Interview with Green Abundance by Design: Profit with Purpose

 Season 2 kicks off with Andrew and Mike of Green Abundance by Design, an ecological landscaping company that takes a nature-led approach to designing and caring for landscapes. With a focus on native plant gardens, invasive species management, and thoughtful lawn care, they’re helping homeowners improve their properties while enriching the natural environment.

In this episode, we explore the counterintuitive decisions that fueled their growth—especially creating year-round jobs in a seasonal industry, raising rates with full transparency, and earning customer support by putting people first. Dennis also shares the business growth chart framework that helped them anticipate choke points like staffing, trucks, parking, and support roles—so they could solve problems before they slowed momentum.

If you’re interested in building a small business that lasts—with strong roots, smart systems, and long-term thinking—this episode is for you.

Transcript

Opening And Guest Introductions

SPEAKER_01 0:02

They didn't come from landscaping. One came from filmmaking, the other software development. But together, they're building a business that follows nature's lead in how they design and care for landscapes. Like the native plants they work with, they're naturals at small business, growing the right way with strong roots and long-term thinking. For our first episode of the second season, we talk with Andrew and Mike of Green Abundance by Design, about creating year-round jobs in a seasonal industry, turning challenges into opportunities, and how they exemplify everything we believe in at American Gutter Monkeys. Smart systems, real investment in people, and building for the long haul. If you're interested in building a small business that lasts, just like the native plants they work with, be sure to listen. We have a great show for you, so grab a cup of coffee, sit back, relax, and welcome to Monkey Business Radio. Hello, everyone, welcome to Monkey Business Radio. I'm Chris Collins, and as always, I'm here with my business partner and good friend Dennis Siggins of the Cape Cod Gut of Monkeys. Or as he's known on the Cape and the Islands, Bobby Downspout. Hello, Dennis. Chris, how are you doing? I'm good, Dennis. So what do we have today for our show?

Dennis 1:10

Today we have a couple of guests on from Green Abundance by Design. It's a landscape company out of Framingham, Massachusetts, my hometown. And my nephew, Michael, and his business partner, Andrew, are here on our show. I've been trying to get them here for quite some time, but they have a busy season, and right now this is not it. So, Andrew, Mike, welcome to the show. Thank you. Mike, you and I have been talking business for a couple of years now. Back up a little bit and talk to me about when you were working in the corporate world and when you left. And just give me the reader's digest version of these last 10 years.

SPEAKER_02 1:47

Yeah. So it started back when my son was born in 2006, and I decided that I really needed to have a good, stable career. So I went into the software field and had a really great 11-year career. But it was never what inspired me, or it was never really like my passion. So for most of the 11 years that I was in software, I knew I wanted to do something else. During those years, I got really into vegetable gardening and liked working in the soil, liked working with my hands. And so in 2017, when I had the opportunity to transition from the corporate world, I decided to get involved in the plant world. And that's where Andrew and I officially started working together.

Dennis 2:24

Mike, what year was that? That that you left VistaPrint?

SPEAKER_02 2:28

Yeah.

Dennis 2:28

What what year did you leave?

SPEAKER_02 2:29

It was November 2017. Um I left VistaPrint and I started working with Andrew on April 3rd of 2018. So just a few months after I left VistaPrint.

Dennis 2:38

Okay. So eight years in. Yeah, this is my eighth year. Yeah. Yeah. And um, Andrew, how long have you been in the landscape business? Uh since 2014.

SPEAKER_03 2:48

That was the first year the idea of green abundance started.

Dennis 2:51

And so you were in the business for about four years when Mike came along. And Mike and I, we we kind of started. Mike is my nephew, so we've we've known each other for how old are you, Mike? 42? Yeah. I've known him for 42 years. But we really connected when you left VistaPrint. You started talking about this passion that you had, and you had met this gentleman, and he had a business and you had uh an interest in this. What was Green Abundance like? How big of a company was it, let's say in 2018 when you guys first started working together?

SPEAKER_03 3:23

Uh yeah, at the time Mike was essentially the first official hire. Oh wow. So I was I was doing it alone for those four years and working on my own. And it worked out that uh a friend of Michael's was helping me on a project at that time in uh fall, summer of 2017. And the next year I realized that you know I need help to continue to grow this, and that's when Mike So Mike, when Mike came on, effectively you just doubled your size.

Early Years at Green Abundance

Dennis 3:52

Yeah. You went from one guy to two guys. Correct. Okay. Okay. So Mike, we've talked a lot in these past eight years about business. And I know about three years ago we started talking a little bit more serious about growth, about strategy, about stuff. I'm sure that you were prompted to ask me because I don't really I didn't know that much about what you were doing, but go back three or four years because some growth started to occur. Tell me a little bit about that process.

