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Lawn & Landscape, May 2005
By Jonathan Katz
Rick Girard never received a college degree. And in retrospect, Girard says maybe he didn’t need one. Girard’s business lessons came from real-world experiences while running his own landscape companies. When he started his first business at 19, Girard was like many young entrepreneurs: ambitious but unprepared for the responsibilities that accompany a growing enterprise.
By the time Girard turned 26, his South Florida business, Girard’s Landscaping & General Maintenance, had an annual revenue of almost $1 million and more than 30 full-time employees. But by Girard’s own admission, he wasn’t mature enough to make the "tough decisions” that define successful business owners.
Girard was paying salaries he couldn’t afford, eventually forcing the company into bankruptcy. He later rebounded after a stint with a nationally recognized landscape firm before starting another company called Outdoor Concepts in 1996. Still in debt from his previous business, Girard sought partners to help him invest in the company.
After financial disputes with two different associates, Girard left Outdoor Concepts in 1998 and created Sanford, Florida based Girard Environmental Services with his brother Randy, who is an equal owner and chief operating officer of the company. Now 35, Girard has used his past mistakes to help the company grow from first-year revenues of $73,000 to more than $15 million in 2004.
You say some bad decisions led to your first company’s bankruptcy. What were they? I didn’t have the guts to make the decisions that I needed to make to save the company. Our total gross sales were less than $1million, and we grew too fast without having direction. We had way too much overhead, and we didn’t pay our payroll taxes – so not being profitable and subsidizing our profit with payroll money is what ultimately put us out of business.
Also, my dad had recently been laid off from a large corporation and came to work for us, and we couldn’t afford to pay my salary, my brother’s salary and my dad’s salary, so we basically had three families trying to make a living off of a company that was doing about $70,000 a month in gross sales, and that just didn’t work. On top of that, I was new in the business. It was the first time I had ever hired managers and the first time I had ever run my own business. Things went great the first four years. We started getting our own warehouse, started hiring more overhead positions – just not realizing that it all cost money. The company didn’t grow fast enough to keep up with all of the overhead. We struggled through it for two years instead of saying, ‘Hey this ain’t working.’
How did you rebound from that business experience? I didn’t have my truck, and I didn’t have a job, so I borrowed $1,000 from my father-in-law, bought a truck, put $1,000 down on it, and that was the beginning of getting back on my feet. I made our guest bedroom my office. Two people helped me out considerably – one was Chris Hine. He was always a good customer, and he gave me $1,000 to go out and buy materials. He also ran a company that was one of our large commercial accounts here in town, and he gave me that job back when nobody else would give me a job. The other person was Steve Gegner at D&J Equipment, and he allowed me to buy a mower, an edger and a weed eater, and he financed that out of his pocket. With these things, I got back on my feet. That was the beginning of Outdoor Concepts.
So what does that say about the importance of forming relationships in business? Hine felt comfortable with me doing his work even though I wasn’t very good at managing money because he liked my quality of work. With Gegner, I remember when we were going out of business and we didn’t have the $800 we owed him, so we paid him $100 a month, and my dad hand-delivered the $100 to him every month. That was significant to Gegner because he deals with a lot of lawn guys, and it just wasn’t something those guys do. They either avoid you or just send you a check. They don’t want to see you just because of the pride factor. He was impressed with the way we handled it. I think relationships are very important, and I think always doing what you say you’re going to do, no matter how hard it is, is also very important.
What was the most challenging part about restarting a business? The most challenging part was being in the same industry in the same town as we were before. When Girard’s Landscaping went out of business, everybody started blaming Girard for why they had a bad year: ‘You know, we didn’t get paid by Girard’s Landscaping or companies like Girard’s Landscaping make it hard on our industry.’ We were blamed for a lot of people’s misfortunes. That’s why I named the business Outdoor Concepts.
How did you overcome that? We got over it by doing business with other people. I had to have partners because of my credit, but unfortunately everybody has a greedy side. The partnership didn’t work, so I had a meeting with my three employees and told them you can either work for my old partner or come work for us, and they chose to work for us. We started an $8,000 cleanup job, took my brother’s credit card to Home Depot and bought $2,000 worth of equipment. We got paid the $8,000, and that was the seed money. There was no investment or outside money.
What did this teach you about working with partners? The difference now is we’re family. Another thing that I think is significant is my brother and I are very different when it comes to our abilities. We compliment each other well. I’m more of the executive-type financial planner – more of a forward-thinking person. My brother is more the day-to-day function of the company – the scheduling and dealing with the employees. I enabled him to focus on the operations side of the business, and he enabled me to focus on the vision side of the business.
So it helps having that separation of duties? Absolutely, and we always help each other. It is just an unwritten rule that that is his job and this is my job. That doesn’t mean I don’t go out in the field and help, but it also doesn’t mean that he doesn’t sit in the office and give his opinion on how he feels things should be done here. He assists me in what I do, and I assist him in what he does, but each of us has our own clear direction.
What are you doing differently today to make sure you have more control over the company’s finances? With the old business, I didn’t really even know what a balance sheet was. I’m not a landscaper anymore – I’m a businessman. Instead of waiting until the end of the month to see what the profit is, I track it more closely. Right now, we have nine departments and three different divisions, so we don’t just track the profit of the company, we track profit and we allocate corporate overhead to each department, so each department is responsible for carrying their share of the overhead. All of our managers carry purchase-order books, so they’re authorized to buy for the company. Instead of controlling our managers on their spending, we educate our managers on how to spend and we share our financials. This way, they see what they spend every month and what net profits and gross profits are. It gives them a lot more insight into what makes our company profitable.
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