The Structure of a $20 Million Landscape Company - Justin White - K&D Landscaping

In this episode of the Digital Toolbox Podcast, host Enmanuel Tejada interviews Justin White, CEO of K&D Landscaping, who shares his inspiring journey from taking over his family business to achieving remarkable growth. They have grown from $1M to over $20M per year over the last 10 years!

Justin discusses the importance of organic growth, effective marketing strategies, and building a strong workforce. He emphasizes the need for a solid organizational structure and the role of a CEO in a growing company. The conversation also touches on private equity insights and Justin's vision for the future, including the launch of the JW Group community for landscapers.

Justin's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/justinwhitekdceo/
JW Group Website: https://www.jwhitegroup.com/
K&D Landscaping Website: https://kndlandscaping.com/


Takeaways

• Justin took over his family landscaping business at 25.
• The company grew from $1 million to $20 million in revenue.
• Organic growth was achieved through effective marketing and hiring.
• Cultural fit is crucial when hiring key positions.
• The importance of having a clear vision for the future.
• Building a strong workforce is essential for success.
• Systems and processes need to be documented and accessible.
• Private equity can impact company culture and operations.
• Community building is vital for landscapers to share knowledge.
• Continuous improvement is necessary for long-term growth.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to the Digital Toolbox Podcast
01:12 Justin White's Journey in Landscaping
03:41 Rapid Growth and Business Strategy
08:42 Overcoming Personal Challenges and Finding Purpose
13:32 Transitioning to Business Leadership
21:59 Service Offerings and Market Expansion
24:36 Marketing Strategies and Inbound Leads
29:57 Building a Strong Workforce
35:42 Organizational Structure of a $20 Million Business
39:45 The Role of a CEO in a Growing Company
53:56 Vision for the Future and Private Equity Insights
01:04:41 Hiring Strategies for Key Positions
01:10:34 Launching the JW Group Community


Keywords

landscaping, business growth, marketing strategies, leadership, private equity, community building, organic growth, service offerings, workforce management, CEO insights

If you are in need of branding or marketing help for your landscape or hardscape company, book a FREE 1 on 1 call with me here:

https://calendly.com/landscapemaverick/discovery-call

Transcript

Enmanuel Tejada (00:02.314)
Welcome everyone to another episode of the, my bad actually, hold on. I think I, there we go, now I'm good on my end. Let me start over. Welcome everyone to another episode of the Digital Toolbox Podcast. This is the podcast where we bring on some amazing guests in the industry. Fuck, let me start over. One more, one more, one more. One more thing.

Justin White (00:07.904)
Okay. Okay.

Justin White (00:20.514)
dude, it's all good. I'm here for it.

Enmanuel Tejada (00:25.898)
Let's go. Perfect. Welcome everyone to another episode of the Digital Toolbox podcast. This is a podcast where we bring on industry experts from landscaping, hardscaping, maintenance all over and we have them ask some questions, give you guys some value. I'm your host, Enmanuel Tajada, owner of Landscape Maverick. We're a marketing and branding agency for landscapers and hardscapers that want to take things to the next level. And today we've got a special guest for you guys. A very, very special guest.

But before we introduce them guys, if you guys find value in this episode, if you're watching on YouTube, make sure you like, make sure you subscribe. If you're watching us, if you're watching clips on Instagram, follow me, follow Justin, know, support the channel, support us so we can bring more value and without further ado, let's get into today's special guest. Justin, introduce yourself, man. Let's get into it.

Justin White (01:12.834)
Yeah, man. I'm so excited to be here today. We're going to cover all kinds of stuff, folks. I we're going to talk rapid organic growth. We're going to talk high ticket home service. We're going to talk marketing. We're going to coaching and communities. So here's my story in a five minute spit. So I took over the family business in 2015 at the age of 25 years old. And I'll back up just a little bit because I think it's so important to share this. know, going through high school, was not

Enmanuel Tejada (01:29.494)
Yes, sir.

Justin White (01:42.754)
a fan of school, wanted to be out riding my dirt bike and doing stuff outside. So, you long story short, I dropped out of high school when I was 17 years old and I always had this mindset that, you know, I can never really run a business, become an entrepreneur because of my past. And with all that being said, I worked my way into a position where my parents felt comfortable when I was 25 years old, handing the business off to me. And I became CEO in 2015 when we were doing about a million in revenue. So,

We're doing about a million, maybe a million two in revenue. We're a all services landscape business in Santa Cruz, California. We're doing mowing, we're doing maintenance, we're doing construction, a little bit of residential, a little bit of construction in commercial space too. And when I came into it, I just saw the business with so much potential. And I knew that if I was gonna make a living there, my parents were gonna continue to make a living, my brother, my sister, my cousin, it was a family business. If we're gonna actually,

work and live in this business and live in California, we have to grow this company. So I happened to have a coach reach out to me in late 2015 and his name is Jonathan Goldhill and he changed my life. He came in, he helped us, we hired him and he helped us establish a set of core values, a vision of 30 million by 2030, which is kind of funny because we had 15 employees and I'm like, guys, we're going to be 300 employees and 30 million in revenue in 15 years.

I, and we're an old company. parents started the company in 1986. So it's like, everyone's like, all right, Justin, know, 25 years old, of course I'm saying these things, but I believed it, man. I believed it. And we started putting things in place. We rolled out a purpose or a why behind the what, which is to raise the bar in the landscape industry. And to be honest, that's why I'm on here today. I want to share this story. I want to inspire others. I want to motivate others. You know, I want to make, I want to make a difference out there. And that's why I share this story. And so.

Fast forward a couple years, 2018, boom, things are happening. We're doing 5 million in revenue, which is insane considering after 30 years in business, three, yeah.

Enmanuel Tejada (03:49.281)
three years after you do the business.

Justin White (03:54.796)
Three years after taking over, we're doing 5 million. So we've already 5X the business in three years. Five years later, 2020 hits. all the challenges, everything else, it ended up working for a positive and a lot of home services. We had 10 million in revenue in 2020. So there we are. Dude, 10 million in revenue five years after taking over the business, things are happening. We've got over a hundred employees. We're really focused on marketing. We're focused on sales. We're focused on culture. And

The community is seeing that. We ended up winning business of the year that year, 2020, from our local chamber. So we're getting recognition outside of the industry. You we landed on the front cover of lawn and landscape management that year. So we're getting recognition within the industry. And we became a place that people wanted to work. We started getting a lot of applications for our open positions because of our marketing efforts and our branding efforts. We started getting a lot of private equity guys reaching out, asking to buy the company.

And our vision was strong. We're going to be 30 million by 2030 and nothing's getting in the way of that. So no matter how much private equity pressure we got, it was never even a question if we're going to take it on, we're going to focus on growing this business to 30 million. So from 2020 to 2024, over the last four years, we went from 10 million to 20 million. And that's where we're at today. So we're a $20 million business, right? Isn't that crazy? It's insane, man.

Enmanuel Tejada (04:53.506)
Sure.

Enmanuel Tejada (05:15.98)
Holy fuck.

Enmanuel Tejada (05:20.418)
It's fucking insane. In four years. You ten it in five years. Well, in ten years, think. Ten it in five years. And then you...

Justin White (05:23.766)
So not in four, yeah.

Five years. Yep.

Doubled again. Yeah, yeah, so we're like 20X over the last nine years. what's cool, yeah.

Enmanuel Tejada (05:40.95)
Wow, dude, so that vision is still alive. That 30 million goal that that coach set for you is still very much in place.

Justin White (05:49.374)
It's very much, it drives us every day. And the team now is like, how quick can we hit that? Can we hit it next year? Can we hit it in 2026? So we're looking at all this. And what I want to point out, this is all organic growth. We haven't bought a company. We haven't done any acquisitions. This has been straight up organic sales and marketing, hiring the right people, going after the right clients, and just doing the right things. Like fundamental business activities with a vision. And here we are.

20 million, what other like really cool things we've leveraged technology a lot in the last four years. So we've brought on a suite of technology that has allowed us to double without adding very many employees. So we went from like 120 employees at 10 million and today we're at 130 employees, but we're doing 20 million. And that is a huge key performance indicator for our team.

Enmanuel Tejada (06:42.806)
Wait, can you repeat that one more time?

Justin White (06:45.57)
Yeah, yeah. So we were at 120 employees in 2020, and we're doing 10 million. Today, we're at 130 employees, but we're doing 20 million in revenue.

Enmanuel Tejada (06:51.819)
Right.

Enmanuel Tejada (06:57.772)
So you're double the revenue because you're at 20 million, but you've only had 30 employees in the last four years.

Justin White (07:04.066)
We've only added 10. Yeah, we went 10. We went from 120 to 130.

Enmanuel Tejada (07:05.942)
Ten.

My goodness, what the fuck?

