By Turf Editors
From the October 2024 Issue
A Timeline Of Accomplishments
1. When, why, and how did you start your business?
I started Grunder Landscaping in 1984 to make money for college. Truthfully, the roots of the business began even earlier when I was 14 and my mom would drive my brother and I to a nearby neighborhood so we could mow lawns. In 1984, I was 16 years old, and the business was a little more structured because I had my license, and we had our own truck. The business was still small – my brother, Rich, and I took care of our clients’ properties after school and on the weekends.
Founder & CEO
Grunder Landscaping Co
Dayton, Ohio
My mom was an elementary school teacher and my dad a civil engineer, and it was expected in my family that we would follow in their footsteps to go to college. I wasn’t smart enough to get an academic scholarship or athletic enough to play a sport at that level, so the options were either take out a student loan or figure it out. I decided to get to work, and I financed 100% of my college education at the University of Dayton with what I earned through Grunder Landscaping Co., graduating without any student debt.
2. Please describe your business now.
Today, Grunder Landscaping Co. offers landscape design-build, maintenance, and snow removal services to both residential and commercial properties. We’re celebrating our 40th year in business in 2024. In our time operating, we’ve completed over $165M in landscaping work. We currently have 90+ team members and we completed $10.8M in revenue in 2023. We are headquartered just south of Dayton, OH.
3. What is your educational background or skill set? Is there a degree, continuing education class, or skill you would recommend for success?
I hold a bachelor’s degree in business administration from the University of Dayton and still maintain an active CDL and Master Gardener certification. The state and national associations have fantastic programs for continuing education horticulturally, and I’ve continued learning ways to make my business better by participating in peer groups and constantly attending events to learn and improve.
4.What do you see as the main reasons why your business grew successfully?
This is pretty simple – take care of your team and they’ll take care of you. I often say that our external customer service will never exceed our internal customer service. I have so much respect for my team and the hard work it takes from everyone on it for us to be successful. We compensate our team well, offer comprehensive benefits, and incentivize them so that when the company wins, they do too.
Taking care of our team also means investing in their training and development and growing so that we can create career paths for our team within the company. We want our team to grow and succeed alongside the business.
5. How did you set yourself apart from competition?
Super simple things. We keep our job sites tidy, we pay attention to the details, and we communicate well. We are good at landscaping, but we’ve learned that if you don’t do the little things well you will lose out on business. So, we make sure we stay good at landscaping, but we also put priority on easy things like being friendly and returning phone calls promptly.
6. What was your best business decision?
Hiring Seth Pflum, our President & COO at Grunder Landscaping Co. and Vince Torchia, our Vice President at our sister company The Grow Group. Both Seth and Vince push me to be better, they aren’t afraid to tell me when I’m wrong, and they work tirelessly for the good of our teams.
This is extra funny considering the humble ways they each entered the company. Seth walked into the office one day to apply for any job we had. He had read our weekly Great Idea from The Grow Group for years and was relocating to the area. Vince started out as our intern while he was a student at the University of Dayton. They’ve since become indispensable.
7. What was your worst business decision?
It’s hard to pick the single worst business decision I’ve made. I’ve had some bad hires; I’ve had team members I let go when I probably should’ve worked harder to train them before calling it quits; we’ve lost money on jobs; we’ve tried to launch services nobody wanted. Name the mistake: I’ve probably made it.
With hindsight, I think what’s held the business back the most though has been a theme of focusing on perfection over progress. Striving for perfection and creating systems to ensure perfection each time ended up keeping our structure too rigid for growth. When we simplified our systems and structure, that was when the real growth happened.
8. What was your funniest business experience?
At 19 years old I had my first really big contract signed. I bought a new briefcase specifically for the meeting – this was back when you had to bring your paper contracts with you places, no e-signing! I set the briefcase down in the parking lot to open my truck door and then promptly backed over the new briefcase with the contract inside it. The contract had tire marks on it.
9. What’s your favorite piece of equipment or landscaper tool?
Probably our Vermeer Mini Skid Steers. They’re the most versatile piece of equipment on the market and are an invaluable tool when we’re doing installations because they’re small enough to be functional on residential properties but save our teams from having to do a lot of heavy work manually.
10. What is your advice to others? What do you wish you had known?
Surround yourself with good, smart people and be open to new ideas. What’s been single most important in my career has been being constantly willing to learn and looking for things I can learn from anyone I meet – whether they’re working a cash register at Walmart, a best-selling author, or the CEO of a Fortune 500 company.
10. What is your plan for the future of your business?
We’re growing rapidly, we have a goal of $13.5M in annual revenue for 2024 and we plan to continue growing beyond that. We hope to open a second office in Cincinnati, where we’re already doing a substantial amount of work, before the end of this year.
