MASTERS GREEN-MISSION STATEMENT 2006 AND BEYOND 

To provide our associates with the best possible training to enable them to confidently and competently follow through on our primary objective: to give our customers the best possible turf, tree and pest control solutions. To provide a high-quality product to our customers while delivering prompt, unsurpassed service. To be a national leader in the green industry arena and command the respect and envy of our competitors while preserving the natural balance of our environment and fostering good will toward everyone we meet.

  Paul Wagner sprayed lawns as a summer job while he attended Ferris State College in Big Rapids, Mich., majoring in business and real estate.

After he graduated in 1982, he took a sales post with TruGreen as "a temporary position until he found a real job," Wagner admits.

What Wagner didn’t expect was that he would thrive in lawn care sales – so much so that within one year’s time he became a sales manager at TruGreen and was then asked to move to Ohio to run the company’s Toledo office.

Continuing his sales success two years later, he was contacted by Orkin Lawn Care (which was formed in 1977 and then sold off by the company in 1997) to be the Atlanta, Ga.-based regional sales manager. In three years, he grew the region from six to 13 offices. "But we were adding offices sooner than we should have and the quality wasn’t there," Wagner explains.

He left Orkin and moved back to Michigan in 1986. Burnt out on the lawn care business, Wagner became a sales representative for a West German cabinetmaker. But to supplement his income since his family had a baby on the way, he consulted for a small lawn care company, teaching them marketing techniques. "I didn’t realize how much I enjoyed the business until I wasn’t doing it anymore," he says.

After losing his sales territory for the cabinet company in 1987, Wagner decided to start his own lawn care business – Masters Green in Troy, Mich. "It’s what I knew, and I understood the business, so it was just the next logical step," he says, adding that he started with only $3,000 in savings, so he built an office in his garage and started marketing. "I knew that I could do the job better than people I worked for in the past and I had a tremendous amount of energy. I thought, ‘Why not develop something of my own and use that energy for my own venture?’"

DELEGATION DILEMMAS. During his first business year, Wagner secured 700 customers via telemarketing. To build his customer base, he abided by a strict schedule. "In order to reach my client goal of 600 to 700 clients for the first year, I had to sell 50 accounts per week for 12 to 14 weeks by myself," he shares. "If I had to be on the phone until 8 p.m. on Saturdays, then that’s what I did. I’m goal oriented, so if I reached 49 clients in one week, that wasn’t reaching my goal of 50. I continually pushed myself."

When selling jobs to clients on the phone, he convinced 50 percent of them to prepay for their lawn care service. With this money, he was able to lease a van, buy a tank and spreader and other supplies he needed for business. "The first year, I survived on prepay money alone," Wagner says. "I offered five applications for the price of four."

Using a crisscross directory, Wagner would block lead residential neighborhoods he was interested in servicing, drop off two-color brochures that his wife, Cathy, a commercial artist, designed, and then telemarket. "I wouldn’t ask for permission to do the estimate – I did rough estimates of typical-sized properties in conforming neighborhoods and then was able to sell jobs because I had all the information I needed when I made the initial client contact," he explains, adding that by doing this he sold more than 200 accounts in 1 square mile, making routes efficient for this one-man show. "I looked for existing neighborhoods that were no more than 10 years old with very conforming sized lots – 5,000 to 6,000 square feet."

To convince clients to buy into his company its first year, Wagner explained his background with TruGreen and Orkin Lawn Care and pushed the fact that as owner of his own business he was the one talking with clients and servicing their lawns. "I told them, ‘You can contact me personally,’ and clients liked that," he says.

He made $30,000 in profit that first year, investing that money back into the business by purchasing two more trucks and leasing a building in a multiple tenant complex. "That’s when we became a real business – when we had a storefront," Wagner says, adding that the second year wasn’t profitable compared to the first because of the additional expenses of growing a business, including hiring and training a sales staff. "It’s easy to be profitable as a one-person operation, but to get to the next step and hire layers of people and additional management – there’s a period there where it’s impossible to be profitable. To get from $100,000 to $1 million took the longest time."