Justin White (07:12.384)
Dude, and this is like, we don't talk about this enough internally. That's a huge win because in the last four years, here's what's important. In the last four years, wages have skyrocketed and I'm a huge fan for that. I want our team to be making double what they're making, right? I think $15 an hour for a mowing person is way too cheap. I want them to be making 25 or 30 an hour. So as we've been able to embrace

Enmanuel Tejada (07:36.566)
Right.

Justin White (07:38.72)
the newer wages with COVID and everything that's happened, inflation, whatever, we've increased our prices consistently. And what that has enabled us to do is our team is making more money and we're doing more revenue for every employee in the business because we've adjusted our pricing structure, we've adjusted our efficiencies. And that is a huge key part of many businesses that people miss is pricing strategy and how to dial in your pricing strategy.

Enmanuel Tejada (08:07.466)
Wow, dude, Justin, you have said enough, dude. You have got us hooked in. are hoping everybody has their seatbelts on. If you don't buckle the fuck up, it's going to be a good one. Justin, we have so much to cover, dude. That was an amazing five minute preface there, dude. This is going to be fucking amazing. It's going to be one of the best episodes we've ever done. So we have so much to cover. Let's get into it. Who was Justin White in high school? Because you said that you had a limited leave that you couldn't.

Justin White (08:27.692)
All right.

Justin White (08:33.12)
Yeah.

Enmanuel Tejada (08:36.566)
do business, but at what age did we even start thinking about business? Like talk to me about Justin White in high school.

Justin White (08:42.048)
Yeah, man. was a, I was, I wasn't a jock. didn't really play sports, but I rode dirt bikes and that was kind of my thing. And so I was focused. I was very competitive. was adventure based. You know, I was, I was out up in the mountains. I loved dirt biking, loved off roading. And when I was 16 years old, I shattered my wrist in a dirt bike race. And I always thought, you know, the dirt biking was going to potentially be a career, but that was a career ending injury.

And that kind of led me honestly into, in a not great place, right? I got a broken arm. I'm 16 years old and you you kind of get, you, you end up hanging out with potheads. So you started smoking weed and, and, know, doing all that. And, that kind of started to demotivate me around what I want to accomplish in life. And so I just kind of, you know, I kind of didn't really do a lot. I honestly feel that injury and at 16 years old, I kind of lost focus of the future. And I started just living week to week.

just like try to party and go after girls and whatever. mean, that was my focus in high school was like the next Saturday night. And honestly, that stayed my focus until I would say everything kind of changed when I was 22 years old. That's when I had a pretty crazy experience happen. And that is when I realized I needed to focus on the bigger picture.

Enmanuel Tejada (09:46.668)
Mmm.

Enmanuel Tejada (10:02.85)
What was it that caused it if you don't mind sharing? Or if it's too much, you don't have to share.

Justin White (10:05.728)
Yes. No, no, I'll share it. I think it's a, it's something that impacts probably more people than they talk about, but a dear friend of mine passed away from a drug overdose. And you know, it was, it was whatever the, the Molly and, and, and the ecstasy and the heroin back then. And now it's all fentanyl. That was, that was a major issue with our town or a surfskate town in Santa Cruz. And unfortunately it hooked a lot of people.

And a really close friend of mine passed away from that. And I saw the impact on his family, on our friend group. And I realized I had to step away from that life. I had to focus on something bigger. So that was, that was 22 and that was in 2012. And I realized I needed to focus on something bigger in life. And that's when I started taking my career a little more seriously in becoming a landscaper and operating tractors and laying hardscape and understanding the nuts and bolts of being a landscaper, man. I leaned into that career.

And I'm glad I did because it gave me lot of purpose in life when I was lacking purpose and I was lacking direction at a young age.

Enmanuel Tejada (11:11.496)
And so your family had the business at that age already, right? So you kind of just decided to follow through with them or did you go outside the family and.

Justin White (11:16.493)
Yep.

Justin White (11:20.522)
No, I pretty much, worked for my dad, mom on and off starting at the age of 16, know, summer work here and there and, and, know, driving tractors and doing stuff like that, but never really looked at it as a career until I was in my early twenties, like 21, 22 is when I started realizing, you know what? I liked doing this and I could see a career in this, but I always thought I'd be more on the operation side, like operating tractors or doing something like that. Never thought I'd be on the business side.

but that's what I got thrown into. that's what I kind of honestly found my passion and my purpose in is the business side.

Enmanuel Tejada (11:56.812)
Wow, that's amazing, dude. That's amazing. So you thought you were going to be, and I'm sorry about your tragic loss there too, Justin. I, you know, it's not a big, it's, it's, it's, it's a serious situation. Your drug overdoses, fentanyl, it sucks that that happened to you. It to your, to your friend. But what I love to see is that you, made the best out of that decision of that situation. You know, one person, you know, it's that funny story that one person can experience two different things and there's two different outcomes. You decided to make the best out of it. So respect on that.

Justin White (12:10.497)
Yeah.

Justin White (12:17.59)
Yeah, man.

Justin White (12:26.422)
Yeah, no, I appreciate it. I share it because I think a lot of people are either struggling with that themselves, they have a friend or family member going through that today. And I think it's almost like we have this responsibility to be this rock for our family, to be this foundation. And the more purpose you can create in life and for yourself and for your group of friends and family, the better you're gonna be able to build onto that foundation. And I think it starts at a very deep emotional level.

So even though we build these big businesses and we have all these dreams, like you can all trace this back to a very singular fundamental part of your life that, and for me, that was kind of the life changing moment where I realized, man, I need to do something and I need to almost do it in memory of my good friend Galen.

Enmanuel Tejada (13:13.154)
100 % dude, I love the fact that you made the best out of that dude, 100%. And so at that same time, you mentioned that you were starting out in the operations side with your parents, right? But not the business side. So at what point did you start transitioning from wanting to be in the field to focusing more on the business side?

Justin White (13:32.268)
So the shift that happened for me is really it was when I started doing the numbers on an estimate and I started doing the sales and I got excited about selling and got excited about figuring out, what are the costs of actually doing this job? How much are we paying our team? What's our overhead? What's our gross margin? What's our net profit? And I started to look at it as like a game. Like how can I increase our profit? What can I pull? What levers can I pull? How can I increase our

Enmanuel Tejada (13:41.954)
Yeah.

Justin White (14:01.666)
or chart charging and, and markup on equipment. How much are we charging per hour? What's our production rates that fascinated me. And I got pulled into that side of things. And I basically recreated our entire pricing structure in like 2012, 2013 at our business. And immediately we started to see an increase in revenue and increase in profit just based on what we did on the back end. And that's when I realized this is kind of like a game, like business is a game and

You know, I've always been competitive and I look at myself as a professional athlete in the business world and that's what I looked at it as and I went into it.

Enmanuel Tejada (14:38.548)
Nice. And it's like you had that competitive sport instinct from motorbikes. It seems that you kind of reignited that in business.

Justin White (14:46.903)
Yeah. Yeah. And I read, I read a lot of books, man. Like, like starting around that 2015 time, I would, I would read at least a book a week and everything from Jim Collins to Simon Sinek to Tony Robbins to Patrick Lincione. I mean, I can name them. I got them all on my bookshelf behind me. It's, it, it reading helped unlock that next level for me.

Enmanuel Tejada (15:05.954)
Yeah

Enmanuel Tejada (15:11.51)
That's awesome, dude. That's amazing. I love that. And that's one thing I need to start doing more. It's like I have the books in my fucking house. I need to just read them. And like my excuses right now is not even an excuse. Like I'm just climbing on the business, but like I have to make time for that too, because that's important.

Justin White (15:21.612)
Yeah.

Enmanuel Tejada (15:28.655)
but yeah, you know,

Justin White (15:29.758)
I'm, dude, I tell you, man, it's a hard thing. I've honestly slowed down a little bit. Yeah, go ahead.

Enmanuel Tejada (15:33.45)
Yep. No, no, keep telling me, keep going.

Justin White (15:39.018)
Well, one of the things we're working on and what we want to bring to our community in next year is, we want to take these great, great books. We want to go interview the authors. You know, I want to bring these guys onto, onto a webinar or podcast and get their insight and input on what were they thinking when they wrote the book? What are the takeaways and bring the book to life in a more Q and a interview style.

Enmanuel Tejada (16:03.318)
That would be sick. Especially asking them those questions tailored to our niche, which is landscaping, hardscape. That would be freaking awesome,

Justin White (16:12.682)
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Bringing our landscape niche into the discussion. That's why it's, you know, I'm a landscaper right now. That's my focus. What I'll do in the future is undecided, but right now I'm focused on building this company and building a community around landscaping.

