Jonathan: Hey, this is Jonathan and I am talking with Tom Kelly of BeeSafe Lawn Care. Hey Tom it’s great to have you on the call with me today. How are you doing?
Tom: I’m doing great Jonathan, thanks for having me today. I’m looking forward to talking to you.
Jonathan: Great! I’m glad you were able to make this work. This is a topic that I personally care about quite a bit. It’s something I’ve thought about for many years and so I think for many companies out there that maybe aren’t addressing organics yet, this is still on their mind. They’re wondering if they can avoid it forever or if it’s something they need to incorporate as part of their strategy. I’d like to have you tell us a little bit about you. In talking with you in the past, you’ve got a really exciting story. You built one heck of a company in the northeast and I understand you sold that. Now you’re onto an even bigger challenge building a really interesting business. If you would, I know your story, but if you would tell us a little bit about what you’ve done and kind of where you’re going to set this up for us?
Tom: Yeah, sure no problem. I got into lawn care by accident like most people. When I graduated college back in the early 90’s, I got a job with a company that a lot of people still remember called Barefoot Grass Lawn Service, which was a large national chemical lawn care service provider. I think they were the second biggest in the country behind TruGreen. I worked for Barefoot for a couple years…I think three or four years in the early nineties…and when Barefoot was sold to TruGreen ChemLawn in 1996 that’s when a couple of partners and myself, instead of going to work for TruGreen, decided that it was a good time to roll the dice and try to start our own service company. We started a company called the Lawn Dog in 1997 in Southern New Hampshire, where our first office was in Hudson, New Hampshire.
We really did very well. We were able to, I guess to make sort of a long story short, grow Lawn Dog to about seven locations and more than 20,000 clients over the next 15 years or so. There was a lot of things coming together. We were really good at what we were doing. It was good timing. We knew how to run a lawn care service business sort from the corporate side, having worked for a big corporate company. We did very well and grew Lawn Dog significantly over the years.
Jonathan: Were you doing any organics with Lawn Dogs?
Tom: You know what, a little bit to be honest with you Jonathan, not major. We focused on it as much as anybody else because there would be an occasional request for it. Back then, the organic movement, I guess you could call it, wasn’t quite as big, although it had started to gain momentum. When somebody requested an organic program, we did what most companies did. We just wouldn’t spray weeds. We would apply regular straight fertilizer and let the weeds grow and keep our fingers crossed on insects. That was our organic program. I remember a company called Harmony which made chicken manure fertilizer. We used that a little bit but nothing significant. We tried to position ourselves as IPM experts and tried to reduce pesticides. But, at the end of the day it was really pretty much the same thing that was in the TruGreen truck.
Jonathan: Right, so from talking to you in the past, you really were compelled to go a different direction and go after the organic market to learn and prove that organics work. Is that right?
Tom: Yeah, part of it was probably just the fact that I was getting older and a little bit more concerned with things like my kid’s health and the health of the environment and that sort of thing. A lot of it also had to do with just building knowledge in terms of the craft of lawn care. I knew that there was an alternative way than just six, seven apps of fertilizer and blanket apps of weed control. I started to really figure out that turf could reach its genetic potential if the soil was healthy. I started to read a lot and just kind of focused my energies on that kind of thing. If the soil was biologically active and healthy and not sterilized from the overuse of a lot of chemicals, grass would kind of do pretty well on its own.
It would be resistant to a lot of issues like insects. And, the thicker the grass, the fewer the weeds…all those regular cultural practices that we talk about all the time. Healthy organic soil grows healthy organic grass. And, I don’t know, I guess it was around 2005 or so I started thinking hard about that. That was probably the birth of some of the things we’re doing today.
Jonathan: Okay, so I’d like to ask you a little more about this in a little bit. But, from somebody that’s listening to this and they’re not sure about organics, is this something that is financially lucrative for them? Is this something that can really add profit to their business from what you’ve seen and what you’ve learned in the companies you’re working with or is this more of just a defensive maneuver for a company?
Tom: Yeah, no, that’s sort of a loaded question because I could talk about that for an hour but, it depends on how you want to look at it. It absolutely is a lucrative option to add to your business. Most companies add it as an option. A lot of lawn care service companies don’t abandon their typical program immediately. They’ll offer the organic program. But, even in your grocery store the organic tomatoes are going to cost 30-40 percent more than the regular tomatoes. People expect to pay more for organic. So that, just generally speaking, as an overall theme, is very true. You can expect to charge more for it. It really appeals to a wealthier client base too. People who have money to spend are much happier to spend it on something that makes them feel good about the way they’re treating the environment and their own property.
To answer your question directly, it absolutely is a profit center for sure. You can really do well by adding an effective organic program, no doubt.
Jonathan: Just to clarify, my transactional value will go up because I can potentially charge more because it has a higher perceived value. But, are you also saying that you’re finding that your net margin on it can increase a bit as well? For example, product cost doesn’t completely offset all of the increase that I can charge possibly in price. Is that true?
Tom: Yeah, well actually, that’s where the trick is. With first-generation organics, where you’re just applying say multiple granular applications of organic fertilizers, your product cost is going to be crazy. It’s too expensive. It’s not something that you can implement and charge enough to be profitable. Some of the newer technology, and I won’t go off on that tangent right now without answering your question but, allows your product costs to go way down. The general scenario, or the general formula that I usually throw out there is that, your product costs, if you do it the right way, are going to be in the neighborhood of 10, 15, or 20 percent more.