The company’s average growth per year initially was about 5 to 10 percent – a reasonable rate, Wagner says. "I intentionally staggered growth to make sure I had the right people in place doing the work," he says. "I had a lot of turnover and I wanted to secure major positions before planning for bigger growth."
 

The hardest part of business growth and technician advancement for Wagner was learning to delegate. "The biggest challenge for me is to instill my work ethic and my marketing techniques to the other sales people in the company," Wagner says. "Trying to run the entire company and managing all of the people by myself and not having the layers of management made it tough to reach $1 million."

Wagner promoted a service manager to oversee technicians, and this gave him some room to focus on growth. Then, the $1-million mark came and went, and he found himself with too many good employees in one office. "Since we were located on the east side of metropolitan Detroit, we decided to start up a business on the west side of Detroit in Walled Lake and give some of our better technicians more growth opportunities," Wagner explains, adding that by mimicking the structure and systems he had developed in his own office, growth was much easier to obtain. "We did $400,000 our first year out there, which was better than my first year by myself."

The company opened a second branch in Canton, Mich., in 2001 and a third in West Chicago, Ill., this year. "We plan to focus on 20 to 25 percent growth annually and open one new branch per year for the next 10 years to continue growth," Wagner states.

In the business’ history, its turnover rate averaged 30 percent, particularly in earlier years. But this has improved as a result of a new payroll policy (see Bonus Bills on page 62), increased growth opportunities via new branch offices, and the reorganization of some employees’ roles, Wagner says. "Once I was able to delegate some responsibility and focus on growth, it became easier," he explains, proving this with escalated growth rates – 33 percent this year and 20 percent in 2002.

MARKETING KNOW-HOW. In the past year, Masters Green has improved its marketing efforts further, creating a vice president of marketing position and putting more money toward the marketing budget – 8 percent of revenue today compared to 4 percent five years ago.

The company’s marketing mix includes telemarketing, direct mail, newsletters, Yellow Pages ads and referrals, and Mark Jewett tracks leads to continually survey each piece’s success.

For instance, this year via 3,000 referral leads, the company sold $300,000 worth of work. Direct mail fared about the same, but telemarketing generated $700,000 in lawn care sales, with total new sales exceeding $2.5 million.

Despite recent telemarketing laws, Wagner still relies on this as a key part of his marketing efforts. "Hypothetically, if there are 50 people on one street and telemarketing’s closing percentage is 5 percent, you know you’ll get two to three people on that street," Wagner shares. "Compare that to direct mail and if the response rate is 1 percent, you get maybe one client."

Though direct mail doesn’t generate as high of leads, Masters Green improved their pieces by upgrading them to glossy, four-color paper. "This is worth the cost for the professionalism it portrays," Wagner says.

The company newsletter – another powerful direct mail tool – is delivered with invoices six times annually, concurrent with the lawn care service schedule. The four-color, four-page piece tells clients about the company, what services they offer, lawn problems that may be occurring and shares lawn care tips. The last one of the year wraps up the season and offers clients information on ways to prepay for next year’s service.

The newsletter is also a means of getting clients to interact with the company. Each year the company has a recipe contest that it advertises in its newsletter. Clients send in recipes every year and the company posts them on its Web site to encourage client interaction and to spice up its newsletter and give clients something else to look forward to. Then, Wagner picks the best dish of all the entrees out of a hat. The winner receives a $100 gift certificate to a local restaurant and a Masters Green apron.

When it comes to Yellow Pages, Wagner says he spends about $50,000 per year on four-color quarter and half page advertisements, and generates $180,000 in sales, which makes the effort worthwhile. "We’re also getting visibility with the Yellow Pages," he says. "If someone sees our flag or one of our trucks and doesn’t get the number but catches the name, he can look us up in the Yellow Pages and give us a call," he says. "Having that presence is important to the company."
A true marketing master, Wagner has built his company to $6.1 million in revenue after 16 business years through a mix of sales know-how and various advertising pieces and plans, and as a result, continued growth is inevitable.

The author is Managing Editor of Lawn & Landscape magazine and can be reached at This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it