Enmanuel Tejada (16:28.562)
Let's go. I love that and I'll definitely be a fucking you're one of your number one supporters, too Let's go and let's move on to a different topic Similar thing too. So let's start getting into this thing. Let's get to the exciting parts, man So now you did those tweaks to your parents back end structure of selling and looking at the pricing at what age like 22 23 That's before you went full-time with like taking over

Justin White (16:35.146)
I appreciate it, brother.

Justin White (16:41.194)
Yeah.

Justin White (16:52.992)
Yeah. Yeah. I went full time right around that time, like 2021. I was pretty much full time. And then I started to work with the numbers in the backend right around 24, 25 is when I really started to get involved at a deep level on the, on the finance and pricing and estimating side.

Enmanuel Tejada (17:12.154)
Nice. so is that after you made that change, I'm sure your parents are like, you know, you know, we know a bit more than you. We've been doing this long. I'm sure there was some sort of skepticism there. so you, sounds like you kind of went in, made it happen. They're like, Holy shit, this one, this guy, this guy's good. You know, Justin here, take this thing full time. Is that kind of how it unraveled?

Justin White (17:31.362)
I think in a very just high level point, yes, but you got to understand, right? And anyone in a family business, they've been doing it for 30 years, my mom and dad. So I'm coming in with all these new ideas. And when I start talking about increasing pricing, they go, well, we're not gonna have enough work if we increase our prices. Like we're not gonna have enough work for our crews. so these limiting beliefs start to come in and these challenges. So I just said, hey, let me test it out on this one thing.

And what we realized is all these tests I was running were working. And so they gave me a little bit more freedom, a little bit more freedom every single year. And finally, in 2015 is when the flood gates opened and they just let me go all in and really take over and create my own vision and be that next generation successor from my parents to myself. for all those family businesses listening, think typically the founders hold on a little bit too long.

and they don't pass it off to their kids until their kids are like 35 or 40. But man, if you can get it to your kids when they're like 25 and they've got that energy, that's when the magic happens because you have the guidance of the founders with the youth and energy of a mid 20 year old next generation successor. And that's what we had. And that was the secret recipe right there.

Enmanuel Tejada (18:53.09)
Yeah, and you were definitely driven through that. I think it's perfect setup. and that trust of like, okay, you know, we're confident in him and his decisions. He might do something crazy, but it's for the best. We trust it. Let's, let's hear him out. Let's see it through. I think that's awesome. let me ask you this then Justin, what were some early challenges before we get into the other strategies? Like what were some early challenges that you faced? Cause of course now you had the range, right? You had control. If you wanted to fire everybody, you could, if you wanted to switch vendors, you could.

What challenges did you face on early?

Justin White (19:27.34)
So I think one of the big challenges I faced was just believing in myself. I think that was my number one first challenge is as much as I showed the confidence that I knew what I was doing, I was making the right decisions. There's this little voice inside of you that's like, hey, who are you to be making these decisions? Who are you to be changing the pricing? Who are you to be hiring and firing? I mean, to grow from one to 5 million requires a lot of change. And that means a lot of decisions.

So my first challenge was believing that I could do it, believing that I was gonna be the right person. And I still struggle with that, to be honest. I don't think that ever goes away. That's what keeps us humble. The next challenge was getting the buy-in of the team, getting the buy-in of the team that these changes I was going to make, such as technology and new software and rebranding our logo and new trucks was the right changes. And when your team has been doing something the same way for at least 20 plus years,

Enmanuel Tejada (20:17.57)
Mmm.

Justin White (20:25.282)
and all of sudden you're challenging everything, you get a lot of pushback. And I wanted feedback and I wanted buy-in from everybody, not just the crew leaders and the supervisors, but entry-level laborers. I wanted them to buy-in. And so that took a lot of work for me to get their buy-in and a lot of conversations for me to explain to them why I was doing what I was doing. The next challenge was money.

Enmanuel Tejada (20:28.94)
Yeah.

Enmanuel Tejada (20:48.034)
Dude, and I can imagine, you're 25. You're 25. mean, look at, imagine a 30, 40 year old foreman. Who the fuck is this guy? Go back to high school. I see, yeah.

Justin White (20:52.31)
Yeah. Yeah.

Justin White (20:58.881)
Yeah.

Justin White (21:02.986)
Yeah, man, that was a challenge. mean, being that young and trying to walk in and own the room with people who worked for my dad for 20 plus years, I had to earn the respect. And luckily I worked in the field for a good seven years on and off, like I said, but I put the time in. They saw that I was a hard worker. I showed up early, I stayed late. So I had the respect of the team, not completely, but in a lot of ways rather than just coming in cold.

Enmanuel Tejada (21:31.508)
Right. I love and I love that the fact that you you got down and dirty with them You were in the trenches with them. So they respect that you even more right? I love that So dude, let's get into it now. Let's let's talk some serious strategy, dude Because you you're a she when it comes to this dude 20 million is no fucking joke So first things first Justin, let's get into this What services are you guys offering when you guys strictly hardscape when you came in? Were you guys only hardscape and did you do lawn care maintenance? Like break that down for me where you were where you guys are now?

Justin White (21:59.82)
Okay, so when I started, were probably about 30 % maintenance and then 70%, mostly commercial installation. And when I say maintenance, we're typically, we're in California, so we're full 12 month season. And we do everything from bed maintenance to lawn mowing to tree work and managing the entire site, mostly of corporate facilities and HOAs. And so we're mostly a commercial company. I knew to...

grow and to grow fast, we had to start to onboard new services such as residential. So in 2018, we rolled out residential services and a design build department. That was led by this guy, Jeremy, who's still on the team leading it today. He's our VP of construction. And so fast forward to today, 30 % of our business is still commercial maintenance. We do high-end commercial sites such as large HOAs, corporate campuses.

resorts and hotels. And the other third of our business is heavy commercial installation. So we do a lot of warehouses is one of our specialties and then a lot of restaurants and again, resorts. A lot of the stuff we maintain, we will build first and then move it into maintenance, which is a really nice pipeline for our recurring revenue. And then the other third of the business is high-end design build. We're in a great area. We're right here by Pebble Beach and

the Silicon Valley, so we have all these really, really wealthy people who want really nice projects, and we're able to take them through the full process from design all the way into build, and then eventually into maintenance. That process has been the fastest growing part of our business is the design, build, maintain. People love it. And typically our project size on the residential, we would average probably 150,000 per project.

And that's a nice price point, man. I mean, you can really make money at that price point. We used to be like 30, 35,000 per project and before that even lower. So we've just continued to go after higher and higher tickets, higher and higher resort or higher, higher level clients and really lean into this idea of high-end residential design, build and maintain.

Enmanuel Tejada (24:22.05)
I think that's beautiful. And let me ask you one question straight to the point, Justin. What is the main driver for you guys when it comes to how you guys grew from 1 million to 20 million? Has it been that design and does most of your money come from that?

Justin White (24:36.544)
You know, what's interesting is everything's grown in somewhat of a similar fashion. So we've really focused on diversity and diversity of revenue. So what we're trying to do is bring in commercial maintenance, commercial install, residential install, and residential maintenance. And guys, it's not easy to do all this under one company. And I don't necessarily recommend that because you're trying to be a lot of things to a lot of different people. So if you're not big enough to

Enmanuel Tejada (25:03.447)
Right.

Justin White (25:05.28)
divide your companies into different teams. You end up trying to switch a crew from residential to commercial, and then from maintenance to install. It's not the way you want to do it. So, you know, if I could go back, maybe we would only focus on one area, but today having three different revenue streams has been really good for us. What's led to the most growth, like I said, it's come from all different areas, but what continues to just drive us forward is

the marketing side of our business. Manny, we are almost 100 % inbound leads. We do very little business development and outbound sales because of the brand we built. Yeah. Do we average, we average like 25 to 50 calls a week for new opportunities. And I want to take this onto the other side too. And I know we're going to talk about this, but we average 120 applications or more for every open position we open for hiring employees.

Enmanuel Tejada (25:42.056)
Inboundly.

Justin White (26:03.692)
So like we get a lot of activity and inbound flow from marketing in terms of employees, but also for our clients.

Enmanuel Tejada (26:10.882)
I was gonna ask you about that too and it's crazy because everybody watching so Justin owns an emmett company is k &d landscaping right over in California one thing that Yeah, candy landscaping when I went to the website dude, like The call to action is apply now, you know, it's not get a free quote It's not you know, so like that shows the status of where you're at Like you're not even trying to make it clear that okay, you know, we'll do your project. Of course you guys would take the project on but

Justin White (26:20.042)
Yep, K &D landscaping.

Enmanuel Tejada (26:40.734)
It seems like your website right now is aimed at bringing on more talent.

which I think is insane.

