Lawn Care Blueprint w/Brandon Comstock: Consultative Selling Lawn Care Contracts That Grow Revenue

Ezra McCarthy

Hello and welcome back to the Lawn Care Blueprint. Today I’m going to start with a simple question. What if everyday issues that you see on your customer’s property could be turned into a revenue opportunity? Great question. So in this episode, we’re going to sit down with Brandon, the founder of siteDNA.ai, but he’s not just a founder of a tech company. He was a longtime landscape business owner there in Calgary, Alberta. And so we’re going to dive into his story a little bit and then get into siteDNA. Who’s it for? How it might be helpful.

So Brandon, glad to have you here today.

Brandon Comstock

Yeah, thanks for having me Ezra McCarthy. Happy to be here.

Ezra McCarthy

So I really want to dive into your landscape business story. And then I’m really curious, however much you’re willing to open up about the sales process. This is something that, well, most people don’t sell. And then those that do, it just kind of seems like people are just guessing on numbers, either over inflating their value or have no idea. Most people don’t undervalue from what I’ve seen, but we’ll get into that. Tell us a little bit, how did you start your landscape business? And then what did that journey look like?

Brandon Comstock

Sure, yeah, I started in the industry like a lot of business owners in the trades. I started with my dad’s company and I started really young in my teens, just helping him in the summers, running his landscape business. And after high school, I moved down to Calgary with my high school sweetheart, Michelle, and she went to university and became a chartered accountant. And I started working with my dad more full time and learning the business and value hard work and seeing what entrepreneurship was like.

And so I did that and we served two types of customers. Primarily we serve condo complexes and municipal contracts as well with the City of Calgary. And so I worked there until I was about 25. We parted ways amicably and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I went and got a job, was an employee for an AV company installing TVs and things like that in boardrooms. I really enjoyed the kind of technical side of that. And then I just realized I really wanted to try running my own business.

So I started Landscapers by Nature when I was 26 out of my garage just with the mower that I had and a very familiar story there, I think, and built it up over time. Michelle joined me a few years in. She had to, of course, pay all the bills and do everything for a few years as far as finances go while I got the business off the ground. But a few years in, she came over and joined us full time when the business started proving itself. So we built LBN for 11 years and just sold it about a year and a half ago. And our thing was really condos. The first dollar in the door was a condo maintenance contract and every dollar through it over 11 years was as well.

Ezra McCarthy

So why did you choose to focus on, I would consider that kind of commercial condos and you mentioned municipalities rather than going there. I might describe it as residential, like single family, that kind of thing.

Brandon Comstock

For one thing, it was what I had learned working with my dad’s company. So I just knew how to put those contracts together and what working with those types of customers demanded. There wasn’t a lot of thought into it as far as what might be higher margin or anything like that. I didn’t know any of that. I never went to school for business or anything. I didn’t know what gross margin was or anything when I started.

I just knew that I would rather sell one contract for 500 or a thousand dollars a month than five or 10 single family homes and manage all the invoicing and all of that. That was pretty much my only thinking at the time when I started. And so yeah, we just got into it and away we went. I’ve always kind of been the type of person that wants to really focus on doing one thing really well. So it wasn’t very difficult for me to decide on that niche and then just say no over and over again for 11 years to all the other opportunities.

Ezra McCarthy

So what gave you the confidence, you mentioned you just had the mower you had starting out of your garage, to go to these commercial clients and try to sell them that you could take care of, I presume somewhat larger than normal property than residential at least.

Brandon Comstock

Well, the first contract that I had, it was a small apartment building in Forest Lawn, one of the worst neighborhoods in Calgary, I would say. And I just took the opportunity because I needed to get in with a property manager and start making some money. So it was 250 dollars a month.

I would show up and people are on the balconies flicking cigarette butts off as I’m mowing the grass or as I’m picking up garbage. It’s very demoralizing. I was questioning what I was doing. But over time, it was just trying things and failing to get in with more condo boards and more property managers.

I would do really silly things. I remember walking around putting brochures on the windows of the lobby in apartment buildings and then realizing after days of trying that probably none of the board members saw that. I didn’t understand. I just didn’t get it right. What eventually worked for me was just walking into their offices and bringing something that wouldn’t just get thrown in the bin. Besides a brochure where the receptionist just throws it in the bin, I would bring these jars of honey, like farm honey, with our logo on it, which sounds really silly, but that’s something that gets put on the counter in the kitchen for all the property managers and all the staff to see, and it’s sort of weird, so they’ll ask questions and kind of talk about it. And oddly enough, that started to get some familiarity with them.