But, if you can charge 15, 20, 25 percent more, not only your transactional fee goes up but, your margin goes up. Even though you’re paying a little bit more for product, you’re actually charging more than that. You’re absolutely right, your net margin increases just by the nature of the formula.
Jonathan: Right. Are you finding that you are able to hold labor cost at about the same or does labor cost go up a little bit as well?
Tom: No, the labor costs are identical. There’s no difference. Say there are two trucks on the road. One’s doing an organic program. One’s doing a chemical program. It’s the same truck. It’s the same employee. The fixed costs associated with that are steady. They don’t change.
Jonathan: From a business owner standpoint that’s a big deal. I’d much rather spend more money on product costs than I would labor. The last thing I want to do is have to add more employees. But, if the cost has to go up anyway, I’d rather it be on my product cost side. So, that to me is a positive. That has always been one of my perceptions…that my labor cost was going to go sky high and my call backs were going to go sky high if I switched over to an organic program. You’re saying that’s not what you’re seeing when it’s done right. Is that correct?
Tom: Yeah absolutely, in terms of labor I mean that’s legitimate, there is no change. It’s not something where you have to pay somebody more to do an organic program or bring on more employees or have three people on a crew to do something. If you do it right, it literally is the same exact formula from a labor and even equipment standpoint.
Jonathan: In terms of and I think we’ve talked about that in the past, but just to clarify, I think what you just alluded to, so my same spray tanks, my same spreaders, all of that do I keep it, would I have to change anything?
Tom: No, it’s the same stuff and sometimes there’s a misconception that when you’re using an organic product or biologically active product, you need to change up your equipment and that’s absolutely not true. The equipment is literally interchangeable. It’s the same equipment, you use for one, you can use for the other.
Jonathan: It’s a big deal, what about training, so if you take your technicians you have now or so if I took mine or another company, they take theirs, any challenges training them or retraining them, how big of a deal is that?
Tom: Yeah that’s a good question too because sometimes in our want to over complicate things and sometimes we do that in the lawn care business, we like to make things complicated.
Jonathan: I agree.
Tom: You’re going to have the same set of problems. It’s not a different set of problems or new set of problems. When a customer calls to complain that they’ve got weeds, it doesn’t change when you offer an organic program, the customer remains the same. Perhaps there is a little bit more leeway and customer is a little bit more understanding but overall the challenges from a customer service standpoint remain exactly the same. In terms of training you really always want your technicians to be knowledgeable to begin with and one of my goals over the years is to kind of elevate the perception of the employee in our industry as being an intelligent, thoughtful professional.
Again whether you’re out there pushing chemical fertilizer or spraying organic fertilizer, your customer isn’t going to ask the same questions in terms of cultural practices and how to care for turf. I would say that there is a little bit more training in terms where I’d always like to see a company train a little bit more aggressively with the understanding of soil biology and just general agronomics. But it’s different, it’s a different approach. It’s a little bit more complicated. When we start talking about strains of bacteria and fungi and those kinds of things, it’s a little bit advanced but I guess to answer your initial question, it’s not something that you have to send somebody to Cornell for two years to get a degree.
Jonathan: Why it wouldn’t scare me off anyway because I think in this industry, like you said most guys over complicate it but the one massive difference maker is service and educating the client being knowledgeable, so I think any dollar invested in building up your team and teaching them at a higher level than your competitors only makes you better anyhow. I see that as a positive anyway.
Tom: Yeah you are so right with that. Anytime you can find a way to make your employees more articulate with what you’re doing in terms of service and customer service and everything else, it’s only going to benefit your entire company. It’s probably a good thing. If we go and say, “Hey you need to be a little smarter or a little bit more trained to do this,” it’s definitely going to benefit your entire business.
Jonathan: Kind of switching back to what we’re talking about in the beginning, so one of the things I think about in my business is there’s a couple things, obviously you want to squeeze more margin out of the business. You want to position yourself different than the market, you don’t want to be able to be perceived like everyone else and then as the business gets big and my belief is as you grow a company in the beginning, you’re just trying to survive and you’re trying to make profit. But then as you become bigger, you really start to take more of a defensive mindset, you say “Okay, I’ve built this asset that I own and I need to protect this.”
A lot of guys think it right on insurance and they get right on all the other little things they weren’t doing, workers comp and so I’ve thought about organics not only from how can I differentiate myself in the market, how can I make more money out of my company but also from a protect me looking 10 years out in the future, a defensive strategy. Through service autopilot, we’ve been fortunate to work with a lot of clients, actually a number of clients internationally but quite a number of clients in Canada. I’ve learned things that I wasn’t aware of just simply having a business here in the US about, what I believe, where things are going.
If you look at Canada, their laws and regulations are completely different, so with all that being said, my question is what do you think the future is here with organics and then obviously you fully believe in it, so why is it that we really need to be very serious about moving our companies in this direction from maybe a defensive strategy?
Tom: That’s an incredible point but I’m not sure a lot of businesses are completely wrapping their head around immediately speaking but more and more are all the time. When you mentioned Canada, it’s not lawful to apply pesticides for aesthetic purposes or for cosmetic purposes, so there’s a dandelion in your client’s lawn you can’t spray it with a product because that’s illegal. Because the dandelion is a matter of aesthetics or cosmetics where it’s subjective, some people think that dandelion doesn’t belong there, some people say, “Hey maybe it does.”
