SWF Business to Business - SUCCESS STORIES
By Rob Esmond (Business to Business Editor)
In just 18 months, Crawford Landscaping Group has gone from an unknown start-up in one of the nation\'s most competitive landscaping markets to one of the most respected and successful firms in the Southwest Florida region.
Today, it provides comprehensive, all inclusive landscape services to both residential and commercial clients, such as The Fifth Third Center, The Inn at Pelican Bay, Villoresi at Mediterra, Wildcat Run in Estero and many single-family residences in some of Southwest Florida\'s most prestigious communities.
Crawford Landscaping has achieved its success through a combination of expert staff, which it has recruited from throughout the United States, superior operating systems and unparalleled standards of excellence.
The company is currently pursuing ISO 9000 certification (International Organization for Standardization), which provides a set of standards for organizations to follow to insure quality management.
\"From our standpoint, to guarantee that we can do what we say we\'re going to do, and offer the quality and services, we have to surround the business with good operating procedures,\" said Blake Crawford, president and CEO. \"ISO 9000 is the format that we\'ve chosen to do that. We want to be the premier landscape company in Southwest Florida.\"
Going back to his earliest working days, Crawford dreamed of founding a landscaping company that would be run with all the professionalism of any serious business. Its capabilities would be comprehensive, its attentiveness to its clients\' needs would be extraordinary, and the training of its employees would be second to none. In tandem with that, Crawford would insure that all of his employees, not just his managers, would have careers with benefits, not just jobs.
While still in highschool, he founded his first business, Crawford-Mourad Landscaping in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. Although he didn\'t exactly corner the local landscaping market, he did formulate many of the ideas, polices and practices that would become staples in Crawford Landscaping.
After learning the automotive industry in Detroit, and the real estate industry in central Florida, Crawford decided to make his dream a reality. In 2004, he chose Naples, where he had vacationed and where he had become familiar with local business trends and opportunities. On that basis, he concluded that the Fort Myers to Naples corridor was in need of a comprehensive professional landscaping company, and that as time went on, the area\'s clientele would become increasingly sophisticated, demanding a quality of services that were unavailable outside of Crawford.
His intent was simple: To build the most professional landscaping company in the nation. By his own admission, it was a lofty goal, but considering the quality, or lack thereof, of most landscapers, it seemed reasonable and attainable.
\"We\'re always had a larger focus,\" Crawford said. \"We always figured we\'d be a $10 million company or greater. When you begin your business thinking that way, you have an opportunity to set things up differently.\"
Through the first half of 2004, Crawford designed virtually every aspect of his company on paper. Borrowing from his experience in plant management in the automotive industry, he developed ways of assuring excellence in every stage of landscaping, from initial consultation with the client, to budgeting time and expenses, to execution of a wide range of services, through intermediate and final evaluation and reporting to the client.
To support and help manage the myriad of details inherent in each job, he researched and tested various software programs, finally deciding on CLIP™, a Sensible Software product developed specifically for the landscaping industry.
\"I can tell a customer about every day that we\'ve been on their property this year and last year,\" Crawford said. \"I can tell them what chemicals we applied, or what irrigation issues we ran into. It\'s all documented.\"
Now it was time for the most important component: Finding the people who could compliment and contribute to a company that would do far more than cut lawns and weed gardens.
Crawford found the perfect complement to his entrepreneurial skills in Tim Felts. Coming from a landscaping background, Felts answered an ad Crawford had placed in one of the industry\'s trade magazines, and within weeks, the two were working together.
Felts brought proven strategies to Crawford\'s big picture goals. What\'s more, their personalities and vision clicked, and they decided to be co-founders of the new company. Today, Felts serves as the company\'s vice president of business development.
Crawford and Felts then turned to Andy Allen for the commercial landscaping end of their business. One of Florida\'s best known landscape installation professionals, Allen likewise shared the vision of Crawford Landscaping, and was excited to finally have a chance to implement his ideas of \"how to do landscaping the right way.\"
As the three of them built their staff, they focused not exclusively on people who had had landscaping backgrounds, but rather on people who were committed professional regardless of their education and training, people who shared their vision of building a company based on quality, unprecedented performance and extreme customer satisfaction.
With his staff and system in place, Crawford and Felts opened Crawford Landscaping in July 2004 and immediately raised the bar by which all landscapers in the area would be measured.
\"Being able to respond to the customer and get the information to them in a timely manner has been something that sets us apart from the competition,\" Felts said. \"I\'ve heard the comment quite a few times from new clients that the companies they used to work with never called them or followed up. That\'s one of the things that we pride ourselves on doing.\"
As word spread and the company grew, Crawford and Felts initiated another concept that would propel their success. By listening to the customer, then by developing systems to implement changes based on those comments that could be tracked and quantified back to the customer, Crawford Landscaping not only learned how to better address a diverse range of customer preferences and expectations, but in the process, to become an increasingly more efficient and effective company overall.
\"We deploy our crews by route sheets every day and the standardization allows us to develop the most efficient way to get crews to their jobs and back,\" he said.
\"They track when they started the job, and when they ended, and that data is captured. It gives us a monitoring tool to see how efficient they\'ve been, and if the customer has any questions, I can tell them everything.\"
But the quest for quality hasn\'t stopped at giving customers more than they expected. If they attain ISO 9000 certification by the end of 2006 as expected, Crawford will become the nation\'s first landscaper to subscribe to the rigid conforms of quality and performance intentionally accepted as the best of the best.
Through its 45 employees, Crawford Landscaping now delivers comprehensive services to over 500 clients throughout Southwest Florida.
\"From our landscape maintenance base, we wanted to add all the services that relate to maintenance,\" Crawford said. \"We\'ve added irrigation, pest control, enhancements and renovations. Now our residential customers enjoy the ability to be able to change their landscaping with a professional company in a timely manner.\"
The company\'s future plans include developing a tree division, a water feature division and a \"hardscape\" division, and basically off the homeowner anything that need for the outside of their home.\"
With 2006 revenues projected at $3./5 million and all indications suggesting annual growth at a rate of 30 percent per year, the company is positioned to reach $10 million revenue by the close of 2010.
\"We really have three guiding principles: quality, services and a commitment to honoring our word,\" Crawford said. \"It\'s surprising how simple those are, yet when you do them, people are very impressed.\"
