Twenty years ago, Russ Kimball was going to school and mowing lawns on the side. Today, he operates a multimillion-dollar landscape management company with aggressive growth plans in the works. He admits to working hard in those early years, but he hangs his success on something else, too — a vision and an understanding of what it takes to grow a company.

Kimball is president of Kimball Property Maintenance in Draper, Utah. His 75-plus employees include six managers and three full-time mechanics. The staff provides maintenance and enhancement services to a wide variety of commercial customers. Nearly 30 percent of the annual budget is geared around snow removal. “When I graduated from college, my intent was not to mow lawns the rest of my life,” says Kimball. “I knew I could make a good living mowing lawns, but I wanted to develop a business, too. I wanted to grow something tangible.”

After leaving school, Kimball had time to focus all his energies on work, and his business started to grow at an annual rate of 25 to 30 percent. As he found more customers, he also continued to develop and expand his relationships with current customers. “I was fortunate early on to understand what it takes to grow,” Kimball recalls. “I knew I had to deliver quality and value to my customers, and I had to develop a real relationship with them if I wanted to retain their business. That meant that I had to understand their business, find out what their needs were, and be proactive in delivering new or different services to meet their needs.”

The philosophy paid off, particularly in later years, as the industry and competition started to blossom. “Some of our customers have been with us 15, maybe even 18 years,” Kimball relates. “Seldom have we lost one because of a quality issue, and when price gets one to change companies, we usually get the customer back the next year.”

Growing a business is similar to raising a family. Just as parents work hard instilling values in their children, preparing for the day when they can go out on their own, business owners work hard for years preparing their employees to take on more responsibilities. Kimball reiterates, “My intent was never to mow lawns forever. Over the years, I have worked to find a tight-knit group of people who share many of my same values. My goal was always to let them run the day-to-day operation of the company, and I would be there to oversee the business, to make sure the quality and numbers were in place.”

To reach this goal required two key ingredients. Wanting to focus on other areas of the business, Kimball looked for a bookkeeper who could not only keep the financial ship upright but who could train his managers to understand numbers. As he grew, he also needed to find people-oriented managers who could continue to develop the all-important relationships with customers.

Kimball solved the financial management challenge by hiring his father who, in the younger Kimball’s words, “understood numbers and was very intent on meeting monthly objectives.” His father was also very effective at exporting his knowledge to other employees and impressing on them the importance of monitoring key indicators like overtime hours and net profit. “Labor is the biggest number by far, and we have learned to manage overtime and our productivity,” says Kimball.

Finding people who could take charge was a different, albeit not overwhelming, challenge for this contractor. “I was fortunate to hire a lot of good people who have since grown into managerial positions,” Kimball emphasizes. “When I needed to hire from outside, I always looked for someone who I thought either had people skills or could develop them later on. To be a successful manager requires having the right personality and skill set. You can teach skills, but changing a personality is more difficult, although not impossible.”

Kimball’s theoretical “let-go” point came at the $2 million sale mark when he brought in a general manager. Doing so allowed him more time to work “on” instead of “in” his business. One of the things he took a closer look at was his snow removal operation. Until then, he had viewed snow removal as a necessary evil, to satisfy current customers. Then, he joined the Snow and Ice Management Association (SIMA) and developed a different attitude. “Whether or not a contractor makes money removing snow has almost everything to do with attitude,” Kimball explains. “When we treated snow removal as an afterthought, we were never organized enough to make money doing it. When we began to think of it more as a profit center, we gradually put systems in place to take advantage of its potential.” Now, he adds, all Utah needs is a little cooperation from Mother Nature and snow could represent nearly one-third of his annual $3 million to $3.5 million budget.

In the meantime, Kimball is not taking any chances. He is moving forward with aggressive growth plans to continue to grow his business at a 15 to 20 percent rate annually and to put people in place who can develop those all-important relationships.

10/03

By Rod Dickens, ALCA Contributing Writer