That was a struggle that went on for many years in Canada and it’s really spread through the majority of all the provinces and the most of the country has legislation in place where you can’t use chemicals. You can’t use lawn care pesticides to improve your lawn. We’ve seen, when you talk about the future that’s actually really trickling down into the United States all the time. Just in terms of legislation, there are multiple states that have implemented similar strategies, although not quite as sever. Take New York State for example which is a big deal, they have a bill called the Child Safe Playing Field Act, which makes it illegal to apply pesticides on school property and in day care centers, generally where children congregate.
What happens from that standpoint is that when and we get calls like this a lot is when a mom in New York State finds out that there’s no weed control being used on the field at the school because the government has decided that it’s probably harmful to a child’s health, she immediately calls into question what’s going on in her own backyard and whether it’s her or husband or whoever is in charge of taking care of the lawn, you start to ask questions. As a parent too, these are legitimate questions. I’m not a scientist but people who are much smarter than I am have determined that it’s not a good idea to have the kids playing in the turf where the weeds were sprayed. I’m going to translate that to my property, so New York State is one, Connecticut has a very similar bill.
There’s lots of counties and towns all over, whether it’s the northeast or the midwest and that’s really begun to move south, so when you ask about the future as it kind of pertains to what’s happened in Canada, it’s time to figure it out because that’s really happening, literally as we speak.
Jonathan: That’s what I’m learning. It’s interesting, I’m in Texas and we have regulations here. We have what’s called TDA here, Texas Department Agriculture, so through service auto pilot again we’ve got clients everywhere in the US and it’s interesting some of the rules and laws in New Jersey, they’re completely different than what we even deal here within Texas but my theory is we’ll eventually see those same things in Texas. I think that’d be true of any state, so interesting question so I don’t know if it’s New Jersey or which exact states have these rules but in some cases you have to notify neighbors in surrounding areas when you’re going to apply a treatment to a property.
Do you still have to do that when you’re using an organic program? Does using a true organic program get you or save you any effort in a sense in terms of notifications and is there anything kind of on the side, side benefit that comes from it in terms as labor savings, internally same the team time.
Tom: New Jersey is an interesting sort of case study because they not only have proposed pesticide legislation but now they have fertilizer legislation and that’s an entirely different scenario that could spend tons of time on too, but the use of chemical nitrogen phosphorus and how that applies to pollution and groundwater and all that. We haven’t even talked about that yet but the one state where there is a pre-notification law and that’s New York State. I think that’s been …
Jonathan: Is it New York, okay.
Tom: Yeah that’s been in effect for quite a while. In fact, we dealt with it at Lawn Dog back in the day that any [genesis 00:19:36] one of those, it’s kind of hard to deal with but if you’re going to run a respectful and lawful business you need to follow the letter of the law all the time. What that law states is that anytime you’re going to do a liquid application of an EPA registered control product, you have to notify in writing all abutting neighbors within and I don’t remember exactly how many days or what the specifics are now, it’s been a while. But you need to notify in writing all abutting neighbors and not just physically abutting, within X feet of your property line that you’re doing a liquid application.
New York has taken that to the next level. That’s kind of a big deal. Operationally that’s a pain in the neck.
Jonathan: That is.
Tom: That’s not easy to comply with, so yeah I mean generally speaking with organics you’re not going to be using a lot of those EPA registered control products. It’s something that you just don’t have in your arsenal. It’s very different.
Jonathan: Right, so the big one that probably and the one I’ve thought about, probably a lot of people think about is obviously is it affordable? We’ve kind of talked about that can you make money at? The one I’ve always worried about is I don’t want to jeopardize losing one of my clients because I’ve switched over to a true full organic program and I’m getting slower results. Then they’re dissatisfied and they look at their neighbor’s property next door and they say, “Hey, his looks great and green and he got real quick results.” Then they start to think we’re incapable essentially, so the results is a big one. I think myself and a lot of people are concerned about that.
What have you learned, what are you seeing, I mean because you are really, I mean this isn’t theory, you’re doing this, so what are you seeing in the real world in the way of results and what would be the expectation if I implemented something like an organic program in my company, a true organic program?
Tom: Again great question and what’s going on now is a little bit different than I think I mentioned what I call first-generation organics. The organics that we’re doing our now are very different than that first generation or old-fashioned type organics. It’s a completely different line of products and just philosophy. In the past, typically you need to tell you customer, “Hey, look there’s going to be a couple year transition period here where we’re going to start using natural fertilizers and we’re going to start working on soil biology but it takes a long time, it happens over the course of a few years.” In a touchy-feely sort of way that’s great and if everybody had patience to wait a couple of years to have a nice lawn, we’d all switched organic right away.
But that doesn’t account for the customer that gets mad at you for patch of clover or for dandelion or when the color isn’t perfect and that’s the reality of it I think is that you always have to … It’s great to implement an organic program but if you’re not considering your business, then you’re probably setting yourself up to fail. You have to meet a customer’s expectations, so couple of things here, one is that the new organics and a lot of the new methods and products and programs and all that good stuff really allow for a much quicker transition. You don’t have to tell your customer that you have to wait two or three years for the lawn and soil to catch up with itself and to wean itself off a chemical.
