, that looks like creating a benefits package that keeps people here, having good quality of work, having good vehicles and equipment to be able to do that work, having year round sources of work versus saying, November's here, we'll see you in April and hope that people come back. So creating lines of work, taking risks to make sure that that stability is set has been a key.

paying our people well. You can go anywhere in this industry and somebody will pay you 50 cents to a dollar more and you can hop. But, you know, we pay our employees to take two weeks off between Christmas and New Year's just to relax and to pay back some of that time that they spend on those Saturdays and stuff during the season. Those things go a long way. Having parties, you know, doing a barbecue once a month where everybody comes in on a Friday and we have some beer and some good food and lined up and everybody just gets a solid thank you and a...

to send off to their weekend in a positive way. Celebrating an end to season party, know, and being able to share that with our team have been big. hanging on to who we have, and there's nothing that represents your company better than a person who's been here and says they enjoy being here. So making sure we don't lose those. Some things that we've done is we got a ton of families working together. Clearly, we're all family working together, mom, dad, brother.

But, you know, talking to our existing employees and saying, you know, who do you have in your family that is interested or would be good? And then in turn, you have that kind of second layer of accountability because if mom's referring her son to another crew and that son's not doing a great job, that foreman's going to tell mom and she's going to come back over and be like, what are you doing? So we've had some great work there. We've also leveraged the seasonal H2B work visa program.

another way that on a grander scale helps us to get seasonal labor and then we don't have to carry the burden of the labor from the winter months, which is great. We have the help when we need it. But more importantly, we've been able to go to our employees who are here, who've been working for us for years and say, who do you have that's family that's out of the country right now that would like the opportunity to come here and earn more in an hour than they do in a day where they're currently located and open up the doors to have

Peter Leckemby (33:49)
Yeah.

Ryan Weston (34:10)
a third of our workforce come in that way. It helps balance the burden of the seasonality and the payroll in the off months. But also, we're reuniting people with their family members that they haven't seen in years, which is the best and most amazing thing. You know, I had a mother, two mothers and their sons that mother had come here to and left their child in Mexico with a relative, a mother or grandmother and said, I want to go and

and work and do the things. then, you know, one thing led to another and they couldn't make it back to be able to support that person or bring that person with them. And so as a result, we've been able to reunite by bringing these now adult children in as workers under the visa program and reunite them with mothers who haven't seen their children in 10 to 15 years. So there's some cool stuff there. So that's been another piece of it. And then honestly, taking and trying to harvest from

great employees and find people that don't always have the best skill set. You're never going to find that irrigation tech that's got 40 years of experience that wants to just willfully hop over to your role and do the same thing. So how do you take the best of your people? How do you take those skill sets and hire and retain people that have a good attitude and a willingness to learn? And how do you cross pollinate that knowledge, you know, and hope to retain them so that they stay with you for years to come after you've trained them.

So those are the real big three components I would say that we do from a staffing standpoint.

Peter Leckemby (35:42)
No, that's great. A couple, a couple of key things, you know, leveraging, obviously the, the visa program is, is important, taking care of the people you got and having them want to come back. but then that third aspect is, is recognizing you can teach almost any skill. You you cannot teach attitude and work ethic. So find the people that have the right attitude in the work ethic and want to do something and teach them the skills and you make them more valuable so that they appreciate in value. And obviously, you know, you've got the culture to back that up. So.

That's great. So now you think about, know, we've talked growing the business, we've talked about the service aspect of it, kind of that operational foundation is, you know, the next piece that when you think about where you're at and where you're going, know, setting yourself up over the next one to two years, tell me a little bit about your, your kind of plans around rebuilding those operational systems.