Ezra McCarthy

Now you mentioned 250 dollars per month. That’s not a lot. So how long did it take for you to actually start to be able to pay your bills and grow solely going after commercial? And did you literally from the very beginning take no residential?

Brandon Comstock

Yeah, we didn’t. I’ve never cut a single family home for money. In the end, out of the 11 years, the last six years of the business, we cut out all of the small apartments. So we niched down even further. We didn’t go downtown anymore to those smaller kinds of 500 to 1200 dollar a month contracts. They were all like our average contract size ended up being 70,000 per year.

We drastically changed at some point. I was really scared to get into the bigger properties because I knew I would need to buy a skid steer and I would need to. It was a big jump to go from small ones where I could do it with push mowers. And I knew I could go and do them myself if I had to, to make that switch when the opportunities were finally offered to me to say okay now I’ve got to really make an investment in equipment here. I need a truck plow and a skid steer for the winter and I need zero turn mowers and I need employees pulling trailers.

That was not the plan from the beginning. It was just going to be me and a friend. And again, I knew nothing about finances. I thought maybe we can do four or 500 grand in revenue and we can pay ourselves a hundred each. That would be amazing. It couldn’t be further from the truth as we started moving through.

Ezra McCarthy

A lot of people think commercials are just kind of this money bonanza, but did you find that they had higher margins, lower margins? Did you really have to keep expenses just cut to the bone to stay profitable?

Brandon Comstock

As compared to single family homes, I think they’re just two very different businesses. One of them, I don’t know if it’s better margins because I never ran a single family home business, but the demands of that business, as I understand them, are much lower than average job size. You need a lot more automations. At scale, you need massive customer service, a lot of phone calls to deal with, a lot of touch points, and a really high volume of marketing to keep the flow happening.

Whereas in my business, it was a lot more relationship based, bigger tickets for the job sizes. So it didn’t demand as much automation. I could spend a long time trying to sell one contract because it was worth 70 grand a year. So multiple meetings, sitting down in multiple board members’ kitchens and explaining our story. And that’s fine in my type of business.

My big thing in specialization is trying to do both of those things well when your business is under five million dollars a year to me is crazy because it was hard enough for us to get there when we specialize in only one thing. I can’t imagine having to deal with phone calls for design build and phone calls for single family and phone calls for municipal and big facilities and all of these things, because those inputs all require different things from the person answering the phone, the estimating system, the equipment that goes out the door, everything.

So I don’t think it comes down to margin. Again, that’s not why we chose commercial. It was just we picked it early on and I just kind of grew to love it. And we just focused on doing that one thing really well. And that thread came all the way through every person in every department in our business so that I felt like we could just wipe the floor with anybody else that tried in our market because it’s all we did.

Some of the systems, I think a mistake that I actually made early on was thinking that software would solve everything and systems would solve everything. And you’re hearing that from a tech founder now that is selling software systems to landscapers. But it was ultimately learning to find the right people and learning what good looked like.

It took me a long time to find those people and maybe people systems before business systems even. So what that means is figuring out how valuable taking time and recruiting is versus just, I had a crew leader walk out the door and I need one Monday. The first guy to show up to the meeting at Tim Hortons is going to get the job that drives a truck to the meeting. And that’s how I did it for years because I was just desperate to fill the seats and that didn’t get us anywhere.

There were a lot of years where we lost money and where Michelle was footing the bill for all of our expenses and my employees were making money and I wasn’t. And that was just part of the grind. But I think once we really figured out people, how to find good ones, and then started moving into systems, doing it in that order, I wish we had from the start.

We figured out things like targeting customer properties instead of just waiting for the phone to ring. So density, as you know, is huge in landscape maintenance. It would be even bigger in single family maintenance, but for commercial or condos it is too. And it’s really hard to build. So we started coming up with ways to, we’d have this condo complex and we want the one across the street, but figuring out who the decision makers are is really difficult. It’s a different property management company, different board members, of course.