SPEAKER_02 4:21

Well, I I always think back to a very specific conversation that you and I had four years ago in January of 2022. And we had gone through a very challenging year in 2021. We had some significant issues with our staff at the time. And we finished the year in 2021. And Andrew and I realized that everybody that had worked for us that year was going to need to go for various reasons. So we decided to move on from our entire field crew, uh, which was like three other members at the time. And I remember calling you in in January of early 2022 saying, I got zero field crew, and we have this interesting position that we're in where we need to hire an entirely new staff. And, you know, we really looked at it as a major challenge, but also an opportunity to kind of rethink the strategy in terms of hiring and retention. And I remember that being it's still very clear in my head, that conversation that we had, because that was like the I think the first one where we really dug deep together in business strategy.

Dennis 5:19

I love talking business. So whenever you call, it's always fun. But so January of 22, we had a conversation and what transpired? I mean, I remember stuff, but you've got it nailed down to the month. And oh yeah. So what do we talk about? What do we decide?

Hiring Full Time Employees

SPEAKER_02 5:36

Well, what I posed to you was this challenge that we needed to hire four people in about a month and a half time period. And I had never, well, I had done hiring in the corporate world, I had never done a full-fledged hiring process in the home service industry and specifically not within the landscaping industry. And so I think my question to you is where do I start? What is the big things to consider? And the story that you told me was a, you know, around a landscaping company that you had worked with before and that you, you know, knew the owner and you guys were friends and he ran a good business and he did good quality work. But the biggest challenge that you had seen in his business was that he was kind of stuck. He was stuck in the layoff model, which is what a landscapers do. They lay off their employees at the end of the year and you know, you can apply for an employment or not, and then you know, you rehire them back in the spring. But what you had told me his biggest challenge was was that every year he lost his best one or two guys because they went for greener pastures. They found another company that was bigger and provided that year-round stability. And so what you told me, what you suggested was with this new opportunity to hire an entirely new field crew, that we should find a way to provide that year-round financial stability and pay our employees throughout the entire winter. So that's that was like the big aha moment from that discussion was we're not looking to hire seasonal hourly help that we were looking to hire year-round and pay people like this kind of salary opportunity where they would get that 52-week paycheck guaranteed. So that was like the big turning point in terms of our business model and the offering that we had for new employees.

Dennis 7:12

So, did people stay on? Do they stay through? How do you how do you do that? How do you provide year-round revenue in an industry that is oftentimes viewed as seasonal? What did you do?

SPEAKER_02 7:23

Well, Andrew and I, I took the conversation that you and I had and I brought it to Andrew and said, you know, my uncle Dennis, who knows quite a bit about business, made this recommendation. So what we did is what we always do. We sat down and crunched the numbers and said, you know, if we only worked for the same nine or nine and a half months that we normally work, but now we're paying people for 12 months, obviously there's increased costs as a result. And what we figured is that we needed to raise our rates considerably in order to cover the downtime in the winter. So we in the beginning of 2022, we had to raise our rates significantly in order to offset and prepare for the ultimate, you know, when we got to the next winter, knowing that we had to pay people through the winter because we were making that, you know, that was part of the offering uh when we put out the jobs and the job offers and is that we were going to pay people in the winter. So we had to make that revenue between March and December to carry us from December to the following March. So we had to raise our rates. But as I told you on the phone the other day, we decided to do it with full transparency. And we we wrote a business you know, uh a mission statement and put it on the website and we shared it with our clients and told them why the rates were going up. And it was largely around wanting to create a sustainable career opportunity for new employees and that we wanted to really take care of employees and provide them the opportunity to have a consistent paycheck and be able to pay their bills in the winter without having to stress out. And a lot of a lot of our clients really resonated with that. They really appreciated deeply that we were putting crew health and safety and stability at the forefront of our newly revised business model. And we had lots and lots of clients tell us that they were very appreciative that not only were we doing it, because they thought that treating humans like humans was a good idea, but that they also appreciated that we were being upfront and transparent about it. We weren't trying to obfuscate it and hide the rate changes. No, we just told people about it and they were appreciative of that.

Dennis 9:11

That's very cool. You took uh a challenge and or maybe even a negative and turned it into a positive by letting the your clients know that.

SPEAKER_01 9:18

Yeah. It's completely against what 98% of the people would tell you to do. It's just and yet it it works. I'm always amazed by that. And we come across this all the time when Dennis is talking about all these different ideas. They just seem so counterintuitive from the outside, but it's kind of amazing. And again, this sounds like another one of those sort of situations. So can you explain a little bit about the business itself? I think it's interesting that that counterintuitive thing. You would think niches, you know, for small businesses can be can be bad. And you guys are in a niche in terms of invasive species.