That’s not necessarily the case anymore but I think more importantly and again this is a business thing as opposed to I guess an advocacy thing. If you’ve got a customer who is telling you that if you don’t go out there and spray that dandelion or kill that clover or whatever, if they’re telling they’re going to cancel your service unless you do that, in my opinion, you want to take care of the customer. If you need to take a couple of steps backwards in terms of the products that you’re using in order to keep your customer happy, in order to keep them enrolled and not cancel that’s an okay choice to make.
You always want to err on the side of doing right by a customer base and if you need to employ a rescue treatment now and then, this is something that comes up with us a lot. I don’t want people to think that it’s all-or-nothing. That would be perfect world again and we don’t live in a perfect world. We want to reduce the amount of pesticides that we use. We want to reduce the amount of chemical inputs that we use and it might be unrealistic to think that you can snap your fingers and they’re all going to go away. If a customer is asking to be transitioned, listen to your custom, you always want to do what’s right for your customer base.
Jonathan: I like that approach a lot, so my takeaway on that is it makes organics doable whereas if you can’t ever go the alternative route in a sense in an emergency situation, you might stay away from organics completely, whereas with your approach, which I buy into, I like that then you can from a business standpoint you really don’t have the risk of moving yourself in the direction of organics because you got a backup plan for the client that just won’t put up with a slow solution. Even slow solution is probably the wrong word from talking to you because, in talking I get the feeling that in many cases I mean you still see nice quick results but in a scenario where there’s just some trouble area that you’ve got to resolve fast that’s when you say, “Worse case go the old way.” Am I hearing you correctly?
Tom: Yep you are, undoubtedly you can transition a lawn but we got a couple of case studies where we’ve got lawn literally right next to each other without a property divider where it’s really the same, it’s the same stand of turf, where there’s one home, say number seven is here, number nine right next door, where they’re basically sharing the same front yard. One home is employing chemical lawn care methods and the other is using an organic program and you can’t tell the difference. Literally you can transition a lawn without having to go a long period of time but you have to bend the rules, even the most conservative advocates for reducing, eliminate pesticides are going to allow a rescue treatment as long as it’s sensible, as long as it’s the last resort.
If you’re just trying to save a customer and the alternative would be that customer can cancel and then maybe go back to 15 applications of blanket weed control again. It’s okay to take a step backwards to take two steps forward, so …
Jonathan: That’s a good point.
Tom: There’s definitely room.
Jonathan: We’ve come a long way from when I first became aware of the organic approach, I don’t know when that was but it was a while back and just learning from you and reading and thinking about where things are going, it’s amazing how much we’ve advanced. What do you see coming, what’s the future?
Tom: I think we have advanced a long way in just a short period of time too and I’ll go back to that first generation organics again. It’s not the same anymore. I think we’ve probably arrived at a best case scenario in terms, there’s always going to be product development, there’s always going to be a better way but I think the science in terms of organic turf care is legitimate now. It’s not speculation, it’s not, maybe if I do this, this will happen. There’s plenty of research, there’s lots of good books written, there’s lots of these results now, there’s testing. I think we are at a place where the future is … Actually the gentlemen I talk to all the time who’s well-versed in this kind of philosophy.
His take is we use organic products and methods to care for grass not necessarily because of our fears that the chemicals are bad but because it’s the best way to make grass look nice, agronomically speaking. We’re there now, I’m very confident in saying that the industry and the consumer base as a whole will likely, it’s happening, they’re transitioning now, it’s going to continue to transition. I don’t think it’ll be too long before it’s probably the norm.
Jonathan: That’s great. I think it’s pretty much proven at this point, we can build up the health of the turf, we can essentially control weeds. What about pests and I think you might have said something about in the beginning, but is there anything with what you’re doing and what you’ve been studying and actually taking place in the market, what can we do? Like for example in my business we do the yearlong ant treatments and we try to do some preventative treatments to keep bugs out of the houses and fiery ants and all those other things. What do you have in that area, what are the possibilities with an organic approach for pests?
Tom: One of the things that that we always recommend companies do is you don’t want to change things up in terms of implementation or a program that looks really any different than what you chemical program looks like. If you’re doing six applications of fertilizer and what not and you’re offering an ant, flea and tick program, do the same thing. Just do it with alternative products. When you ask about ant control and at Lawn Dog, we have ant, flea and tick program and treatments that were really super popular. I mean they’re pests that people don’t want to deal with and in the south and where you are, it’s even more of a big deal.
It’s funny that there are and this isn’t our core business in terms of dealing with products but there have been, there always have been and there are new products coming out all the time that are natural pest control products that just haven’t been really popular for whatever reason. I guess that’s an entirely different argument but there are lots of pest control products whether it’s surface pests or ants or ticks or mosquitoes, they work very very well on controlling those kind of insects. That’s almost something that’s been going on for a while. It just hasn’t really been wildly popular. I don’t know in terms of products marketing or what not but for instance cedar oil. Cedar oil is a natural insect control, it works really well with ants.