So we started learning systems to target properties we wanted rather than just waiting for property managers to give us opportunities all over the city. So that was one thing, just building that database over a lot of years.

And other ones were just really healthy or really simple scorecards that would help us turn landscapers into business people, like the same process I had to go through. So eventually when we got account managers and I needed to start handing off responsibilities and depending on others to run my business, we needed ways for them to learn about business too.

So we came up with some scorecards that we could review every week. Of course, I had team members helping me with all of these things. And we really started having account managers reporting on their P and Ls and their expenses and sitting at boardroom tables. And that whole transformation was really interesting for me to go through, very satisfying.

Ezra McCarthy

Did you learn that from EOS or Traction, the book? Because that just sounds a lot like it.

Brandon Comstock

That’s really funny that you say that. Yeah, we did. We were run on EOS for four or five years at the end of our business. We learned some of the things along the way. So we did use Service Autopilot in the early days and eventually switched to LMN. And so that fed us a lot of data.

And then I was blessed to have Michelle, she’s a CA, and she came on full time once we started growing. So I had an awesome CFO that was specialized in the landscape industry from a much smaller business size than most companies would.

Eventually we implemented EOS and I first heard about it from the president of the board at one of our condo complexes that we looked after. His name was Lou and he took me out for coffee one day and told me about this and he was an implementer for them. And he helped us build it into our business and we already had some really good, really keen people on board. And once we put a business structure in place like that, it really started to take off.

Ezra McCarthy

And to clarify for those listening who may not know what we’re talking about, Traction is a book by Gino Wickman. Tremendous read, probably more for those who are probably above, I’m saying 300 to 500 thousand dollars just because it more deals with organizational structure. And then the book presents the system called EOS or Entrepreneurial Operating System. Really good read, just a slight side note there for someone who’s like what are you guys talking about. The acronyms can get you.

Brandon Comstock

Yeah, really simple systems to follow. And it really helped me to build our long term vision with our team rather than me just kind of coming up with it on weekends and then trying to repeat it enough times. It helped me come up with the vision with them and then gave me a structure to communicate that to the entire company on a regular cadence and really wrap it all up with data and get a lot of buy-in, I guess is what it came down to.

Ezra McCarthy

I want to touch on your sales process leading up to when you eventually did sell. At that point, it sounds like you’d put some systems in place. I have a feeling you could leave for a day or two without things falling apart. So what made you decide after 11 years of obviously very hard work, as we all know, building this business to sell your baby?

Brandon Comstock

Yeah, so we were able to leave regularly. There was a time when we had another house in Vancouver Island, which is about a 14 hour drive from Calgary or a 45 minute flight because of the Rocky Mountains in between us. So it was far enough away where we were quite distant from the business.

But we had that for a couple of years and we were back and forth for the business and enjoying our time out there. But that in a big way was from the people and structure that we put in place after nine years or whatever it took us to get it there.

People ask me all the time why we sold the business. And of course, as we were going through that process, that’s the number one question that you get asked from potential buyers. And I’ve never come up with a really simple answer. It just felt like it was time.

I’m naturally quite entrepreneurial and I like building things and I want to be really excited about what I’m building. And it was such an odd thing because we got the business to a good place where we could. It was like the dream. We could leave it for an amount of time. It was making great money and we had great people running things. And it was like why would we sell it at this point.

It was kind of an odd thing that that feeling came to be. But I think it was that our team was quite excited to keep driving and building it to the next level. And I wasn’t as excited as they were anymore. I wanted to switch gears and take some risks in tech and try something new and just put myself through the wringer again in a new industry, I suppose. So yeah, that’s about the best answer I can give. It just felt like it was time.

Ezra McCarthy

So let’s walk through something that, and you can tell us as much or as little as you’re comfortable with, but how did that process go? Did you look for a broker? And then I’m curious, especially for multifamily, do they give you a rough number of EBITDA? How do they calculate something like that?

Brandon Comstock

Yeah, so we did use a broker. Something weird, but we were fortunate to, a couple of years prior to selling it, we were fortunate to go through a failed deal.

Ezra McCarthy

Yeah, I want to hear about the failed deal.

Brandon Comstock

Sure, yeah. So the failed deal, it just taught me a lot about how to value my business going through the process, even though it was quite hectic.

