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Midwest contractor goes from being a student and teacher to practitioner

With more than 33 years of experience in the green industry, Fred Haskett, CTP, managing partner of U.S. Lawns of West and St. Charles County in the St. Louis metropolitan area, has a few insights about operating a successful business. “Always establish clear operational and growth goals,” Haskett advises emerging landscape contractors. “Know the basic math and execution that goes into achieving and sustaining growth, and don’t oversell or undersell your effective production capacity. In fact, the biggest mistake young entrepreneurs often make is overselling, period, which ultimately results in having unhappy customers and operating with untrained ­employees.”

This veteran puts his math to work in two U.S. Lawn franchises that he and his wife Kelly acquired in 2003. In four years, the couple has grown the operation exponentially, from a small startup franchise with one truck and one crew into an operation that employs 22 people. Four weekly service crews, one detail crew, one remedial crew, and one application crew provide landscape management services during the growing season, and there’s a snow and ice removal crew on call for the unpredictable St. Louis winters.

Haskett’s resume reads like he’s worked for the Who’s Who in the green industry. His career, however, didn’t start off that way. Always interested in theater, he attended Kent State as a political science and speech major in the early 1970s. After a summer job at a Dover, Ohio, garden center piqued his interest in plants, he transferred to Ohio State University – Wooster, where he majored in landscape design and horticulture.

The horticulture transplant eventually became the first full-time employee for the garden center owners. He worked there three years before moving on to manage a start-up maintenance division for a Canton, Ohio, lawn care operator. Says Haskett, “A week after I took the job, I learned that the big maintenance account, allowing for the creation of the new division, was a 100-acre cemetery; my job was to manage the grounds and the cemetery operations, which meant I had to layout grave sites and do other things that I would rather not think about today.”

Within two years, the company owner found himself in financial difficulty, and he ended up selling a lawn care route to his maintenance division manager. “I was 27 years old at the time,” Haskett recalls. “I bought an 800-gallon tanker truck to service my 165 customers and called the new business Green World Lawn Care.”

The young entrepreneur grew the business from $58,000 in the first year to a $970,000 operation ten years later that serviced 1,250 residential and 200 commercial accounts. Always looking for a new challenge, Haskett sold his company in 1991 and took a job on the East Coast with J.C. Ehrlich Co., located in Reading, Pennsylvania. As a division operations manager, he would help grow the lawn and tree care division from seven locations in three states to 11 locations in four states, while adding more than $4 million in additional annual revenue. Even more significant, when he left in 1996 to take a position with BRICKMAN, the lawn and tree care division was reporting net profitability of more than 11 percent, up several points from a 3 percent annual loss reported in 1991.

Home cooking

The BRICKMAN move took Haskett back home to the Midwest where he became the manager of the company’s St. Louis market operations. It is also where he met his wife Kelly. Four years later, he accepted an offer from Valley Crest’s franchise subsidiary U.S. Lawns to oversee the operations and development of 28 independent franchise locations in an 11-state region. He purchased two territories, while employed by the company, and left its employ two years ago to devote full time to his and Kelly’s business.

“I have worked with three of the most outstanding organizations in the green industry,” Haskett relates. “Through them, I’ve gained a tremendous amount of knowledge. At J.C. Erlich, I learned how to manage operations and financials for multi-state, multi-branch systems, and to justify and achieve growth and expansion. I learned full-service commercial landscape management at BRICKMAN and gained insight into how to manage Hispanic workers. As senior facilitator and trainer for U.S. Lawns, I was able to transfer my knowledge and experience to other owners/operators, and later, when Kelly and I purchased a couple of territories, I had the opportunity to see if could take my own advice.”

He continues, “I always wanted to run my own business again, and working for three premiere green industry companies gave me an advantage I didn’t have when I was young and naïve. Over the years, I’ve also tried to network in other ways and learn from as many industry people as possible. I joined PLANET’s legacy groups — PLCAA in 1981 and ALCA in 1996. I was actively involved in both groups, and now serve on the PLANET Board of Directors as chair of the Lawn Care Specialty Group.”

The long list of experiences has paid off. In 2005, the year he left the U.S. Lawns corporate staff, the St. Louis West and St. Charles County franchise territories grew 39 percent to $440,000. The next year it added another 45 percent in revenue, and the business is on track to duplicate that growth figure this year. Along the way, Haskett says that he and Kelly have enjoyed their work. They’re also building a strong core group of employees, and they like their customers and their employees. The goal now is to take the business to the next level.

As a student and teacher of the industry and now a practitioner once again, Haskett re-emphasizes that successful growth requires knowing the math — knowing how much crews can produce at maximum quality and efficiency, knowing your company’s retention rate, and knowing your proposal closing rate. Numbers don’t lie, he adds, but they can get you in trouble if you don’t pay attention to them. That is something he learned, taught, and now practices for himself.