Justin White (26:48.974)
We're looking for the best. Yeah, I'm glad you picked up on that. And that's intentional. We focus, I would say probably 51 % of our marketing spend goes to recruiting and hiring and 49 % goes to new client development because we believe with the right people and getting the best people in our industry to work at our company, we will ultimately get the best clients. But first,

You got to get your team. You got to build that bench. You got to build that roster. And for us, we're always hiring. If a good, amazing person comes and knocks on our door and they fit our core values and they're a hard worker, you know, we, we're going to bring them on and give them a chance. And that's how many of our team leads now. They started off as entry level positions and just hustled their way to the top.

Enmanuel Tejada (27:42.506)
I think that's amazing that you level guys up instead of having to bring a guy internally From somewhere else. So I think that's freaking awesome, dude But do let's stay on that same topic then which is you know the money side and the marketing side so Most of you guys leads are inbound leads, right? So that's how that's what referrals that's people looking you guys up organically on Google like would you consider that inbound as well like the SEO aspect the branding aspect

Justin White (28:13.568)
Yes. So we figure inbound is anyone who finds us organically. I would even, we don't do a lot of ads or ad spend, but anyone who is referred to us, anyone who finds us on Google, social media, LinkedIn, any of those resources and platforms, they'll call our office or they're submit online. How would they get into our funnel? And that's our inbound lead flow. And I would say if I had to put,

It's not so much the volume of leads that I look at, but it's the volume of closed sales. And I would say that the highest volume of closed sales comes from referrals. Because those people are warm, they're ready to buy, and you just got to give them an opportunity to say yes. Where when people are calling you from Google, they're probably calling five or 10 other companies. And it's, it's a, you got to race and get them a phone call, get a meeting, get a proposal in front of them. A referral is usually coming to you because

they've already decided to work for you and you've just got to give them a reason to hire you versus having to go out and re-educate them. They've already probably been educated around why your company's a good fit for them.

Enmanuel Tejada (29:24.436)
Nice, 100 % agree. there's, it would be a problem if the closing rate was the lowest with referrals. Cause I would be like, what the hell dude? Like this company like, trust you, they know who you are. They want to work with you. Like give them the opportunity, like you said, to say, yeah. So that's pretty cool there. And so right now, I mean, do you guys do any outbound?

Marketing at all or advertising and it's also is it done in-house what you guys are doing or do you guys outsource? That's what agency how does that help you guys?

Justin White (29:57.236)
Yeah, we recently went to an agency about a year ago because we just started to spend our marketing spend is now we're shooting for about 3 % of revenue. So, you know, we're shooting for about a $500, $600,000 a year spend on marketing, which is hard to do internally. So we actually had to hire someone to help us spend money and really get that, get that money spent efficiently. That has been, that has been really, really strong for us in far as turning on ads.

Enmanuel Tejada (30:20.342)
Hmm.

Justin White (30:26.307)
targeting certain markets, targeting certain clients. And then we rolled out a business development team about a year ago as well. It was September of 2023. And it was really our first full-time salesperson that we really had any success with. And so now we have two full-time salespeople who are outbound, knocking on doors, going to networking events, really trying to drum up business, which is a new thing for us. Like we grew to 20 million with really out a sales team. So I'm just, I'm

super excited to see over the next year, now that we have a sales team and we're investing all this money in marketing, I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if we're 40 million in the next two or three years based on what we're seeing.

Enmanuel Tejada (31:06.626)
This you're gonna do it again, dude that is fucking insane, but I love the progression dude I fucking love the progression because it's not like you just said I came in and then I hired a BD a Sales development guy here. I went with this agency here. We started paying this guy for advertising We started paying that guy for email marketing this guy for door knocking, you know, you guys did it over time. You're adding more systems

Justin White (31:09.302)
Hahaha!

Justin White (31:17.057)
Yeah.

Enmanuel Tejada (31:33.086)
more ways of bringing in revenue as you grow, which I think is freaking amazing.

Justin White (31:40.21)
You hit on it, Manny. mean, what we focus on, and I talk about this, is we want to fire BBs and then cannonballs, or bullets and then cannonballs. The idea here is I want to try a bunch of different things very lightly and with very little investment. So we're going to try, like you said, all these ideas. Like we're going to do door knocking, we're going to do flyers, we're going to do mailers, we're going to do door hangers, we're going to do direct calls, we're going to do email marketing. We're going to do 10 different things.

And we're gonna do each one a little bit. And we're gonna measure the results. And then when we get the results, we realize, okay, for some reason, the mailers is having the best penetration and push through. So we're gonna take all of our money and we're gonna stop doing all those other things and do all mailers for the next month. And just go all in on one solution. We're gonna dial that in and we're gonna figure out our process. And once that's figured out and then we automate that, we'll then do that same test.

and we'll do it again and we'll test another five or 10 strategies. Sometimes the ones that we tried that didn't work for previous, we tweak them a little bit, we try them all, we find what works and then we go all in on that. But what we're doing is we're constantly adding and building on top of our system. And as we build, we ensure that we automate and systematize what's working and then we can go to the next thing. And then we get that working and automated and systematized. And then we go to the next thing.

So it's very much of a progression and a disciplined approach where I see so many business owners, especially those trying to go from, you know, one or 2 million up to five or even 10 million. They try to do everything at once and they end up not making any real progress in one direction. So if I could go back and redo it, I would do more disciplined approach and less of a full court blitz. Just focus on one thing and do that really well, automate it, and then move to the next. And then just repeat, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat.

Enmanuel Tejada (33:32.46)
Dude, I love that. And I love the analogy too. You said we fire BBs first and then we fire cannonballs once we know that the BBs hit. I think that's, I've never heard that before. I think it's a beautiful analogy.

Justin White (33:41.675)
Yeah.

Justin White (33:45.462)
Yeah, it comes from Jim Collins. He's an author, great author. But the idea is like, you want to get your aim figured out. You want to figure out the wind and the direction. And once you get all that dialed and you're hitting the target every time, then go and put the big cannonball in with all the gunpowder and shoot your shot. You know what I mean?

Enmanuel Tejada (34:05.966)
Exactly, dude. I love that. I really, really do. I'm gonna have to steal that analogy from you. I'm gonna start using that. I'll give you some credit. I'll throw you a bond. I got that from Justin White, know, K B landscaping, but I like that, dude. I appreciate you hitting on that topic there. And you said 3 % is the marketing budget of a $20 million landscaping business.

Justin White (34:12.104)
Awesome. Hey, call it. Yeah, let's do it.

Justin White (34:31.252)
Exactly. That's what we're shooting between. So on the low end, one and a half percent of revenue on the high end, 3 % of revenue. just depends on the balance. Yep. That's everything. That's all in on marketing.

Enmanuel Tejada (34:40.726)
And that's just the ad spend or.

Enmanuel Tejada (34:48.02)
But that includes like that includes, you know, every door direct mailers that includes paying the agency that includes the ad spend for the agency. And then the sales reps to, or is that included in there too, or.

Justin White (35:03.874)
The sales reps are not included in that. So this would just be marketing. Exactly.

Enmanuel Tejada (35:07.762)
God

Enmanuel Tejada (35:11.406)
Nice. Okay. Awesome. Interesting. Very, very interesting. I like that. I like that a lot. And so what does the work force look like of a $20 million landscape business? I mean, you know, how many guys, I know you said you're about a one 30 right now, but you know what rules, mean, what, how many field guys do you guys have? How many former do you guys have? How many project managers, how many internal staff? What does that look like? What does that organization chart look like?

Justin White (35:42.344)
Yeah, it's such a great question. I think this is a, this is a challenge. lot of businesses struggle with as they start to grow. And I call it, you go from, I call it superhero mode is when you're going from one to 5 million because you have yourself and then a bunch of T a bunch of helpers. And, and like my buddy Dylan, he runs a concrete company. He's got like one or he's got two project managers and a helper in the office. And that's kind of it. And they're going to do like five, 6 million this year. That's, but he's like,

Enmanuel Tejada (36:10.38)
Hmm.

Justin White (36:11.49)
You know, he's working, he's working hard because he's in superhero mode. So when you go from five to 10 million, you got to create a leadership team. And that's what we did is we created a leadership team. And, and then when you go from 10 to 20 million, you don't have to change too much. Once you're at 10 million, you've kind of set your company up. So let me talk you through and walk you through what we look like today. So I'm the CEO. I'm at the very top. have two, basically two direct reports. One is my chief operating officer, John.

The other is my director of administration, Jessica. So let me start with Jessica. So Jessica oversees our HR team, which we don't call it HR. We call it employee success. She oversees our finance team and our marketing team. I know, right? I like that. So she's, she oversees employee success, finance and marketing, along with any back end legal and contract administration and all that other, you know, insurances and BS that goes on behind the scenes.