So there was a private equity company in Canada that was buying up a bunch of landscape companies and kind of becoming a national provider in Canada. And it was the first time we’d gone through the process. Eventually the deal just didn’t go through. We were fine with the price and everything and we were going to help them maybe build out a condo division, which they didn’t have much of at the time.

And yeah, it just didn’t go through at the last minute and that was okay. A couple years later, Michelle and I decided I think it’s the right time and we did use a broker at that time, a great company in Canada here.

I would say my biggest learning was just putting together a really good team to help with that transaction. It was well worth it to me for the price that a broker charges, which is certainly not small. And by the time you add on a lawyer that specializes in M and A and an accountant that also does, you’re adding another hundred grand plus on to the broker’s fees and all of these things. Well worth it in my opinion.

It was stressful to go through but they were able to hold my hand and call me when there’s problems and certainly I’m sure earned us at least as much as all of their fees in the end and got us a good deal.

As far as deal structure goes and everything, that is where a lot of the value of having that team on your side goes. It’s not just the price that you agree to with the buyer. It’s really the deal structure too.

So there’s often components of the cash you get upfront. There’s earn out potentially where you’re based on the performance of the company, you get or don’t get a certain amount. VTB is sometimes one portion, which is vendor take back, which is like the seller being the finance person for a portion of the deal.

Those are a few of the components. So it’s not just as simple as selling a car or something. There’s a lot more to it than just coming up with the price.

Ezra McCarthy

Was some of the impetus for selling be that you are starting to look into the software space, this may be a new mountain to climb proverbially?

Brandon Comstock

It was certainly on the go. We had the tech company for a couple of years before selling. It wasn’t the reason for selling though. It was really just it feels like the time is right.

And then afterwards, in hindsight, it would have been nice if we had taken more time off. We were already right into running a business with SiteDNA. So it would have been nice if we gave ourselves three to six months to just do nothing, but it’s just not how we roll, I guess.

Ezra McCarthy

Walk us through what was the impetus for starting SiteDNA, what is it, and then what kind of business is it for?

Brandon Comstock

Yeah. So SiteDNA is kind of solving a problem for landscape maintenance companies that we noticed and solved in our business at LBN when we were running it.

We just found that there’s a big opportunity in enhancement sales and just communicating in a much better, more proactive way with those types of customers. I’m sure it overlaps into other customer segments too, but I always just speak from commercial and condos because that’s where all my experience is.

When they hire a landscaper, they usually want a consultative sales process. It’s not like I just come to cut my grass every week and I never want to hear from you again. They want to hear about recommendations. They want to know what you’re seeing on their property and they want to know how they can improve their property.

And anyone who’s been a landscaper for long enough knows you’ll hear complaints like that where they say hey why aren’t you guys making more recommendations. Why aren’t you telling us what you’re seeing?

Even if they didn’t know it when they hired you, that’s usually what they want, is to hear about these things. Not in a pushy upsells kind of way, but more of a property audit inspection type of way where I can put together a beautiful report and show you what I found and open a discussion around upsells or even just being honest about maintenance failures that I’m seeing my crews do that we’re addressing.

So anything that you’re seeing on the site. The software is basically a site audit tool so you can easily snap photos that are geo located so it drops pins on the map for you and the customer.

You can add prices and descriptions and so on to those through templates very quickly. That’s really a key issue for account managers or owners that are doing site walks. You almost have to be able to capture things without breaking pace, especially if you’re walking with a customer. You don’t want to be writing things on a notepad, snapping a bunch of photos, getting back into your truck, trying to merge those things.

Then you have to go back to the office, to your computer to create an estimate and send it off. Sometimes we’re talking about a 200 dollar shrub replacement. So a lot of times these things get avoided.

So making it very easy to collect those issues on site for the crews or for the account manager is really key. And that’s what we’ve accomplished with our mobile app. So you do the inspection, you can create a report right when you get back in your truck, you can email it off to the customer or text it to your crew if it’s a quality control inspection that you’ve done. And it shows them location of all the issues, prices if that applies, and you can open that discussion with the customer to help them with their budget or help them plan those enhancement opportunities over sometimes a number of years.

Ezra McCarthy

I think one of the things we’ve talked about, or I think you mentioned on your site, is helping with revenue. So obviously if you’re doing these upsells, a great tool to bring it to the customer. What does that kind of process look like?