Specializing In Natives And Invasives

SPEAKER_03 9:54

Yeah. So when the business was started, I knew from the beginning that I didn't want to necessarily just be a landscaper. I was coming from a focus of, you know, having a positive impact and creating gardens that I thought were kind of missing in the suburban environment. And so from the beginning, it always started as like this is a specialty kind of service. And as we did that work and as we developed that process, that's where like the other service elements to our business started developing, where we understood that as we got into native plants and building biodiversity through planting plants that are meant for the environment in our area. That's where we saw the invasive plant problem present itself, where pretty much all of our clients had some form of, you know, an infestation of invasive plants. And that was essentially an untapped market for our area, where not many people actually offer that as a service, even though it was a something that pretty much everyone needs. So it was seeing the these gaps in the traditional service, because I think a lot of landscaping is just following patterns that other people have set forth. A lot of the practices and models in which landscape companies are built on are very standardized approaches. And it it does make for easier businesses to run. You know, if you're going to cut grass at these locations and the schedule, it makes for a very standardized business, which is helpful in its own regard. I definitely don't slight people for following the models that work, but I knew with green abundance that I wanted to do something differently and not just offer what everyone else was offering. And in that process, we developed some really high value services that allowed us to have that flexibility to essentially be able to offer also unique employment opportunities that the industry wasn't offering because, you know, we're not cutting lawns at the lowest rate possible. We're doing higher value, more technical work. That's where, you know, being able to pay people all year round was more of an actual opportunity or was actually feasible from a financial perspective because it's not a standard service.

Dennis 12:01

So you specialize, which is cool. I think that's a great idea. A lot of people, Chris was saying some things that we've begun to discuss here are often seem counterintuitive. Instead of offering services in a whole array of landscaping areas, you've selected or chosen invasive species as your specialty. Is that somewhat correct? That and native plants. They go hand in hand. Okay. Sure. Is there within your region, the Framingham area, is there another company that specializes in that?

SPEAKER_03 12:36

I mean, in our immediate area, in terms of the whole package that we're offering, because it we look at it as like a closed loop system. Within native plants comes invasive plants, and with invasive plants comes native plants. Uh in our immediate area, there's no one immediately.

Dennis 12:50

Cool. Good. Yeah. Do you ever feel like you're missing out on lawn cutting or other type things? Is do you do you ever feel that way?

SPEAKER_03 12:58

Very quickly. So part of the growth that was so slow in building the business, and you know, the first four years were making a lot of inexpensive mistakes. And then with Mike coming on, it was again making a lot of inexpensive mistakes before we took that big leap in um 2022, where we really re-engineered how we approached the running of the business and our employees. It was understanding that the more services that we offered wasn't necessarily a good thing because there are very real constraints and limits to any business in terms of your physical space, you know, what you can actually offer people. I remember one year when we were thinking about how we can make more money and do offer more services to make more money. I was mowing my neighbor's lawn as an experiment because we do we're we're trying not to offer the service that everyone else is offering because sure we're not trying to compete on the same product at because it's it's a race to the bottom when we get into that cycle. Yeah. And I think there's just a lot of different things that we can do in a more environmentally focused way. And so one of those ideas was around the lawn and how we can approach that differently. So I was mowing my neighbor's lawn, but leaving certain areas unmowed to create a meadow effect. She had a very big lawn. She wasn't using it for, you know, she was a grandmother. She didn't have grandkids playing there all the time. Like it was largely unused. So I was experimenting with framing these mowed areas and unmowed areas in a way that didn't look neglectful. So the bo there were borders and pathways and all these other things that were mowed around it. But at the time, this was too early for us to be able to offer it. I wasn't able to spend the time needed to do that. We didn't have the crew that could service that. And it was very low money, but it was it was an experiment done on one property. And we learned that lesson that this is not the time, but there's something here. So now when we have the larger crew and we're looking at being more of a holistic, whole package company to our clients that want this alternative approach, right? We're now taking on clients that do need their lawns cut, but are also open to having part of that turn into a meadow type situation. So we're cutting lawns, but we're not cutting them like everyone else is cutting.

Dennis 15:13

That's very interesting. I love specializing.

SPEAKER_03 15:16

It's really where you can actually get good at something.