I use it at my house all the time in terms of keeping the ants out of the house. It will keep mosquitoes away, it’s a natural deterrent for lots of insects. Cedar oil certainly is a new, I mean it’s something that’s been around for a long time. It’s just really growing in popularity now, maybe because people are calling into question some of the insecticides but when you go down that road there’ been items in place for quite a while that a very effective.
Jonathan: Something like cedar oil, is that typically sold at a LESCO or do you have to go generally somewhere else to track down those products?
Tom: No, they’re readily available. I know that LESCO is carrying a really nice cedar oil product this year that’s been real popular. My brother actually runs a LESCO Service Center. Yeah, he says, he sells quite a bit of it. There’s lots of different brands out there and again even from a retail standpoint, those are really growing in popularity too, so the knowledge base is growing with these products are available.
Jonathan: This is a question for you more from my perspective, so I’m in Texas and I think a lot of guys in the south will kind of have this question. I know there’s different weed verities all throughout the country, but for us here in the south, we have historically used MSMA to treat crabgrass and dallisgrass or Johnson and all these different grassy weeds. MSMA was basically taken off the market a while back, you can still spray it if you have it in inventory but you can’t pick it up.
This is a big concern and along with that the big concern in having conversations internally at my company and talking to other guys, I know a lot of guys in the industry, the question always comes up, “Okay, organic program sounds great, we would love to do it, but what are we going to do about the grassy weeds because that’s the weed in the lawn here in our market that will just make the lawn look terrible in two days.”
Tom: Absolutely.
Jonathan: Have you found that through an organic program you can control those weeds, what are your findings on that type of a weed in the southern market?
Tom: I often say to people especially this time of year that on the day I finally pass away it will be at least two or three years earlier than it should have been because of people yelling at me about crabgrass. I mean that’s the biggest causer of stress in our industry by far, all those grassy annual weeds where they explode quickly and most of the country now is in a pretty significant heat wave. It’s that time of the year, there’s going to be crabgrass, it’s a fact of life and whether it’s a chemical lawn, an organic lawn, it’s just that the crabgrass calls will start. I’m sure they have for you already.
Jonathan: Oh yeah.
Tom: There’s couple of different approaches that we take to grassy weeds in the organic world and because organics isn’t necessarily a product centered approach, it’s not like, I don’t think MSMA when I think crabgrass, although I spent plenty of time with hand cans of MSMA in my life or whatever it is now. We like to think that we can manage a lot of these pests in a lot of different ways. From a product standpoint, products like corn gluten are popular. I’m not a huge fan of granular corn gluten in terms of pre-immersion control really because it’s a fertilizer as well and sort of a contradiction there and that’s first-generation. You need a lot of product but there’s now liquid corn gluten which really has the nitrogen taken out of it.
It really works very well on all grassy annual weeds but it’s a small part of a larger management strategy. It’s really interesting that this is something that people overlook oftentimes because we’re so focused on being a product centered philosophy or approach in lawn care in general. But think of this, when your crabgrass or your dallisgrass or any other sort of annual grassy weed germinates, over the course of the year, we continue to fertilize it with water-soluble quick release nitrogen in addition to the slow release that’s in the fertilizer. Because lot of those grassy annual weeds have really shallow root systems, you know that day when finally you just get that massive crabgrass explosion.
All the sudden it’s like, “Oh man there’s crabgrass everywhere,” what would be the worst thing you could possibly do? Probably add more fertilizer because it just perpetuates it, so with organics one of the things that you do is you’re not applying large amounts of water soluble, in most cases urea. There’s no water soluble quick release source of nitrogen. We try to find nitrogen in other places, through soil biology, through nitrogen fixing and through bacteria and cultural practices like returning clippings, all those kind of general things. We don’t apply lots of nitrogen that’s the key that’s the goal. You have that breakthrough and whether it’s a chemical lawn or an organic lawn, it’s always going to happen.
But the biggest difference is that we’re not fertilizing it consistently, every four or five weeks for three months, you’ll really immediately notice far fewer service calls or complaints because the crabgrass, even though it’s there, it’s not quite as visible. It’s not growing at three times the speed of the turf. It becomes less of an issue. Then once soil biology really increases and you have a much more healthy soil food web, it’s just generally speaking a less hospitable place for those sort of weeds to grow. Without even any inputs, without any product changes or anything at all, if you discontinue using a lot of the chemical products we’ve come to really depend on, you can eliminate that crabgrass from the your turf over the course of a few years naturally. It will go away.
I guess that’s where there could be a transition.
Jonathan: I see.
Tom: When you begin to employ some of the product based strategies like liquid gluten and making some adjustments culturally, you can get it out of there quicker. But again Jonathan, I’m going to go back to what we were talking about earlier, if you’ve got a customer that’s got some crabgrass and they tell you if you don’t come out there when you’re post emergent and get rid of it, my suggestion is that you’re going to have to do it. There’s a good not really a post emergent accepted organic control for annuals, selective grassy annual post emergent control, so MSMA or drive or I don’t even know what drive is being called now, those post emergent chemical options in the event that a customer is going to cancel, are your last line of defense.
You should be careful with it, try to reduce it, don’t be reckless, save the customer.
Jonathan: If you’re able to cut back, so couple of things come to mind when you say we’re able to cut back on the amount of fertilizer we’re applying, are we going to continue to see the green effect, are we continue to see the thickness and the greenness in the lawn that a chemical lawn would see?
