As an enterprising 10-year-old, Nick Tamble mowed neighbors' lawns to earn spending money. Almost 25 years later, that entrepreneurial spirit - honed by a sharp focus on business education - remains as strong as a stone retaining wall in the form of Lawn & Landscape Gardens, a landscaping business in Circle Pines, Minn.
Tamble, 34, founded Lawn & Landscape as a lawn care business in 1990. He was 16 years old, and operated out of the trunk of a 1978 Oldsmobile Delta 88. Today, the business - which Tamble co-owns with his brother, Anthony - employs 16 full-time employees in summer and includes four divisions: landscaping, lawn care, yard maintenance and snow removal.
The company's business mix is about 70 percent landscaping, 20 percent maintenance, 5 percent lawn care and 5 percent snow removal.
"I love the outdoors and working on my own - making my own decisions," Tamble says about his motivation to enter the landscaping field. "Free enterprise was very attractive to me, even as a young boy.
"As soon as I was able to drive, I started posting advertising flyers on telephone poles around Roseville, the town where I grew up," he continues. "My first year, I had eight or nine lawn care clients and made about $1,500."
Tamble went to college soon after starting the business. Since the landscaping season started and ended while he was still attending classes, Anthony Tamble helped hold things together in late spring and early fall.
Intent on obtaining a degree in environmental science, Tamble eventually shifted gears and earned an education degree, figuring a teaching job would be a good fallback position if the landscaping gig didn't work out.
"I knew I could at least substitute teach in winter," he says.
But landscaping remained his real passion. So after receiving the education degree, he attended about a dozen classes at the University of Minnesota, focusing on horticulture and other courses that would help him run a business.
LIFELONG LEARNER
Tamble is a big believer in education, and has relied on a non-traditional business education curriculum to make him a smarter entrepreneur. Over the years, he's relied on fellow businessmen, professional organizations and even a business coach to sharpen his business acumen.
"I wanted to run a business the right way," he says. "I didn't want to run into problems that might snowball into something much worse later on."
Early in his career, Tamble discovered a great resource: SCORE, a non-profit organization that provides small-business owners with free and confidential mentoring and advice from volunteers who are either retired or working executives and businessmen. The group offers one-on-one counseling services as well as low-cost educational seminars (for more information, visit www.score.org).
SCORE counselors taught Tamble how to set up a business, work with accountants and deal with tax issues. They also introduced him to things like a certificate of assumed name, which in effect allows a business to legally claim a business name after searching a database to ensure it isn't already taken.
"I attended SCORE seminars, and usually was the youngest guy there by at least 10 years," he says.
Tamble found another valuable business ally in the Minnesota Nursery and Landscape Association, a proactive trade organization that helps landscape-related businesses operate successfully, as well as lobbies for the industry in the state legislature (log onto www.mnla.biz for details).
"The MNLA allows you to learn about specific areas of running a business that you want to improve or grow," Tamble says. "It's quite valuable. I learned a lot about basic accounting and setting up a balance sheet."
COST ACCOUNTING
Knowing how much to charge customers and remain profitable is an ongoing struggle for many small business owners. For help, Tamble relies on an invaluable tool called a chart of accounts, which he learned about at an MNLA seminar.
Tamble describes it as a "dynamic spread sheet" that determines the revenue a company needs to cover its overhead costs - and still make a profit.
"It's a glorified balance sheet of sorts," Tamble says. "It shows me things like revenue, direct costs (such as materials for a job) and indirect costs (equipment parts and repairs, for instance) by division. It's useful because if one division generates 70 percent of my revenue, I want to charge a man-hour rate that can recoup 70 percent of its overhead costs."
One of the primary issues in the landscaping industry centers on how much to charge customers, Tamble says.
"There's a lot of buzz in the industry about under-charging for services," he explains. "If you're charging customers $46 an hour when you really should be charging $61 an hour ... it can cripple your business.
"I revise my chart of accounts annually," he adds. "Costs change and efficiencies change, and you need to account for that."
Tamble says he divided the company into four separate business segments for similar reasons.
"I want to know how each segment is doing independent of each other," Tamble says. "If they were all lumped together, you could be trashing out $20,000 in one area and not even know it."
LANDING A BIG JOB
As Lawn & Landscape grew in its early years, so did the scope of its work. The company expanded from mowing and trimming/edging lawns to small landscaping jobs, featuring simple projects like boulder features.
But Tamble wanted to enter the more lucrative market for larger landscaping jobs. The main obstacle? Lack of experience.
That all changed when the company landed a $15,000 job to do a major landscape renovation. They key was video footage Tamble shot of a landscaping project as it progressed, as well as the end result.
Tamble showed the video to the prospective client, and Lawn & Landscape got the job. It involved a tear-out of a three-level terraced garden built out of old railroad ties, and reinstalling it with boulder tiers, terraced and veined with different levels of plants. The project also included treated-timber stairs that curve through the middle of the terraces, and a flagstone patio atop the terrace.
"That project was invaluable," Tamble says. "I didn't have a good grasp of costs at the time ... we may have even lost money on it. But we got photos that proved we could do a major installation. Having before and after photos to show prospective clients was huge."