We have John, John oversees basically our entire operation. So he, he oversees pretty much all of the sales, all the operations and all of the front end delivery to our clients, which in, which his direct reports look like our VP of construction, our VP of maintenance and our operational manager. So operation manager oversees the mechanics, the trucks, all the equipment management, the fleet.

the facilities and then our VP of maintenance overseas maintenance and our VP of construction overseas construction. Our VP of maintenance has a number of direct reports. They have account managers and supervisors that report up to the VP and we kind of have it structured in a branch model. It gets a little complicated below there, but you know, we have a, let's see about 25 maintenance crews that run on a regular basis and on the construction side,

We have about 11 crews that run regularly on our, on our construction side. And under our VP of Jeremy, he's got a series of project managers, estimators and designers that oversee the day to day. So, like I said, it gets hard to explain it once you go down a layer below the VPs, but that's our manage our leadership team is, is the VPs, John and Jessica, our finance managers on the team as well, Tina, and really.

Justin White (38:37.748)
they make the decisions day in and day out more so than I do. So my job is not to make decisions anymore. I say my job is to review the decisions they make and give them candid feedback on the vision of the company and how their decisions are playing into the bigger picture. Because I'm focusing on where we're to be in three years, five years and 10 years. And they're more focusing on where are we going to be over the next three months. So I need to bridge that gap of like,

Okay, are we making this decision to hire this person? Does it fit in with the vision for 2025 and 2026? And that's more my job than anything else.

Enmanuel Tejada (39:17.954)
Dude, I really appreciate that, Justin. Holy shit, that is the most in-depth org chart that I've heard. And it's fucking insane. You have 25 crews for maintenance. That's fucking insane, dude. I know guys that, like, my gosh. That's insane. Let me ask you a couple questions on that, Justin, because it truly is an honor to be able to ask you questions directly to the source. So.

Justin White (39:21.068)
Yeah.

Justin White (39:33.792)
Yeah, yeah.

Hahaha!

Justin White (39:41.601)
Yeah.

Enmanuel Tejada (39:45.536)
You're so far detached. You are so far detached from a project that's going on in the field. You don't have control. You can't just say, fuck it, I'm going to leave the office and I'm going to go install some papers because Juan didn't show up today and now I have to go and do that. How does that feel? Because sometimes it feels good to know that, okay, if you know, if I, if some shit goes down on the job site, I can go and I can do it because I have the expertise. But you are so disconnected from that. How does that feel? Do you ever feel fear? Do you ever feel?

I know you feel relieved, but what else comes with that?

Justin White (40:17.418)
Yeah, such a great question. And I was talking about this today. Honestly, I feel bad. Like I feel guilty that I'm not out there literally working side by side with my brothers who I grew up with. mean, some of these guys in the field had been working with my dad, like Juan Sotelo, he's been working for us and with my dad for 32 years. And it feels guilty that he's out there, he's hustling, he's making it happen, but I'm not with him.

side by side, like I was 10 years ago. And that is a big, big challenge for me because a lot of people, myself included, feel like you have to put in that same amount of work that your team is putting in and they need to see you on the job site. They need to physically see you physically doing work. And if you're not physically doing work, then you should be going and picking up the material to make their life easier. But it gets to a point where, look, with 30 plus crews and irrigation techs and spray techs and all these trucks going out.

Like we have 72 trucks. Like I can't be in 72 places every day. So you have to build the team and you have to give yourself the permission to trust the people you hire. And it almost becomes a burden. If I go to a job site and I start asking questions and I start giving them direction of how to change something, I'm undermining my VP. I'm undermining my project manager. I'm undermining my supervisor. So I just said that three people who work for us and work with us.

are not accurately, they're not right. And I'm more right than them. So you have to actually not go to the job site and critique anything. You can't, you have to go there. You can take your notes. You can take your pictures. But then you have to say to the crew, good job. I appreciate you guys. Thank you so much. know, have a great day. Here's some cold drinks. Then you go meet with the VP and say, hey, Jerry, like I see these are some issues on this site.

Enmanuel Tejada (41:51.586)
Mmm.

Justin White (42:15.798)
and then he'll go meet with his team who meets with their team who eventually gets back to the foreman to give them that feedback. So as much as you want to give them the feedback in the moment, I don't think it's the best thing to do because you created this organization and you have to go through the proper channels. So it's frustrating. I feel guilty. I have fear that they're not doing it right, that they're not doing it as good as I would like it to be done. Man, it's all real and it's all there every day. You have to actively manage that.

I think it's different because I grew up in the business and I grew up with the business. If I were to go hire a brand new CEO from outside the company, they wouldn't have these issues. But that's what makes me me. And I think that's the difference of the people who are listening to this show are the people who are taking their companies and growing that, growing it to a million, growing it to five, 10 million, maybe 100 million one day. They have to understand as they get bigger, you can't be the superhero anymore.

that goes and saves a day. You've got to build a team of superheroes to handle it for you.

Enmanuel Tejada (43:21.58)
Wow, such a fucking amazing answer, dude. Holy shit. Justin, I'm telling you, this is one of the fucking craziest episodes we've done, We're doing it. We're literally living through it. Holy shit. Wow. And I love what you said, too. It's like, yeah, if you go and you cut the structure by you going out to a job site and critiquing them.

Justin White (43:27.212)
Ha

Justin White (43:32.46)
Yeah, bro, I f-

I fuck, I love it, I'm here for it man.

Enmanuel Tejada (43:48.806)
You undermine everybody else so it's like you make them not like not feel like shit But you like undermine what they said, but you don't know what's the structure is you don't know and There's so many things involved to do like there's so many people like you said you're talking to your VP Your VP is talking to the head of construction the head of construction is talking to the foreman the foreman is talking to the project Manager the project manager is talking to the guys in the field. Like how the how does that work? How does the message not get? Convoluted on the way down. Does that ever happen?

Justin White (44:20.306)
for sure. It happens. I think you have to set in the right systems and procedures. We always talk about scaling the company through systems, not scaling the company through people. So I want to be clear. People are the number one success factor that you will have in growing a business. You have to have the right people invest in those people and give them your trust, but they have to be able to have a system that they operate on. It's, just like when the police.

they have a code on the radio for anything that were to happen, right? Like armed robbery in progress or like a carjacking, whatever it is, they can say the code. Everyone knows not only what that means, but how we respond to that issue. And you need the same thing within your business. You have to have a code of conduct and you have to have a system and an SOP or a standard operating procedure for everything you do, from sales to marketing to estimating to finance, and most definitely to installing

and maintaining the landscape. once you systematize your business, you shouldn't have to be sending messages down the organization. It should just operate as long as you have the right people and the right systems. I mean, things are gonna happen, shit's gonna happen, but for the most part, it should run pretty well. And if it's not running pretty well, you either have the wrong system or the wrong people. And once you fix that, you're back in business, man. You shouldn't be having too many issues.

So if people are having issues at scale and you have employees and you're having issues, you're the wrong employees or you have the wrong systems. And I would first look at systems before you start firing employees. Like let's make sure the systems are good and then we can look at the culture and the employees.

Enmanuel Tejada (46:03.498)
Yeah, yeah, dude, that's such a golden nugget. It's either systems or it's the people. I love it, dude. And so let's talk a little bit more about that Justin, know, system systemization, what you guys have in place. And it's crazy because you guys have literally the beauty of your story is that you were there when the company was a million, you were there before it was a million, you were there now at 10 million and 20 million. So like you've seen this thing evolve, like it must feel so amazing of what you've built.

So how have you guys like what are some of your systems like how what does that look like where is this stored? Is that a Google Doc? Is that a SOP? Is that a video? What does that even look like for a 20 million dollar company?

Justin White (46:45.602)
So, you this is an area that we need to improve on at our company. And I think this is such a good thing. I'm so glad you asked this question. I listened to a lot of podcasts and I just feel like a lot of people say how good they are and all these things that are going well. No, man, the truth is we have a lot of things, even at 20 million with high profitability that we need to improve on. And one of those areas is our document storage, our system storage and our SOP access.

We have built so many SOPs that are buried in some Google folder that like you have to click through five things to get to it. No one's doing, no one's getting to that. No one in the field is getting to that. So our big issue right now is we are very reliant on the fact that our team, most of our team has been here for a long time, especially at the leadership level. So they just know the system and we've done things the same way for a long time. So.

Enmanuel Tejada (47:24.066)
You

Justin White (47:43.202)
They understand and they know the system as far as it being documented. It's probably documented, but it's probably not easily accessible. And there's probably an old video that we recorded three or four or five years ago. It's kind of like outdated. So one of the things that we have on our list of improvements we wanna make in 2025 is automating our internal school. And we wanna create a school.

Enmanuel Tejada (47:58.53)
Mm-hmm.

Enmanuel Tejada (48:10.474)
a school community?

Justin White (48:11.306)
One second, sorry about that.

So we want to create not so much a school community, we want to create a school internally with our company that is basically going to be an in-house, like we're looking at some different softwares, but we want to create a school that's going to allow our team to go in and learn at a rapid, accelerated pace to advance through the organization. So we want them to be able to advance and...