Tom: Yeah and again, this is where it takes a while, it takes a few years. If you’re not thinking in terms of pounds of N per 1000 square feet anymore, it’s not like, ”Ok I need to get three-quarters of a pound of nitrogen now.” Especially with you guys doing deeper in the south, where you’re dealing with Bermuda grass, warm season turf grasses, you need a lot a nitrogen so it can be a challenge to find it but it’s just that water soluble chemical nitrogen that gives you that quick roller coaster ride, where get that nuclear green for two weeks and then it goes way.
I guess you don’t lose anything in terms of quality but the truth be told that nuclear green I just talked about that you see in early spring on some of the chemical lawns that might be a thing of the past, whereas it almost looks unnatural. You probably see it from an airplane, the glow, so you may lose that a little bit but in terms of even color and dark color, a lot of that depends on the grass types to begin with. But you’re not giving up a lot because you’re changing your pounds of nitrogen per thousand square feet.
Jonathan: One thing about putting less fertilizer down if you’re a maintenance company and your mowing, you don’t get quite the surge and I know through the slow-release, you can eliminate some of the surge but you don’t get quite the surge, which is a nightmare for a maintenance company. Your fertilizer company [inaudible 00:39:54], they put down fertilizer, trying to get the thing as green and thick as they can and their goal is completely opposed to the maintenance company, is going to come in to mow the lawn behind them and even if they’re mowing it weekly, there’s so much top growth that it’s a nightmare.
Being able to maintain the greenness while at the same time not having to put down the fertilizer is, am I thinking in the right direction, would it mean less speed in the way of growth or would an organic lawn grow, I now realize that organic lawn isn’t going to be as green probably, but will the organic lawn grow as fast as a lawn where you’re constantly dumping fertilizer or would you see a little bit of a pullback in the way of growth?
Tom: You sound like you’ve been on a moving crew in April before.
Jonathan: I know the business, so I know all the pains that come with it.
Tom: The fights as result of those, put it this way, the first application in the organic program that we implement does not even contain a fertilizer and when you think about it, of all the times in the course of a year where it probably doesn’t make sense to apply a fertilizer in the spring, when the turf is as green is it’s probably going to be naturally. It’s using stored energy from the previous year and it just doesn’t make sense. You could look at the grass and watch it grow and really pick off the maintenance crews. That’s true, I think what you are getting at is in an organic lawn, you do slow growth down a lot, you don’t have the roller coaster ride.
What we try to do is follow the genetic patterns of the turf grass, so in the north, if you’re dealing with a cool season turf grass like a bluegrass, ryegrass mixed, genetically speaking that grass doesn’t want to be fertilized unless it’s late spring or early fall and we’ve forced fertilizer on it through our chemical programs over the years to create artificial growth. As a result of that artificial growth, you’re really making the mowing crews mad for one thing. You’re creating disease activity, surge growth is creating stress. When the mowing crew is out there and they’re cutting it three ways to make sure they’re getting all the clippings up. They’re really stressing the grass out. That creates problems a week from that event.
You know what I mean, so you have to follow genetically speaking when that particular species wants to be fertilized. It’s different for different types but, yet you just aren’t going to force unnatural growth with organics. The color is just as good, it really is.
Jonathan: That’s a big deal, what about water, so my hunch is that if I’m putting down less fertilizer then I’m probable able to cut back on watering a bit or am I off base there?
Tom: Yeah, no, you’re right there too. The funny thing is that and again this is sort of a geographical issue but I think most turf professionals would agree that we cause more issues as a result of overwatering than under-watering. I mean it’s weird how people don’t understand how to use an irrigation system.
Jonathan: Right, yeah we struggle in our market with getting our clients to understand that the less frequent deeper waterings that you rotate through your zones and again we’re in the south is so much more effective than this craziness we see of five minutes every day seven days a week.
Tom: Right, I know.
Jonathan: Or 30 minutes a day seven days a week or whatever the number is and so water education’s a big deal and actually from my perspective anything we can educate our client on or teach to the client and show them that “Hey, we can save you money on your watering billing and conserve there as well.” That’s a selling point that’s another point of differentiation as a company, so tell me a little bit about that. I interrupted you there but you were starting to tell me that I think that we can cut back on watering a bit.
Tom: No, huge, you’re right and I guess when you were saying that it kind of occurred to me that at the core of organics is the reduction of inputs and we’re not just talking about fertilizer, we’re talking about water too. Part of it is educating people on how to water properly and I’ll take 45 minutes of per zone every three days over 15 minutes every day …
Jonathan: Yes, absolutely, yup.
Tom: All the time, just by nature, an organic healthy soil with lots of microbiology retains water much more efficiently. It’s almost like a sponge and that’s what you want with your turf is that’s why you water deeply so that the roots have to work hard. You want the root system to go down as deep into the soil as possible, so the longer and the deeper, the roots more healthy and resilient the turf grass. When you water ten minutes per zone every day, the roots are going to be happy to hang on the top of the soil because that’s where the water is going to be. That creates problems but, yes absolutely an organic lawn requires, I know there are people that say 50%, whatever percent, I don’t know how they prove that but far less water far less water than a chemically dependent one.
Jonathan: Wow that’s a big deal. The last one and thanks for all your time here. I got just a couple more for you but what about smell? That’s one that I used to think about back in, you’d cover your lawn with something, you’d come in and they’d spread stuff around with rakes and we cover it and the yard would stink for a week. I mean do we still live in those days or is it better these days, as it’s advanced.