Brandon Comstock

Yeah, so my thing is really let’s maximize the revenue from all of our customers that we already have before we go out and sell more customers. If you’re just relying on selling more customers, then you’re going to be adding a lot more admin work and a lot more phone calls to answer.

You’re adding all of these things when you add new contracts. When there’s a lot of high margin work in enhancements, the approval rates are usually a lot higher with enhancements than they are with contracts as well.

A lot of these customers are not going to get three bids for a 200 dollar shrub replacement. So it just makes a lot of sense to focus on your existing customer base first, especially when they’re going to be more satisfied with your services if you’re making these recommendations.

They want to hear about these things and they want to plan it out with you over time a lot of the time. So some of the numbers that we’ve actually seen, when companies are just acting as more like order takers, just answering the phone when a customer asks for that dead shrub to be replaced, they’re able to capture usually around 15 to the high teens as a percentage of their maintenance revenue.

So for every 100 dollars, they’re capturing 15 to say 18 dollars in upsells or enhancements. When you become more of a consultative salesperson, more proactive, and you’re identifying all these things and pointing them out to the customer, you can often exceed 40 percent.

So it’s a huge boost. And if you track customer satisfaction, you’ll see that start to go up too, because you’re adding so many touch points and becoming that kind of trusted advisor that they actually wanted when they hired you.

Ezra McCarthy

So walk us through that process. You take the picture. Are you in the app sending to the customer? Are you sending it through email? Do they have to have the app as a customer? How do you get that information to the customer?

Brandon Comstock

Good question. So there’s mobile apps in both app stores and there’s a web version as well that all stays in sync.

If you’re an account manager, you’re going to do a site walk. Spring walkthroughs are coming up. So you’re going to do a spring walkthrough with your customer. You would arrive in your truck, you would select the property on the mobile app and you would start capturing by taking pictures in the app. This keeps all the photos off of your camera roll as well and off of your employee’s camera roll.

It will produce an issue on the property as soon as you’ve taken a photo. You can easily just apply a template to that so it will fill in the title, the price, the description, and then you’re onto the next one. Keep adding issues as you go.

When you get finished and you get back to your truck, they’re all categorized, they’re all tagged. Everything’s already done by the time you get there. And then you can tap the report button and it will produce a really nice PDF report for you that you can send by whatever means you’d like.

So you tap the report button, you get that window that you see pop up normally on your phone. You can text it, email it, share it on Slack, however you would like. And that gets the conversation started on the enhancements or whatever you might have found.

Ezra McCarthy

Brandon, this has been really enjoyable. I’d like to end with two questions here. Has there been a book that you’ve enjoyed recently and or a podcast you recommend?

Brandon Comstock

So the podcast I’ll recommend has to be Five for 50, Jonathan Pototschnik. His old Lawn Care Millionaire stuff really inspired me when I was starting out. And then now he has one of the best podcasts and best resources out there on YouTube is where I watch it.

Founders podcast is also one of my favorites. It’s not landscape specific, but I love that podcast.

And then the book that I’m reading right now is called Exactly What to Say by Phil Jones. It’s really good. It’s very simple, easy to read. I spoke at a Landscaper convention recently and it’s just simple phrases too often in a sales process to help persuade people to your way of thinking or just help the conversation along. So I really liked that book.

Ezra McCarthy

Yeah, big fan of Founders and the Five for 50. Good podcast. I haven’t heard of that book though, so I’ll have to look at that. Well, thank you for your time. If someone’s interested, Brandon, in finding you or maybe checking out SiteDNA, where’s the best place for them to find you?

Brandon Comstock

siteDNA.ai is our website. We are currently accepting waitlist members. So we’re in beta right now and it’s no credit card required. Just go on. It takes 30 seconds to fill out a really short form and you’ll be on our waitlist for our free beta to try the platform.

And if you want to get a hold of me directly, brandon@sitedna.ai or message me on LinkedIn. Pretty easy to get a hold of.

Ezra McCarthy

Well, thank you, Brandon, and thank you everyone for tuning in. And before we go here, I was just looking at the stats today and 36 percent of you are not following the podcast. So if you’re listening and you’ve gotten value and enjoyment from this podcast, be sure to hit that follow button and we’ll catch you on the next one.