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For those in the green industry who are looking to become more successful, Jeff Korhan, CLP, ASLA, president of Treemendous Landscape Company in Plainfield, Illinois, has one message — understand what you are passionate about in your life and somehow connect that with your work. Korhan started making the connection in 1988 when he launched a weekend landscape business while working for a Fortune 50 company. Four years later, he left that company and went to work full-time designing and installing residential landscapes. “My original intent when I made plans to go to college was to major in ornamental horticulture,” remembers Korhan, “but fate took me, entirely, in another direction. I ended up getting a degree in chemistry and later earning an MBA. After 10 years of traveling around the United States and Canada for a large corporation selling petrochemicals, I decided it was time for a change. I wanted to be involved with a community, and I wanted to truly enjoy my work. I also wanted to work in an environment that had a faster pace than the corporate world offered.” As the saying goes, be careful what you wish for. In 1992, Korhan jumped full speed ahead into his young design/build business. At first, he said, it was exciting, and he enjoyed controlling his destiny. But later, as the business grew, it became unwieldy. He started to lose focus from his core business by offering maintenance and design/build services to the commercial market. “My biggest mistake was to take my eye off the proverbial ball and get involved in a market that I couldn’t connect with,” says Korhan. “I could identify with the residential market and the personal attachment homeowners have with their landscapes. The commercial market is different; I understood it, but I just couldn’t connect with it. There is much less of that emotional attachment, and it was becoming an intensive numbers game.  We simply discovered that others were better at it than we were.” Then, in early 2001, Treemendous lost a couple of key commercial accounts around the same time the September 11th tragedy occurred. That was soon followed by other events, including significant equipment theft, and his long-time bank called in his loans just as the season was ending. Says Korhan, “Suddenly the world looked different to me. It was a time of awakening, and I decided that the only viable scenario was to refocus on where we started — providing design/build and maintenance services to one core market — homeowners. Once we made that decision, we effectively closed off one faucet and watched as the other slowly began to trickle. The right work for us came in, and the projects became more substantial, as well. Even some of our original customers began calling us, knowing that once again we were a company that catered exclusively to their needs.”  He continues, “As hard as it was for a couple of years, we learned a valuable lesson. We went back to the drawing board and rediscovered what we did best.” His company also fashioned a new marketing message. Treemendous continued to tighten the message, so homeowners understood categorically that the company provides design/build and maintenance services to homeowners in west suburban Chicago with a high degree of professionalism, including national certification. The company retained its snow and ice management services to commercial customers, but Treemendous made it very clear that those services were, and continue to be, offered through a separate company. Adds Korhan, “Probably the best thing about our one-pointed focus is that we know what kind of work we do and so do our customers and friends in the community. It makes your life so much easier when you clearly know, in an instant, who is and isn’t your customer!” Staying connected Today, Treemendous Landscape Company operates three divisions — design/build, maintenance, and enhancement — and employs 30 people during the busy season. Korhan admits that challenges remain, but he sees them as “good challenges.” He adds, “The residential side of this business is very detail oriented in very specific ways. Yet, we use this as an opportunity to gain a competitive edge by building good systems to manage the details. Also, interacting with homeowners takes the emphasis off the product and places it more squarely on the experience.” As he puts it, understanding and interpreting homeowners’ desires and then following through are important to designing and building a landscape that meets their expectations. That is the critical connection between the company and the customers. “I think we do a good job in these areas because we have a creative staff,” Korhan emphasizes. “Over the years, we have changed our approach by having clients come to our office instead of traveling to their home to make a sales presentation. Doing so gives them a chance to see our offices, our awards and project photos on the wall, and how we operate. In other words, they get to find out who we are.” Korhan says his company has also been successful in combining the design and sales functions. Yet, he emphasizes that everyone in his company sells, including production people, because the most important tool in selling is communication. Mind game  Looking back at his company’s development, Korhan reiterates how important it is to stay focused and connected with customers. He also realizes that he needed to achieve what he calls a “work-life balance,” having the mental strength to effectively handle the small day-to-day, or even more significant, events of operating a seasonal business. “Over the years, I’ve learned some valuable stress-management tools, meditation probably being the most effective,” says Korhan. “In fact, meditation helped me manage the stress that accumulated during our company’s more difficult years.”  This contractor believes strongly enough in the value of the connection between the mind, body, and environment to have formed another company, True Nature, through which he is retained to speak and coach others on maintaining a healthy balance between life and work. In fact, he has a book on this subject in the works that he hopes to complete this summer. “I truly believe that people who have a healthy balance in their lives — people who understand who they are and what is important to them, especially in their work — will be more confident and, therefore, achieve greater success than those who lack balance,” Korhan adds. “They will become leaders who will help employees make that all-important connection with customers.”  5/05 By Rod Dickens, PLANET Contributing Writer