Ryan Weston (36:36)
So we invested in some technology. Obviously, I think that the green industry tends to not always embrace things because we're out, we're planting, we're in the dirt, we're doing our thing. But there's a lot of technology that really helps if you have a good CRM system that helps you estimate consistently and helps you track your client record and communicate more efficiently versus something via paper. So that's something that we've invested in. We're going to continue to refine it.

so that over the next couple of years, we get more and more agile, more and more efficient when it comes to how we operate the business. Using that as a tool that doesn't run the business, but that helps us run our business is probably the biggest thing. Setting in place some standards, some operational best practices, something just so far as what is the proper way to do something and how are we doing it? And then continuing education, looking for ways to...

how are things shifting in the industry? know, going away from gas power to electric equipment and going from water -wise restrictions on what you can plant, what you can't plant, what times of year you can and can't, how often you can water and not, better ways to more efficiently operate irrigation systems. So, you know, taking partners with companies that are leading the way and suppliers that are leading the way and teaching our teams on how to do that.

So I found that what makes me excited is staying ahead of a lot of these trends, trying to be as informed about these trends as possible and be someone whose business is stable enough that with the operating system, the accounting principles, all that stuff set up well in the background that we can then spend our time focusing on continuing to improve the customer's experience.

and continuing to be cutting edge when it comes to the work that we're doing and how we do it.

Peter Leckemby (38:37)
Yeah, it's fascinating. You know, a lot of times you don't think of maybe some of the home services and innovation and, know, just some of the stuff you just talked about from, you know, taking the green industry and making it more green electric powered tools, just the way irrigation systems are designed now with app controls, so many different aspects of that. Going back to the operational thing, you talked about the idea of reestablishing standards and establishing that, you know, so many business owners, they're great at the thing they do.

They're the doer of the thing and then they hire and they grow. It's sometimes hard to go back and how do you document the process? How do you do the thing? And it takes a lot of work. It takes an investment of time. Something I've been kind of keeping an eye on that is fascinating and I know you and I will talk about it more in the future is leveraging artificial intelligence. And a lot of times big tech and the big companies talk about artificial intelligence.

commoditization of those tools and the availability for small business owners. I'm going to be putting together a series of resources and tools to talk about how a small business owner can do something simple and leverage basically mostly free AI to build SOPs, to build process docs, to build internal training. There's just a lot of really great tools out there now that your good employee that's in the office can literally build your entire office SOPs in a couple of days just by doing their job. Because the tools and the technology exists now to do that.

Ryan Weston (40:05)
Well, and know, AI is just this uncharted water, but you know, we've thought, you know, a lot of times we have a lot of folks that are capable of taking the next level from a talent development standpoint, but aren't capable because they haven't been able to learn the language or haven't been able to carve out the time to attend school because of a largely Latino workforce or Spanish speaking workforce. So many of us have been able to carve out the time and been able to, you know, become bilingual. It's one of the best things I've been able to do.

to be able to connect with my team. But how could we potentially utilize AI to help someone who's been behind a lawnmower for 15 years move into an account manager role, interact with clientele where their English is good enough for that type of conversation, but you've got email correspondence and building proposals and how can we use AI to help with that translation, that grammar, that punctuation to make them come across extremely professional and be able to take that next level rather than being stuck kind of at a position where

Peter Leckemby (40:35)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Ryan Weston (41:03)
They're just stuck working with their hands. So we're working with quite a few of our team to work into those types of things that use AI to help with that as well.

Peter Leckemby (41:14)
Yeah, it's amazing. These large language models now, somebody who doesn't have the formal puncturing grammar can just speak into their computer and it will spit out the email that they need to send to the client. And, know, if you build it on some templates and things that you've done in your, business that standardizes the language for your clients. yeah, I love the way that you're already thinking about that. Cause I think that's a super important thing for business owners. If you want to retain that talent and help develop that talent and.

who knows, maybe spin off the next generation of great business owners. That's exciting. So as you think about, you know, bringing this kind of full circle, you talked about talent development. You've got big goals for yourself. Tell me about, you know, maybe over the next 18 months, your kind of succession planning and how you're, you're looking at that for yourself.