Tom: That’s funny because that’s topical with us right now. My company has many different inputs and different fertilizers and what not. One of our fertilizers, the nitrogen is derived from composted plant material and fish and it stinks. It doesn’t smell good. You can smell it when you’re applying it, so sometimes the home owner will come and say, “Wow that stuff there that must be really working good, it smells so bad.”
Jonathan: Maybe that’s how you position it.
Tom: Yeah, exactly right and then the smell goes away but believe it or not and I don’t know how this is even possible but we’re sourcing deodorized fish at this point. With this particular product moving forward and don’t ask me because I don’t know. I don’t know how you take the stink out of fish, but somebody has. It’s a good question and it’s a legitimate question. It’s funny because sometimes it really is bothersome to people, sometimes people make a joke about it. But I guess that’s an example of how even though we’ve reached a point where we’re pretty successful with the things that we do, we’re always getting better to the point where we have taken the stink out of fish somehow.
Jonathan: Are we keeping the kids off the lawn and the dogs off the lawn like with the chemical program is that still a concern for some number of hours after the application?
Tom: No, not at all, actually not at all. I mean you always want to follow label directions with any product that you apply, but there’s no reentry time, even with a lot of those insect control they talk about cedar oil, neem oil is another popular one, zero reentry. Even when those products are used in agriculture, they have zero days to harvest, so when you use a chemical insecticide on strawberries or something, usually there’s days to harvest that’s going to be say 30 days, which is recommending that you don’t eat that for 30 days after the product has been applied. Most of these products have zero days to harvest, so you would basically spray it and eat it on the same day, so there is no reentry time.
Jonathan: See that’s interesting to me, back to your analogy earlier of the playground, the kid goes home and they have weeds and mom finds out that well they have some weeds because they don’t want to potentially put down those harmful chemicals, kind of the same thing every time you leave a card on the door for your client, say, “Hey, whatever you do, don’t let your kid touch this class of 24 hours.” That got to kind of make you wonder as a parent, why is that exactly? That’s another nice thing about being able to keep that off of your literature and door hangers and such.
Tom: Isn’t that one of those weird things that in today’s day and age when we are like freaking out about almost everything, but we still are accepting of the fact that you put a big skull and cross bones sign on your front lawn and you don’t think twice about it.
Jonathan: Yeah, I know, we have been seeing it for so long, we’re I guess becoming numb to it, I don’t know.
Tom: Yeah, but I think more and more people are taking note but it is interesting that … It’s an issue, there’s no doubt and that became way more apparent to me when I had to think about my own kids running around out there.
Jonathan: Yeah, absolutely, so I’m a business owner in the business and I want to make this transition, how do you start educating myself? If I know nothing about organics, it’s kind of overwhelming honestly because for most of the guys in the chemical side, they’ve never done a soil test in their life. They were just putting stuff down, now maybe I need to do a soil test. I mean there’s new things I’ve got to learn and I’m already busy running my business, how do I accomplish the task of starting to learn about this and educate myself about it to see if it’s something that whether I made the transition, starting this year or in two years, how do I start the process of education?
Tom: Well, one of the things that my company in particular does is, we simplify it for people because I think what you just said is really true. It can be totally overwhelming and just with the growing popularity of everything that we’re talking about right now, there are lots of products out there. There are lots of choices and it’s like, you have to relearn everything you thought you knew before. It’s now all different, so of the thousand products that you could be faced with, what do you apply and spray and what am I going to do, what’s the right winterizer and then if you want to start talking about strains of Bacillus and soil biology, I mean it’s overwhelming. It totally is overwhelming, so what my company Natural Technologies and Bee Safe Lawn that is we simplified it.
We built an approach that takes a lot of the guesswork out of it for lawn and landscape companies where we say, “Okay, this is what you want to do now and this is what you want to do next.” A lot of it is dealing with synergy with one product working off of what happened previous and thinking ahead. It is overwhelming, you’re absolutely right, it’s complicated. That’s why those first generation programs were kind of failures because it’s not just a simple product substitution. You can’t just, like I said at the beginning of our conversation, stop spraying weeds and keep your fingers crossed with bugs, it’s not going to happen. It’s a process, there is no doubt. You want to read a lot.
You want to associate with people who been through the process, you just want to become well-versed on soil biology and I think keeping an open mind in terms of implementing a strategy is always important. But, you’re right, it’s complicated and it can be overwhelming. It’s not impossible. That’s for sure, it can be done, but it’s different, no doubt.
Jonathan: Let’s say your company, you have thousands of clients that I call fertilization weed control that you provide that service to, what’s the ideal approach, do you start promoting it to your clients to make the transition or do you say, “Starting this year, we are all organic.” Taking into account your strategy where in an emergency situation, you react accordingly and you fix maybe the problem with a chemical solution if you must, but forgetting that aspect, what I’m saying is, do you find that companies are better offering it to their clients in transitioning or trying to just move everybody on to this program and we’re switching the entire mindset of the entire organization, we are now organic.
Can you really live in both worlds, can you sort of be the old chemical way and be the organic way with the hope that eventually you’re 100% organic, what’s the best strategy from what you have seen?
