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Shared vision

These brothers share business values, split up the networking, and encourage continuous improvement

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McCoy Landscape Services, Inc.
Marion, Ohio
Matt McCoy, CLP, president

Matt McCoy, CLP, calls his company a work in progress. Yet, after he and his brother Mark have been running the business for nearly 20 years, it’s anything but that. Located in Marion, Ohio, McCoy Landscape Services, Inc., sports a landscape management division and a design/build division, owns two Christmas Décor franchises, and offers snow removal services. During peak season, the company employs 40 people and outfits 12 crews, divided evenly between its two service divisions.

So why call it a work in progress? Because at the end of each year, the owners discuss the past season, pick an aspect of the business that they feel didn’t do well, and then develop a strategy to improve. “We call it turning our weaknesses into strengths,” says Matt, “and we’ve been very diligent about it since we started the business in 1987.”

From small beginnings

Actually, the true start-up date was 10 years earlier when their father started a small business installing lawns. “Dad was an accountant, and he started the business on the side to give Mark and me a means to work our way through college,” Matt remembers. “I became interested in the industry and decided to major in landscape architecture. My brother chose another path at first, getting a degree in chemistry.”

After college, Matt held management positions with two very large landscape contractors for several years before he and Mark decided to go back home and grow the family business.

Shared vision

One of the keys to the brothers’ success is a shared vision and value system, Matt explains. “With our backgrounds, we have so much in common that we often think alike. Yet, the two of us have different strengths, too, which helps immensely when it comes to running a company. Mark has the ability to motivate people and juggle several different projects at once, which makes him a great VP of Operations. I enjoy the financial side of the business and love the challenge of growing our sales.”

He continues, “We learned a lot working with our father and being around our grandfather, whose words of advice ring loud and clear to this day. Since we were starting out with basically nothing, Grandpa told me, ‘All you have is your name.’ What he meant was that all you have is your reputation.

“In thinking back, that makes a lot of sense. When you really think about the ability of any business to survive and thrive, it all boils down to that company’s reputation. We’ve worked long and hard to build a business based on taking care of our customers’ needs. We built a good reputation one customer at a time. We executed projects that would make Grandpa proud. And over the years, the word got around, and our business has grown and flourished.”

Divide and conquer

The McCoys joined PLANET (then ALCA) in 1990 and began working on strengthening their weaknesses. Says Matt, “I would hate to think what our business would be like today if we had failed to join. We have met some tremendous people along the way who have helped us through our growing pains and plateau periods. My brother and I also became regular attendees at ALCA seminars and conventions, with the idea that we would split up, attend separate sessions with topics in areas where we lacked expertise, and then later compare notes. We also purposely went our separate ways many evenings at these events. We would each go to dinner and network with separate groups so that we could, in essence, double what we learned.”

The strategy worked. Their newly found network of very successful contractors introduced them to green industry consultant Jack Mattingly, who came in to help them through an early growth plateau. “Early on, I was a bottleneck to growth because I had difficulty delegating responsibility,” Matt recalls. “One of Jack’s suggestions was that we set up a management team and devise a system for delegating management responsibilities.

“Later on, we became a regular client of Frank Ross, who, to this day, keeps us on the right financial path. Franks’ overhead recovery system has given us the peace of mind of knowing exactly what our breakeven price on any given project should be. Seriously, without ALCA, without the people we met through the organization, our learning curve would have been much longer and more  laborious.”

Getting stronger

When asked to point out some past weaknesses, Matt says the company has improved in many areas over the years. “Finding the right organizational chart was a challenge, and we finally found the solution that works best for us. We now have two midlevel managers, one for each division. The Landscape Division supervisor oversees field operations in the Design/Build Division. He also is responsible for training and elevating the abilities of our field staff. The Maintenance Division is headed by an account manager who oversees the maintenance crews, retains the great accounts that we have, and finds more like them.”

Matt also says that two other areas where weaknesses have given way to strengths are employee retention and training. “Since the snow removal business is so undependable, in the early days we were forced to lay off a large percentage of our employees at season’s end. In 1997, after years of searching for a solution to this challenge, we purchased our first of two Christmas Décor franchises. The move allowed us to reduce the length of layoff for many of our people.

“To our employees, a six-week layoff is a vacation and a four-month layoff is a layoff. Now, with our two franchises, we can retain more trained people from year to year. Although Christmas Décor is not a big money maker for us, it has substantially reduced our recruiting and training costs.”

Training is something the company has recently focused on, too. Matt and Mark signed up for Jim Paluch’s Training Challenge four years ago and have continued to develop an ongoing training program of their own. “We hold a company-wide training meeting every Tuesday morning for a half hour,” Matt relates. “Reviewing safety issues is a big part of the sessions, but we also use that time to discuss a wide variety of topics, such as minimizing indirect time and increasing productivity. We find the training sessions to be a great team-building exercise, and they have become part of a larger strategy to practice open-book management and share ideas with our employees.”

The work in progress is developing quite nicely, continually strengthening its weak areas and building on its successes. The motivation behind this constant improvement is quite simple, Matt adds. “We are always setting goals for ourselves and then working hard to achieve them.” What better way to define success?