Enmanuel Tejada (48:21.985)
Mmm.

Justin White (48:42.15)
learn new ways of doing things. And so we want a entry level technician to be able to become like a certified water manager or grow into becoming an account manager or project manager within a few years and leveraging the knowledge we have internally by automating our training. And so we're looking at some different, different software, some different communities. We mentioned school community, right? S K O L like we're kind of taking that same concept and trying to create that internally within our company.

to share our knowledge and share ideas to accelerate learning at a deep level. So, I mean, I say all this to say our systems need improvement, but we're working on that. And that's one of our big goals for 2025. We do have systems, they're just not easily accessible.

Enmanuel Tejada (49:31.302)
Nice. And I appreciate you being open about that Justin, because it shows that even a, even a 20, 20 million dollar company is still looking to improve. It still has room to grow. And you're not afraid to say that you're not just sitting here with a smile saying, we're perfect. You know, let me just sit back because you know, we're always trying to grow. What we're trying to improve. So respect on that. but I like what you said.

Justin White (49:32.726)
So, yeah.

Enmanuel Tejada (49:54.956)
But I also have some fear around that too, because before I started my marketing and branding agency, I worked at an IT company and the boss was a amazing guy. I actually go to the spot with him all the times that we're like best friends.

And so he had an issue where it was like, you know, he had S O P's, but they were difficult to find. was on SharePoint, which is like Microsoft's version of drive, shit ton of folders. Nobody uses it, but the senior guys know it so they don't have to go and check it out. But he still expects new guys that come to the company to.

Justin White (50:16.671)
Mmm, yeah.

Enmanuel Tejada (50:29.75)
go through those outdated documents and then they get pissed off because like nobody's following the documents. The old guys leave the company and now everything is screwed. He's saying we have the SOPs, why are we not following them? So I guess there is maybe a gap there, like not just having SOPs but like training the team on how to use them, making it easy, making it fun to use them. So I guess there's a big gap in the industry or in business as a whole for that, for that solution.

Justin White (50:55.562)
Yeah. Yeah, that's a big gap. And there's, I, I, we're not currently using a software, so I'm not going to say any names, but we're shooting BBs, if you will, we're testing it out and seeing which software is going to be the best one for us. once we figure it out, we're big on brand partnerships and, and trying to help our partners grow. So once we figure it out, we'll definitely make it public. But right now we're, we're trying to solve that problem for ourselves too. Hey, so.

Enmanuel Tejada (51:06.081)
Turn it off.

Enmanuel Tejada (51:23.2)
Yeah, dude, 100%. But the systems have worked though, for sure, because you guys are at 20 million. That's it.

Justin White (51:30.034)
Yeah. Yeah. I think it's important to point it out. I mean, even at 20 million and 70 trucks and all these people, mean, we still every week we go into our meeting trying to figure out what can we improve on? How can we grow? How can we, how can we differentiate? And it's, it's just figuring it out as you go. I don't think there's ever a point where you're like, okay, I'm here. I got to figure it out. And my business is in cruise control.

I mean, maybe, maybe some businesses get to that point, but I don't, I don't see ours ever getting to that point because our culture is all about rapid growth and constant improvement. And I think most people think like that. So if you're trying to grow and you're trying to be better, just remember it. Like don't burn yourself out because it never stops. You're always going to have that mindset no matter how big you get.

Enmanuel Tejada (52:20.716)
Yeah, and I think sometimes we all get caught up like even in general, even not in business. Like I was just at an Andy Elliott event and do you know who Andy Elliott is by the way? Yeah, amazing, amazing. And sometimes in our heads.

Justin White (52:31.977)
yeah, yeah, yeah.

Enmanuel Tejada (52:36.8)
We think of like these amazing people and it was amazing seeing him in person, dude, I'm working out. He's literally two feet in front of me and he's just Jack. He's struggling to finish the workout because we're doing it. Everybody's struggling. I see him, you know, struggling on the pushup and I'm like, dude, he's a real fucking human just like me. Like, you know, him showing that like it took me flying out there and seeing him in person, this person that has made hundreds of millions and he's struggling to finish a workout just like I'm struggling. It's like, dude, if he did it, I can do it like.

Justin White (52:54.795)
Yeah.

Enmanuel Tejada (53:05.45)
I'm glorifying him, but it's like, can also achieve it. Like it's just reality, dude. I love that. And you put it into perspective there too, with the business side.

Justin White (53:12.619)
Yeah.

Justin White (53:16.138)
You just got to do the work, you know, you just got to go out there, you got to work hard. I don't think there's any shortcut for hard work and you got to be willing to put the work in.

Enmanuel Tejada (53:27.006)
100%, 1000 fucking percent. And Justin, real quick, dude, I know want to be respectful of your time, dude, so I don't want to take too long here, but I wanted to ask you on the valuation of a company like yours, what's your plan? you guys were at 20 million, you guys are going to hit 30 million, no doubt, maybe even 40 or 50, but what does that look like for you? Are you going to be the CEO the entire time? Would you ever consider stepping out and hiring a CEO? How does that look like for you? Are you selling the company? What's on your mind?

Justin White (53:30.102)
Yeah.

Justin White (53:56.948)
Yeah, it's a great question. When, when, when is this podcast going to post, you know?

Enmanuel Tejada (54:01.686)
Maybe honestly just maybe like a month out dude. I'm so fucking slumped editing and everything

Justin White (54:06.378)
Okay. Okay. No, no, no. Good. Good. Okay. So I asked that question because I'm rolling out a new vision to my team for the next 10 years. And I want to make sure they hear it first before everybody else. So I'll just speak in, terms of, of big picture. So first off for K and D our vision right now has become a platform of choice for the entire Southwest United States over the next 10 years. We want to provide a platform where family businesses can sell their business.

and get a good return and hopefully generational wealth, life-changing money, while also bringing the next generation into the fold, into ownership. So we're basically trying to do a roll-up of landscape family companies across the Southwest United States, focused towards culture, quality, consistency, and local employee ownership. And we've got a really cool plan for this.

that is not necessarily the private equity playbook. So we're gonna be giving people who do wanna sell, hopefully, a different option than the typical private equity model. And I could talk in detail about that, but private equity, their goal within three to seven years, they wanna sell the platform. So they buy a bunch of companies, they put it together, they try to make everyone a little bit more profitable, a little bit better, and then they sell that to the next private equity company.

that can be very beneficial for a lot of people, including the employees. It can also be very detrimental to culture and quality and sometimes the employees. So we're working on a slightly different model that hopefully will lead us to building a, you know, top five landscape company in the country over the next 10 years. My goal, my dream, I want to be the CEO of that platform. And I want to take that over the next 10 years to

You know, our goal is to get a billion dollars in value by 2035. So we want to be a billion dollar company in 2035. And, and that's kind of the big picture, the blocking and tackling the day in and day out, what that plan looks like. We've got it planned out. We've got every single quarter over the next 10 years, pretty well planned out. obviously I keep that pretty tight to the vest. Yeah, man. I got it on Excel spreadsheet. I built it out every quarter. What we're going to do when we're going to buy, how we're going to grow.

Enmanuel Tejada (56:15.677)
NO WAY

Justin White (56:25.536)
I got the vision. I'm big on vision. think you gotta have the vision and then manifestation will take you there.

Enmanuel Tejada (56:32.588)
Dude, you've got the next quarters for the next 10 years mapped out on a spreadsheet of what needs to happen for X-Gall to be met.

Justin White (56:43.65)
You know what's cool about it too is I've used chat GPT to shortcut that creation. Usually that would have taken me days to put this together, but with chat GPT, I've been able to take my vision, my ideas, my, my goals and have it create an Excel spreadsheet out of that with, with basically a focus for every quarter for the next 40 quarters. Hey, I'll just asterisk like everything's going to change next year. Everything's going to change the year after, like it's constantly going to change. We're going to have to make adjustments.

but at least we're starting with a plan that's mapped out. I'm a pilot too, so I fly planes and you need to know what your way point is. need to know like how are you gonna climb out? When are you gonna level off? What are your way points? What's your route of flight? When are you gonna land? How long is the runway? From start to finish, you have to plan out every single inch of that trip, fuel, weight, everything. I'm taking that same principle and I'm applying it to business.

in terms of having a route of flight of where we want to take our company. And that has been a mind opener for me of how detailed you can get.

Enmanuel Tejada (57:49.442)
Dude, I think that's freaking amazing. The fact that, dude, you're like the most interesting man in the world. You're a fucking pilot too. I didn't know that. It makes sense.

Justin White (57:56.738)
Yeah, bro, I got my pilot's license two years ago. Yep. Yep. You got the plane right here, man. Constant inspiration.