Ryan Weston (42:04)
think the most important thing I'm looking at through that lens is we built a lot of these things within the company based on the backs of certain people. How do I make this generational proof? How do I make this bigger and better so that it's sustainable, it's scalable for someone beyond myself in the lead role? identifying who's the next bench of talent? What skill sets do they possess?

what skill sets or areas of the business do they need to learn and what kind of training and development am I putting those folks through? Not sitting behind the scenes fixing all the things, but bringing them inside and saying, let me show you how I'm fixing this, starts to build and breed this culture of, you know, kind of an appetite for learning, which is really important. So the 18 month lens that I'm looking through is.

How am I gonna build a business over the next 18 months? How am I gonna recruit talent? How am I going to develop the talent that I have to operate this business without me? I plan on being in this business for a while and I love what I do, but how am I gonna be able to do it so that I don't always have to be here? And looking through that lens is really what I'm trying to do. And how do I get my team to...

Peter Leckemby (43:17)
Yeah.

Ryan Weston (43:24)
function on their own two feet in areas that they've never done. You know, if I've got an account manager who's never really learned best practices and how to process collections or, you know, struggles with communication. How do I give them the tools and the resources and the standards to do those things well so that as I, you know, move on or we grow or we have other people that come into the folds.

there's a playbook for how to do things. So developing that playbook, identifying who's gonna need it, and watching it grow is really where my lens is focused.

Peter Leckemby (43:56)
That's awesome. You know, just having been in the industry as long as you have and still having that energy, but also strategically thinking about how do you build that independence? So you don't always have to be the one in the business and then you can pull back and be more in that strategic space. Cause you've, you know, when we were talking, you're like, Hey, I'm the guy that'll muscle through anything and figure it out. And now you're stepping back to be, how do I not have to be that guy now?

Ryan Weston (44:20)
Right.

Peter Leckemby (44:22)
So as we kind of land this plane, would you say is maybe some of the best advice you could give to a business owner that's out there today and looking to grow their business well and establish the right foundations?

Ryan Weston (44:37)
There's a lot. think I would say your people are your most valuable, valuable key. Your success will happen because of them. Invest your time there. Those people will represent you, take care of your customer in a way. So just make sure that those expectations are founded in knowledge. Make sure that the support is given to that team and make sure that as it

you grow, you're tuned into where the growing pains are happening and you're focusing in on that to make that road a little easier for your team. But also be willing to take a step back and let them, you know, take some risks, take some chances because I realize that, you know.

we didn't get where we're at today because everything was planned out and that we were taught and so forth. You have to learn some of those lessons and earn some of those battle scars because it helps develop who you are. So I think that is a key thing. Don't be afraid to take a risk as long as it's been well calculated, you know.

And if the gut feels good, it's probably good. I think we can analysis paralysis, all kinds of data and numbers and things like that. But if you got a good feeling about it, go with it. We've shaken many a hands and moved forward on many a business, multi -million dollar business adventures with a shake of the hand and a commitment to make it work. There will be hard times. It will be stressful.

And you just have to kind of hunker down, pull that team in around you, reset, swallow your pride, and just pick the path forward. And that's probably the biggest thing.

Peter Leckemby (46:26)
I love that. So over the last 40 minutes, there have been an enormous amount of gold in this conversation. If people are paying attention, tips, things that they can do. And very clearly, you know, one thing you've echoed multiple times is you're not going to get it all right. Learn from those mistakes. So I love that. It's, you know, not trying to avoid failure. It's, it's fail smart and, and learn from it.

Ryan Weston (46:50)
Yep, absolutely.

Peter Leckemby (46:52)
Appreciate that. Ryan, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on here. And I know everybody that's observing, watching this, listening to this, got a lot of value out of that. So thank you for being here and just very grateful for you, man. Great business and just doing great things in the community.

Ryan Weston (47:09)
Thank you, thanks for having me. Happy to share and hope there's some little bits of wisdom or some battle scars that are shared that somebody else says, okay, I can keep going. Someone else has been on this path and come out on this side, so.

Peter Leckemby (47:21)
Yeah, no doubt there is. And we'll put everything in the show notes and all the links and everything. So if you guys can reach out to Weston landscape, reach out to Ryan and we'll give you all the info to connect. Thanks, Ryan. Appreciate you.

Ryan Weston (47:34)
Thank you.