IN THE GARAGE
As the company tackled larger projects, its stable of equipment expanded accordingly. Today, Tamble owns a 1999 International 4700 Low Pro dump truck; a 2004 Versadump 14-foot tandem dump trailer (14,000 pounds gvw), made by Midsota Manufacturing Inc.; 1997 and 2003 Dodge 1500 pickup trucks; 1999, 2001 and 2004 Dodge 2500 4 x 4 pickup trucks; a 2004 Bobcat MT55 diesel mini-track loader and a 2005 Bobcat S185 skid-steer loader; a 2005 Exmark 48-inch hydro-drive mower and a 2006 Exmark 52-inch hydro-drive mower; a 2008 Billy Goat HTR leaf shredder; 2006 and 2008 Bobcat BC15 compactors; a 2001 Boss Super-Duty 7 1/2-foot snowplow; a 2005 Hiniker 8-foot C-plow; a 2007 Hiniker 8-foot straight-blade snowplow; a 2005 Stihl HT 101 pole saw and a 2007 Stihl 420 cut-off saw; and a 2001 MK electric paver saw and a 2004 MK gas-powered paver saw, made by MK Diamond Products Inc.
Tamble buys Bobcat products from Tri-State Bobcat Inc. in Lino Lakes, Minn. He purchased the International truck from Kohls-Weelborg Ford-Mercury Inc. in Redwood Falls; the Exmark and Billy Goat equipment at Merriam Park Repair in St. Paul; the Hiniker plows from Crysteel Manufacturing Inc. in Lake Crystal; the Stihl saws from Twin City Saw and Service Co. in St. Paul; the MK saws from Esch Construction Supply Inc. in St. Paul; and the Versadump trailer from Midsota Manufacturing.
WINTER WONDERLAND
In order to stay busy in winter and keep revenue coming in, Lawn & Landscape also offers residential snow-removal service. With slightly more than 100 accounts, snow removal doesn't generate a significant portion of the company's sales. Nonetheless, it's a "pretty profitable" piece of the business, Tamble says.
Tamble prices snow-removal based on an average amount of calls made per season, which is around 13 (the trucks head out after 1 1/2 inches of snowfall). Pricing is a calculated gamble, but most years it works out, he says.
"If we had to go out 20 times, we'd get pinched," he says. "But last year (which was an unusually snowy winter for much of the Midwest), we still only went out 15 times."
With gas prices unpredictable, Tamble restricts snow removal to homes within a 10-mile radius of the company's shop. And to keep an accurate handle on costs, he meticulously tracks things like the number of miles driven per route, how much time is spent on each route and how many snow removals are performed.
To generate business, Tamble offers a special fall promotion that provides existing customers with a 5 percent discount if they pre-pay for both fall yard maintenance and snow removal. He only offers the promotion to customers who live within that 10-mile radius, and generates a mailing list from a database of client names.
The pre-pay option improves cash flow and saves money by avoiding billing, postage and other related administrative costs. Tamble uses software from Real Green Systems (www.realgreen.com) to develop his promotional campaigns and track customer information.
FALL PROMOTION
The fall promotion kicks off with a postcard mailed to existing customers; it tells them to expect a pre-quote sheet to arrive by mail within a week.
"We send out the postcard because it gives them a heads-up that the pre-quote is coming, and we also use it to promote some additional fall-related services," Tamble says. "For instance, we might feature fire pit installations, fall plantings or holiday planters - things existing clients are more likely to do than new clients."
Five days later, Tamble mails out the pre-quote sheets, which list prices for a short list of services. On a postage-paid tear-off section along the bottom of the sheet, customers can quickly check off the services they want and mail it back to Lawn & Landscape.
The tear-off sections are bar coded; when they arrive at Lawn & Landscape, they're scanned, and the information is imported into the Real Green software database. In addition, the software is linked to QuickBooks, an accounting software package for small business made by Intuit Inc. QuickBooks uses data captured by the Real Green software to compile monthly financial reports, Tamble says.
"The beauty of pre-quote sheets is that you're telling prospective customers what your service costs ahead of time," Tamble explains. "I don't have to go out and spend hours and hours quoting jobs. It's definitely a time-saver for both parties."
But the promotional program doesn't stop there. After establishing the company's snow-removal routes, Tamble does something he calls block-lead marketing. First he gets permission to set up a Lawn & Landscape sign in the yards of various existing customers - usually clients who've made business referrals. Then Tamble takes a walk around the neighborhood, eyeballs each property to estimate a price for fall yard cleaning and snow removal, and sticks a written quote inside the door.
"We typically do the whole block where the sign is posted," Tamble explains. "That might be 20 houses, or it might be 50. It's easy to estimate snow removal prices, because the driveway is right there in your face. Yard maintenance is a bit tougher, because you don't want to snoop around peoples' property, so sometimes we take a little hit there.
"Last year we targeted 200 homes, and got five new clients," he adds. "That's a 2 1/2 percent response rate for very little up-front marketing cost."
DEALING WITH DOWNTURN
Aside from snow removal, Tamble realizes he provides customers with "wants" not "needs." As such, demand for large-scale landscaping projects has dropped off the table the last couple months as consumers batten down their financial hatches.
When business slumps like that, there isn't much Tamble can do except lay off some employees. The combination of reduced payroll and lower material costs help the company somewhat maintain its financial footing.
"I also try to do niche marketing as effectively as possible," he says. For example, right now Tamble is willing to spend money on marketing his company's snow-removal and fall yard-cleaning services, but not on advertising his landscaping service, figuring most people can't afford to spend thousands of dollars on huge landscaping projects.
"Those divisions may not be the most profitable (of the company's four divisions), but they at least generate cash flow when we need it most," Tamble says. "Those are services that cost only $200 or $300 and still provide value for clients."
When layoffs occur, that also means Tamble and his brother will be out in the field more, doing yard maintenance work.
"I'd much rather have 15 guys working full-time through November," he says. "But in times like this, anything goes. It's not beneath me by any means. It's what I started doing at the very beginning."