Enmanuel Tejada (58:03.01)
EWW

Enmanuel Tejada (58:07.746)
Wow, man, that's amazing. And you know what, without taking up too much of your time, Justin, I wanna ask you two more questions. So talk goes a little bit more on the private equity play, because you've mentioned that even you have experienced that as well, where private equity starts reaching out to you. How does that work? How do they know that your company is worth 10 million? How do they find that out? Does the government sell the information? How does that even happen?

Justin White (58:33.598)
It's, you know, what's interesting is, is private equity is a very small circle of people, even though it's a big industry and word gets around that industry very quickly, kind of like the landscape industry. Like we all kind of know a lot of the bigger names in our industry, but either way, right? Here's the deal. Private equity has looked in, came into the landscape space and specifically home service. They kind of started with HVAC and moved into plumbing and electrical and now landscaping, lawn care, lawn services. And what it is is.

Enmanuel Tejada (59:00.021)
friends.

Justin White (59:02.978)
Well, yeah. Yeah. And what they'll do is they'll basically research your company. They'll do a case study and they'll try to figure out. They'll, they'll listen to podcasts like this and like, all right, yeah. Justin's 20 million in revenue. Like he's probably making anywhere from a 10 to 20 % EBITDA margin, which is earnings before interest tax deductions, appreciation. And they're probably doing, you know, between two and 4 million in profit at 20 million in California. They're probably.

you know, anywhere from a five to 10 X multiple. So now they start putting these numbers together. So now they're anywhere from like, you know, a 10 to potentially $40 million business. And they, and they start kind of piecing this together. And then they ask themselves, Hey, what's the value of having another company in central California for us? Well, we got a company in Oregon. We got a company in Arizona having a company in central California. Really? It'll really play that book out nicely. So then they start targeting that company.

for different reasons, the size, the location, the people, the brand, every private equity strategy is going to be slightly different. And depending on if they're getting ready to sell, they're going to be very aggressive in buying more companies because you get this, what's called this EBITDA arbitrage where they can add a bunch of companies for a lower multiple. And then they add it to their giant book. And then that doubles the multiple overnight. So they can kind of double their money. If they're early on, they're looking for foundational businesses with strong leaders and good markets.

that can help their platform get to the next level. And so every private equity is going to have a little different of a playbook, but overall the playbook's pretty standard. They want to buy a bunch of companies. Typically it's 10 to 20 companies. They want to put them together and then they want to sell those as a conglomerate or a group of companies and get the revenue turn on that or the revenue arbitrage and EBITDA arbitrage where they're buying everyone at a five or seven X multiple, but they're selling the entire group and maybe a 12 X multiple.

and they've got some organic growth built into that as well. So private equity is making a bunch of money, but they're also improving our industry in a lot of ways. They're bringing smart business people into the industry. They're funding these new technology platforms like Service Titan and some of these other AI driven softwares into our industry because the money's there now. And we're seeing some really awesome stuff happening. However, from a family business side,

Justin White (01:01:30.508)
does take a little bit of that culture, family business aspect out of the business. And it has to, because they have to create standard operating procedures across their entire platform. most people, you get into the, yeah, once you get over 3 million in revenue, you probably are going to start getting an email from someone called ABC partners. And they think your business is a great application for them, right? So if you're getting those calls, congratulations.

Enmanuel Tejada (01:01:35.915)
Mmm.

Enmanuel Tejada (01:01:41.875)
Exactly.

Justin White (01:02:00.298)
My advice, take a few of those calls, be very closed off with your numbers and your information, but listen to what they're saying, ask questions about the strategy, and you're going to learn a ton about private equity and how they work by taking two or three of those Zoom calls with them. And you never know, maybe, I always say it, someone offers you a ridiculous number for your business that you can't say no to, and you sell your business. Like that's never a

bad way to go is selling your business for an insane amount of money. And you can do whatever you want after that. A lot of times they'll ask you to stay on board so you can still continue to run your business. I, know, I'm not for or against selling your business. I think everyone should have an exit plan. It's not my current plan right now. It's not my current strategy, but like I say, everything's up for discussion and debate. So that's kind of what's happening in the private equity world. Hopefully that gives the listeners a little bit of insight of how that operates and how that works.

Enmanuel Tejada (01:02:59.252)
It does, dude, it does. You went into detail, you kept it simple enough for us to understand. That's fucking awesome. And so your vision is to do the same thing that private equity is doing in a way which is different, right? Like you're still conglomerating all these companies. You're going to have your own SOPs or you're going to let them keep their own? How's that going to work?

Justin White (01:03:21.514)
Yeah, it's going to be, we've got a pretty solid playbook of how it's going to work. And honestly, I can't say too much because it's a, it's the secret sauce that makes us different than everybody else. So I'm sure there's going to be a few of those guys listening to this, trying to figure out what our plan is, but I'll just say when you know, when, when you see it in action, you're going to know the difference. You're going to feel the difference. And I'll sum it up by this. Our goal is after we buy a company.

Enmanuel Tejada (01:03:31.266)
Right.

Justin White (01:03:49.59)
the first 90 days of that company after acquisition is gonna be the best 90 days of those employees life ever. That's our goal. We wanna make it the best company that you've ever worked at after an acquisition, which is very, very hard to do. But if we can do what we have planned right, that would be the result.

Enmanuel Tejada (01:04:13.282)
Dude, I fucking love it and I'm excited to, I can't wait to see what's going to come of it. Just that I have one last question. I'm sorry. I know I said that like 10 times already, but I just have to ask you. Yeah, I just have to ask you, So at the level of where you're at of a company where, know, you guys are at two and 20 million, you've got VPs, you've got people, you know, better, like people that have degrees that have experience, you know,

Justin White (01:04:20.514)
No worries,

Yeah, yeah, go ahead.

Enmanuel Tejada (01:04:41.44)
I guess what I'm trying to ask is this, when you go and you hire a CFO or you hire a CTO or you hire a, head of construction or head of whatever, like the very top, like people that report to you, how do you hire those guys? Do they have to have experience in home services? Can you take a guy from wall street and plug them into your company? Does that even work?

Justin White (01:05:04.15)
Man, that's such a great question. And I've had experience where it's worked and where it hasn't worked. I've got some peers where it's worked and it hasn't worked. I think at a fundamental level, no matter what their credentials are, they have to align with your culture and your people. So if they're the best salesperson ever, or they're the best financial person ever, but your core value is humility and they're an arrogant asshole, like they're never gonna work.

Enmanuel Tejada (01:05:26.796)
Mm-hmm.

Justin White (01:05:33.282)
So I think you have to first ask yourself, are they a cultural fit? Are they gonna fit in with our culture? And if that's a yes, then you can go over and ask, they have the skillsets to do the job? And I think that goes for anyone from a entry level person to a CFO or a CTO, but you've gotta be cautious. You've gotta be cautious for the traveling professionals, for the guys who work at Google and Microsoft and Home Depot or whatever at the executive level. And all of sudden,

They're applying to work at your company and you're flattered because these are giant, you know, fortune 500 names. The problem is they come in, they're there for two or three years. They cost an arm and a leg. They don't do a lot and they leave usually after a couple of years because they got a better offer. And you're asking yourself, did they really make a difference for the 300, $400,000 a year I paid them? So I think you have to A, surround yourself with a group of advisors that can help you.

vet these people. I am not a fortune 500 CEO. didn't come from wall street, right? I was self taught, self raised. And what I do, if I'm going to hire a really high level person is I will have one of my advisors, one of my mentors interview that person over zoom or in person to qualify them at a high level. And I've surrounded myself with mentors and people who are able to do that for me. And they can tell me, Hey, Justin, this CFO there, they know what they're doing. They mean business. They're a good fit for you.

As far as culture, you have to figure that out, but I think they're good from a, from a skillset standpoint. So when you get into that position and you're ready to hire people, you just got to be really cautious and protective first and foremost of your culture because everything flows down from the top. So if you make a bad, if you make a mistake at the top, it's going to impact your entire organization. And that could lead to a lot of turnover that could lead to disengagement, a lot of bad things.

So you wanna first protect culture and second, protect your money and not make a bad investment. Manny, that segues into something I wanna bring up and that's the JW group that we're rolling out in January. And I wanna kind of plug this if I can for a quick minute. So January 1st, we're opening up a new group and it's a school community. We're leaning into this competitive nature, cause that's who I am at the core.

Justin White (01:07:56.722)
And what we're trying to do is create a community of like-minded landscapers who want to grow and want to change the change of the industry. I hope to have professionals and advisors like yourself on there to talk about marketing. And I hope to have amazing people from finance and culture and sales and operation and, and create an opportunity for people who maybe aren't able to afford one-on-one coaching, or maybe they are having a one-on-one coach.

They are in a peer group, but they're lacking that day in and day out motivation. You know, I have a saying people need to be reminded more than they need to be educated. So our community isn't going to be necessarily focused around education, education, education. It's going to be motivation, community impact, and creating a team of people who can help each other get to the next level. So for example, when you're getting ready to hire your CFO, you can ping my buddy, Andrew Kraft. Shout out, Andrew.

