As a high school junior in 1989, Eric Brand took over his brother’s landscaping business, equipped with a push mower, a chain saw and some hand tools. His mother co-signed for an Isuzu pickup and he went to work, making $8,000 in sales the first year by mowing and maintaining the lawns of eight customers. By year five, he hit the $100,000 mark. Today, his $2 million firm is poised for even more growth, experiencing a 20-percent boost in the past year.

One indication Brand has made all this effort work: he still retains a few of his original eight lawn maintenance clients.

A studied approach
P & L’s growth is not accidental. “I’ve never worked for another landscaper,” Brand notes, “so all of my learning has been on the job. I’ve learned by talking to other landscapers, suppliers and customers, and then piece everything together. So I tell my guys that I’m always open to different ways of doing things.”

Brand has also hit the books. P & L is certified by several entities, including the Interlocking Concrete Paver Association and the National Concrete Masonry Association. The company is also a certified Aquascape Contractor, Techo-Pro Installer and Hunter Gold Preferred Installer, member of the New Hampshire Landscape Association and an accredited member of the Better Business Bureau. “By taking courses, passing exams and meeting certain criteria, we’re giving more to our customers to make sure the job is done properly,” he says.

And he tries to show his crews the potential in front of them. “Our growth is limited to our personnel,” Brand says. “If we did not have capable foremen, we could not add crews. Finding experienced crew leaders is our biggest challenge.” So P & L promotes from within. “Actually, we’ve tried to bring in experienced people for crew leaders from the outside, and have found it’s hard for them to change their ways and start to do jobs the way we do them,” Brand says.

Brand credits Jason Monahan, his general manager, with providing invaluable aid – assistance that proved essential during an especially critical time of Brand’s life. When his middle son was in Boston’s Children’s Hospital for several months, “Jason just held everything down,” Brand says, simply. “On jobs, he’ll make the same decisions I would. It’s scary how alike we think. Our customers get the same answer from both of us.”

Growth by diversity
While Brand learned early on landscape construction was more profitable than lawn maintenance, he knows he still needs to maintain a solid base of maintenance customers. “We had gotten down to four crew days of mowing a few years ago, but now we’re back up to seven days, which is important now that new housing construction is down,” he comments. And winter commercial snowplowing now makes up about 25 percent of P & L’s annual revenues.

Always on the watch for ways he can logically expand his services, Brand added hydroseeding about nine years ago. It proved to be an excellent decision, “way beyond what I thought when we first purchased our hydroseeder,” he comments. He now provides hydroseeding for other landscapers in addition to his own jobs.