Tom: I think probably the latter, the last scenario that you just mentioned is probably the most common one. If you are a lawn care service company and I think you said, so you have 2000 clients that you have been treating and you worked hard to build a good relationship with them. We talked about how important customer service and trust is, if you sent out the prepay letter at the end of the [inaudible 00:52:59] we’re switching to organic, it would be chaos. People would be freaking out. Everybody would say, “No, don’t do that.” I don’t think we’re at that point yet, I wish we were and inevitably we will be. But, what most companies have done Jonathan is, they very gingerly offer an organic program that doesn’t cost a whole lot more.
They ask or offer the conversion process from the chemical customers to move over to their organic side. They continue to market efficiently to new customers to either side, so I guess you can live in both worlds and most people we talk to kind of understand eventually their organic side will be bigger than their chemical side just generally speaking with the way we all deal with. Take a look at organic agriculture and the section in your grocery store, how big that’s gotten in comparison to previous years. I think most people or at least most forward thinking companies realize that that’s going to be the case. They just are a little bit skeptical about forcing it and that we focused on running your business a few times in this talk and that’s important, you can’t ignore that.
There is a fear of failure, there is always going to be customers who say, “If you are spraying this much, I want you to spray twice as much.” Those customers are there, you don’t want to alienate them. You also don’t want to sort of call into question what you’ve done for an awful long time. If you start saying “Hey, we’re doing it this way because this stuff is bad.” You might have customers saying, “Well why didn’t you tell me that five years ago?” It’s an approach that you need to take intelligently, you don’t want to jump the gun. You don’t want to go nuts. You want to make sure that you are doing everything premeditated.
But, to answer your question, most companies that we deal with are gradually switching to organic and currently giving their customers the choice and seeing that their organic division grow a lot.
Jonathan: Are we seeing the TruGreens and Scott’s of the world making the transition or are you seeing the really big players in the market, are they making a move yet, are they still sitting and waiting?
Tom: We will use TruGreen as a perfect example because they’re not in a very good situation where their the country’s biggest lawn care provider and they’ve built a really huge business on spraying pesticides basically, they’re chemical company. If all a sudden, they said “Hey we’re not doing that anymore, we’re doing it this way,” imagine how many people are going to say, “What’s going on with this, am I going to get sick because of what you did.” You’re basically admitting that everything you’ve done for your entire existence has been wrong, so that I’m glad I’m not in that boat because there will be investors unhappy with that scenario but when TruGreen introduced their TruNatural Program, you’ve probably heard of that and a lot of people have.
People said “Tom, what are you going to do now man, TruGreen has got an organic program.” I was thrilled, I was like “That’s awesome.” They’re acknowledging that there’s a need, they’re going to promote it with those silly commercials they how on TV sometimes and what’s the saying, a rising tide raises all ships. Even though we’re still one of the little minority, when the big guy acknowledges that what you’re doing is probably the future, man that’s awesome.
Jonathan: They got the marketing budget to spread the word.
Tom: Yeah, right absolutely. I don’t think I fear a TruGreen putting us on the side. I think it’s great that they’ve begun to introduce it. From a personal standpoint, any reduction in some of those chemicals is okay by me.
Jonathan: It’s a big deal, yeah. You’ve given me a lot of time here. I’ll tell you what, why don’t you give us one last thing, give us a good case study or a good example of success story here that it will be motivating for everyone to really be thinking about this and why it’s the future and why we need to be considering it in our businesses?
Tom: Yeah, I’ll give you a little example, we’ve got a company in New Jersey and you want mind if I name his name, it’s a company called HydroGreen and he was a skeptic. He came on board with us last year and implemented our organic program and he was kicking and screaming all the way. He was forward thinking enough that he knew we needed to do it but remember I mentioned the two lawns right next to each other. Those are Keith’s, one is Keith’s customers, two of them right next to each other. This is an old school guy who built sort of an old school business, did very well, fairly conservative, has been in business for a while.
I guess he probably always had this maybe little tweak in his mind that he had to do something a little bit different in order to continue to differentiate not only his business but to continue to grow and thinking about the future like you mentioned earlier. Keith brought on our organic program reluctantly, but has seen awesome results. He is one of our biggest advocates to the point where I mentioned those two lawns at the beginning of the conversation. He has grown his business immensely just by offering the organic program. He has grown a lot of his other divisions by opening up doors to clientele that typically wouldn’t have paid attention to him before. That’s a success story, he’s got great results with the agronomic program.
He’s grown his organic customer base significantly. His overall growth has done very very well. He feels like he is doing the right thing and he is a firm believer now whereas he was skeptical before.
Jonathan: That’s fantastic. That’s great, anything else we should know about you, anything else you want to, parting thoughts here?
Tom: I really love having these conversations even though I’ve been doing this for 20 years, I still like talking about grass and if anybody who happens to be listening, anybody in your audience just wants to talk about it, I’m absolutely available anytime. My company Natural Technologies, we helped existing lot of landscape companies make that transition all the time. It’s what our core business is and we’re still excited about doing it. My phone’s always available and my door is always open.
Jonathan: That’s great, well Tom, I appreciate all your time here. It’s been a big education, so thanks for coming on and again thanks for all your time.
Tom: Yeah, no, thank you Jonathan. I really enjoyed it.
Jonathan: You’re welcome, I did too.