I know you're listening, in Texas, who is the CFO of a $50 million landscape company in Texas, and you can say, hey, Andrew, as a CFO of a $50 million landscape company in Texas, what are some things I should be looking at as I go to hire my CFO for my $10 million business, or my five or $20 million business, right? And you'll have direct access to these people like Andrew Kraft, who have already done amazing things and are running these huge companies.

Enmanuel Tejada (01:08:57.442)
Thank

Justin White (01:09:25.196)
So this community is really focused towards people who want to embrace the eight figure mindset, who want to grow from one, two, three to 10 million and hopefully beyond. And we're excited to launch that so we can answer those kinds of questions, give you the feedback and of course give you access. Like doing live Q and A's and live podcasts like we're doing now. Like Manny, think about how cool would it be after we wrap this thing if we had a guests, know, a hundred guests sitting there just diving questions at us and we stayed on for another hour just shooting the shit about guest questions.

Enmanuel Tejada (01:09:54.08)
I'll be...

Justin White (01:09:54.86)
I would love that, you know what I mean? And I'm sure there'd be a ton too.

Enmanuel Tejada (01:09:59.97)
Dude, a hundred percent. dude, I cannot fucking wait. And Justin, I got to give it to you because you're sharp. You've built this thing from the ground up. You're, you're smart. You're, you're been in the field, dude. Like you are qualified to do this. There's a lot of people that are doing it. Everybody has a school community now. Everybody has a Facebook group, but they're doing, you know, a hundred K 200 K you've been in the trenches. You've built this thing up that you are qualified. So how can the audience get in contact with you? How can they get on the waiting list for that?

school community, what's it going to be called? Give us some more details around that.

Justin White (01:10:34.73)
Yeah, man. And I'll just say over the last 10 years, I've spent over a million dollars on one-on-one coaches just for myself. So that's the investment I've made into coaching. That's how much I believe in it. And not everyone can afford or wants to make that investment. So I'm really assimilating that data and assimilating that knowledge. And hopefully I'm going to be able to download that. So first and foremost, the waiting list is open.

What you're going to do is go to the, let me get the, let me double check the website because my assistant just changed this. So it is the, okay. It's going to go jwhite group.com. So J.

Enmanuel Tejada (01:11:17.25)
jygroup.com

Justin White (01:11:20.972)
Jaywhitegroup.com. There's a big button when you open up that website, boom, you join the wait list. We're not gonna spam you with emails or anything. You just get in a few things. I will asterisk here. We are requiring a $1 million revenue minimum to get into the group. If you're not at a million, don't worry. I've got a couple other groups that I'm really close with and we can refer you to those guys. You can get in those and before you know it, I believe it, you'll be at a million, you'll get into our group.

But we are trying to focus towards that contractor who's doing at least a million specifically landscaping and wants to get to 10 million. So look, if you're doing 3 million and you're kind of just like, I'm just going to be here at 3 million. I'm not looking to grow. Not, not really the place for you, but if you're wanting to get to that five, seven, 10 million and beyond, this is the place. And we have some exciting announcements. I'll probably may or may not have already made these announcements by the time this podcast launches.

but all the information is going to be sent to you when you join that wait list. The specific benefits, we've got some amazing partners. I'll just say that the biggest technology brand in the landscape and service home industry is going to be a partner, the biggest equipment manufacturer. You know, again, I'm not dropping names, like they're going to be, we're going to have the biggest, the brightest, the best in this group. And we want the biggest, the brightest and the best landscapers in our group as well.

Enmanuel Tejada (01:12:45.73)
Dude, I think that's phenomenal news for the industry and for yourself. And dude, I cannot fucking wait to be a member in that. I mean, not a member, but at value anyway I can, because I don't own a million dollar landscape company yet. On the pipeline though, Justin, on the pipeline. I would just say that for now, but dude, I love what you're doing. Yeah, yeah.

Justin White (01:13:04.064)
Yeah, dude. Hey, well, Manny, look, yeah. I was just gonna say, man, if you're in, brother, like we're creating a partnership program within our group. So people like yourself who are knowledgeable and understand and do, like, for example, you marketing, we want you to be providing that information to our team and giving them a pipeline to reach you if they wanna buy up services from you. Like if they wanna redo their logo, redo their brand, we wanna make sure they can get in touch with you. So, you know, for your listeners,

we're going to have that in there. And that's an exciting part of that that we're doing that's a little different than some of the other groups.

Enmanuel Tejada (01:13:34.178)
you

Enmanuel Tejada (01:13:40.812)
Dude, I think that's freaking fantastic, man. I cannot wait to be in there adding value to January 1st. You guys, you heard it, jwhitegroup.com. Go ahead and get on that wait list. You're not gonna wanna miss it. mean, imagine you, I don't know if it's gonna be a paid group or not, Justin. In fact, do you know what it's gonna be yet or no?

Justin White (01:14:00.938)
It will be paid. Yeah, it'll be paid and the dollar amount is going to be announced soon. And I, all I say is, man, if you take, if you take advantage of one of the discounts in there from our partner program, it's going to pay for your entire year. So we've got some really good discounts coming out with our partners and, but it will be paid. Yeah. think that's, and I'll say it's important part in both sides. We want to be able to provide a lot of value and bring amazing people in. We also feel like when you pay.

you're bought in and you're engaged and you want to get something out of it. And that's an important part for me.

Enmanuel Tejada (01:14:33.122)
100%. And I think that, you know, I've definitely found this to be true in life and I'm only 24, but I definitely have found it to be true myself because when I've paid for a lot of coaching too, not a million, but I've definitely paid a good couple.

50, 60,000 so far and looking to spend more because when people pay, they pay attention. So, if you want to take it seriously, you have to some skin in the game. And besides, it's a discount, whatever the price is going to be, whether it's a hundred, a thousand, 2,000, 5,000, 10,000, it's a discounted price because you're getting access to your information, Justin, which you paid a million dollars for. Somebody can pay X amount per month and gain that much information, summed down into a way they can understand.

Justin White (01:14:50.754)
Nice.

Enmanuel Tejada (01:15:16.544)
I think it's a discount either way.

Justin White (01:15:19.906)
100%. And like I said, it's going to be all about motivating and inspiring each other. And I know it's that missing piece that I wish I had when I was scaling from three to 10 million and from 10 to 20, man, this was the missing piece I didn't have. I made a lot of mistakes. I lost a lot of money. So I'm taking those lessons learned and I'm putting them out there for the public and the community to learn from. I'm trying to fill that, fill that gap that I had.

When I was scaling from that, from that single digit to that eight figure.

Enmanuel Tejada (01:15:54.476)
Dude, I think that's amazing, dude. And you're qualified and you're driven, dude. I cannot fucking wait for this thing to launch. So Justin, it's been a pleasure to have you on, dude. Seriously, you gave us a lot of value. know, guys are going to check out that jwhitegroup.com to join the wait list. How else can they get in contact with you? Maybe they have a question for you. Maybe they want to follow your journey as you do your thing. How can they do that? How can they reach you?

Justin White (01:16:18.678)
Yeah, man. Instagram and LinkedIn are the two areas I'm definitely most active on. You can DM me on either of those platforms. Give me a follow. I'd appreciate it. You can find me on Instagram. It just put in, if you search Justin White KD CEO, you'll find me. I'll pop right up. Justin White KD CEO. And then also on LinkedIn, you just type in Justin White K and D landscaping. I think at this point you could probably put me into Google and find me that way too. I've done a lot of different podcasts and speaking things.

Enmanuel Tejada (01:16:45.73)
Thank

Justin White (01:16:48.866)
Probably won't be out in time. I'm speaking at the equip show. dude, I get to introduce the keynote, Kevin O'Connor next week. So, you know, this probably won't go out in time, but dude, I'm up, up in front of 3000 people. Yeah. I'm a little nervous about it, but I'm stoked.

Enmanuel Tejada (01:16:56.18)
Are you serious?

Enmanuel Tejada (01:17:06.39)
Dude, let's go. I'm gonna be at the Equip Expo and I'm gonna be in the audience, dude. So, holy shit. What a... that's gonna be amazing to see.

Justin White (01:17:13.666)
shit. Don't miss. Don't. All right, bro. Well, we're going to have to catch up and, and meet up and equip and, and shoot some ideas back and forth. I'm excited.

Enmanuel Tejada (01:17:23.638)
Dude, 100%, Justin, it's been a pleasure to have you on. The audience is gonna reach out to you. They're gonna go join your wait list, Pleasure having you on,

Justin White (01:17:34.048)
Right. I appreciate it, man. My pleasure.

Enmanuel Tejada (01:17:39.19)
Boom, Justin, we did it, man.