After mowing a residential property, Neil Deering, owner of TLC (Total Lawn Care, lnc.), Kalispell, Montana, looks back at the lawn. He drives away slowly, his smile seems to soak in the manicured property with its signature Walker cut.
"That's why we're successful, right there," he says. "The quality of cut is so far above anything else. There just is no competition. No matter how slow you go on another mower, you can't get that quality of cut."
Deering possesses an obvious pride in the work he does, and in his crew. "Did you see them turn around and look at the lawn, too?" he asks. "They love doing great work. Without good people I'm nothing - just another guy on a lawn mower."
A Sense Of Stewardship
Ask anyone who is really successful what makes their business go and you'll hear some common threads. Deering believes it has to do with people, commitment and goals. Spend some time with him and you soon learn there's much more to his success than he tells. He is a stickler for quality, he treats people the way he likes to be treated, he works hard, he likes to have fun. And when it comes to lawn care, he can be uncompromising.
"If there is one thing that has made our business successful it's that I have a real strong sense of stewardship. It's hard talking about a sense of stewardship without sounding self-serving. But you have to have it in order to care for a property. I try to impart that to my employees, and I hire people who can grasp it."
Knock-Your-Socks-Off Service
TLC has been in business since 1990. The first year, the company billed $65,000. This year Deering projects to do over $500,000. Not bad for only 5 years of controlled growth.
Deering explains TLC's success by the number of Walkers he operates. "We have 6 Walkers, and we'll probably add another at the end of the season. We've expanded at the rate of one Walker a year."
When it comes to man-hour productivity, Deering can't imagine owning anything but Walkers. "This is a service business and I won't let the quality of our service slip. Ours has been real steady, planned growth. I actually plan my growth with Walkers. We don't have a big potpourri of equipment. We know what works for us. It would be real easy to expand faster, but if we expanded faster than the 'knock-your-socks-off service' we have tried so hard to provide, then we would lose everything we have gained."
TLC currently handles about 270 accounts, enough to keep 3 crews mowing 7 days a week, 26 weeks a year. Based on square footage, two-thirds of TLC's business is commercial, the rest is residential. "On a weekly basis, we mow 3 million square feet of turf with 5 Walkers."
The company employs 13 people. Crews rotate so that on any given day, 6 to 8 employees are servicing customers. "I have one crew that just does flowers, landscaping repairs and all that. The rest are mowing. that's my bread and butter."
When the season ends and the snow begins to fly, Deering converts his entire fleet for snow removal. His larger trucks plow roads while the smaller trucks take on Kalispell's commercial parking lots. After a heavy snow, TLC trucks spread out across the city hauling Walkers behind them. I actually generate more dollars per hour with Walkers doing sidewalk snow removal than I do mowing. I average 12 snow removals a year. Last year was a record year with 19. We had a contract with the city and did almost the entire downtown. It was a great year."
Mountain Man
Deering didn't always aspire to lawn care. In the 1980's, he was a mountain man operating a remote ranch in northwest Montana. Deering would drive to the secluded outback in June and stay until after Thanksgiving. Meanwhile, wife Rosemary stayed in Kalispell.
Each year in November, he came down from the ranch with about $4000 of earned income. During winters, to stay busy, he renovated old houses. He took $2000 and bought an old house, then spent the other $2000 fixing it up. He repeated the process several years running, renting out each house when completed.
As his inventory of houses accumulated, all those properties required significant maintenance and lawn care. "I would be mowing and trimming bushes at a house, and pretty soon a neighbor would come over and say, 'I see you over here mowing every Thursday, would you cut our grass while you are at it?'" Not one to turn away work, Deering obliged anyone who asked.
"Soon it got to be so much work, I couldn't get the toilets fixed," he laughs. "So I hired a neighbor's kid who was looking for a summer job and I bought an old 5 hp rider."
About this time it occurred to him that mowing could actually become a business. He told himself, "Hey, I like working outside, I like working with plants and trees and flowers, I like having a nice lawn. This really could be a business." Still, he loved the ranch.
Then one year, Deering came down out of the mountains and his son didn't recognize him. "Talk about being crushed. Emotionally, it was a real punch in the stomach. I had the greatest job on earth and I knew then I had to give it up."
So in 1990, Deering switched gears. He hung on to the houses for security, but he refocused his energies on the new business which he called Total Lawn Care - TLC.
More Mountains To Climb
"The first year I bought my first Walker," relates Deering. "I had seen a Walker here in the valley and I saw what it could do. Once I got on it and ran it, there was no comparison. I tried some other riders, but they didn't stack up with the bagger and zero-turn.
"The second year I bought a second Walker and I hired another operator. Then I started getting really excited about the whole process. I started putting the numbers together and looking at the big picture and I said, "Wait a minute, this thing is headed in the right direction, we're rolling!"
Deering hesitates when asked about getting a larger tractor for some of his bigger commercial accounts. ''I'm real leery about buying a big machine that can make a huge cut because I just don't think it can do as good a job or look as nice. Besides, the Walkers have a 5 foot deck and I can pull it off in about 2 minutes then use the machine for something else."
This year, Deering added the bigger deck, a 54" side discharge deck. "It's tremendous," he says. "It discharges the clippings real good. At first, I was worried it might leave little wind-rows and stuff, but it works great. So we bought it thinking we would use it to cut big open vacant lot type accounts, but it leaves such a good-looking cut we're using it on some of our better accounts."
Bidding With Walkers
Walker efficiencies play a fundamental role in his bidding process. "I'll ask a new customer what he's been mowing with and he'll tell me this or that kind of rider. Then I'll ask him how long it takes and if he says 4 hours, I'll know it'll take me 2 hours. I just know."
Deering cares for his Walkers with the same attention to detail that he cares for his customers' properties. "My Walkers get cleaned everyday," he says. "They get sharpened blades everyday. I have two certified mechanics putting their ears to these machines everyday. We change oil every 50 hours. And we keep a good maintenance log where everything is written in, so we know exactly what has been done to each machine."
The only things he pampers more than his Walkers are his customers. "We're here for customer service, nothing else. If I'm not taking someone's headache away, I'm not in business. In any business, and especially this one, quality is perceived by how well we do what we say we are going to do. Can we deliver? The Walkers help us deliver. With a Walker, everything my people touch looks great. You can't put a value on that."
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