Green Abundance Company Size

Dennis 15:19

It also becomes so efficient, so highly efficient. There was a time in my life where I was a general contractor and primarily a roofing company, but I also built a couple of houses and we always had a deck or you know, replacement windows. We always had stuff going. And one of the parts that I didn't like about that was when one of my trucks had to unload from the day before because they were roofing for the last 11 days, and now they're gonna go build a couple of decks. So they got to empty out the trucks, get all their roof and stuff out of there, run down the list and retool with the tools necessary for building a deck. And it takes a while. And I know some people do that every day, but it's great when I come in in the morning, and we have 15 trucks, and we never send all 15 out in the same day, but because each truck has a slightly different purpose. But we have 12 service trucks, and it's great when I see nine or 10 of them all backed in, and all they're doing is prepping to go clean gutters. It takes them 10 or 15 minutes and they're off. They just have to check the truck's inventory from the day before and off they go. And it's so streamlined and so efficient. That to me is one of the beauties of specializing, is everybody knows what they're doing and they get really good at it. They get very efficient at it, and there's very little downtime, there's very little inefficiency. And that's a thing of beauty. It really is. Mike, okay, back to employment. So seven to eight years ago, when you came to work for the company that was formerly a one-person company with Andrew, now it's two people. That was seven to eight years ago. How big is your company now? How many employees?

SPEAKER_02 16:55

We have seven field crew, and we're hiring two to three more in the next month. So we'll go into the season with nine or ten field crew. And then we have four support staff. Andrew and I co-run the company essentially. And then we have a full-time administrative assistant who does work beyond just her admin role. And then we have a young woman that we hired last year who started as an administrative assistant, and she's now grown into um our planting project manager. Cool. So we have four support staff. We will ultimately have call it nine field crew this year. So that's 13. And then we have a couple of other people behind the scenes. We have a guy that does all of our video work and a lot of our marketing stuff. Um, it's a friend of Andrew's from from back in the day. And then my partner's actually our nursery manager. So my partner Allison manages our plant nursery that lives in my backyard right now. And so at any given time, we might have a thousand or two thousand plants that are in our peaches growing in that.

Dennis 17:45

Yeah, too. I got a batch of them last fall, and they were really good. Right from downtown Framingham. Oh, yeah. Who would have thunk it?

SPEAKER_03 17:52

So um Yeah, 15 to 17.

SPEAKER_02 17:55

Yeah. Nice. 15 or so, folks. Wow, this is really great. Yeah. So we've grown a lot. You know, we when I started with Andrew seven years ago, I was the first employee, and and now we're looking at teens in terms of number of people.

The Growth Chart: Solving Choke Points

Dennis 18:05

So one day you and I were talking, Mike, I don't know if it was here physically. We were here in my location in Mashpee, or where it was on the phone, but somehow I gave you or you got hold of one of our business growth charts. Okay. Business growth chart is something that I made up maybe 10 years ago. And across the top is all the category, the critical categories that could become choke points in my company. For example, the number of revenue generating employees in the field, the number of support staff in the office, number of service trucks we need, the number of box trucks, which are the trucks that produce gutters, square footage on the building, square footage for warehouse space, you know, all these things, number of parking spaces. And with any business, as you grow, you hit ceilings, little ceilings. So you guys are growing and you realize, wow, we need a couple of more people in the field. So you need to hire a couple of people in the field. And then you say, oh my gosh, we got more guys in the field. We need another truck or two. So we have to go quickly buy another truck and a trailer, maybe some equipment. So you got to get on that. Then you realize with three new employees plus two new trucks is five more parking spaces that you don't have in some. Okay. So I developed this process of a business growth chart like 10 years ago. And I'm very proactive about it. I'm forever updating it and expanding it. And so across the top is all those potential choke points. And down the left hand column is the size of the company, annual sales. So half a million, a million, 1.5, 2 million, all the way down to whatever we can grow to. Let's say it's a$10 million process right now. And in if if you look at the left-hand column, and let's say you guys want to hit$2 million next year, you want to be a$2 million company, and you look across at all of those, I don't know what your choke points are, but certainly number of people in the field, number of support staff, right? Parking spaces. Talk about the growth and what are those choke points or potential choke points, which we can turn them into opportunities. But talk about that process, Mike, because I know a lot of times when we talk on the phone, you get so excited about that. You're like, we just this happened and this is what we did, and we saw it coming because of this and the tell me about that.

SPEAKER_02 20:25

Talk about that. The conversation that you're referencing was when I was here almost exactly a year ago. It was the end of January, came down to visit you, and you had on the phone told me about this business growth chart a couple of times, but I hadn't seen it. So when I was here physically with you, we were standing in, I was standing in your office, you were sitting at your chair, and I said, Hey, you got that business growth chart handy. And you were like, Yeah, I actually got it up right now. And I told you when we were on the phone the other day, as soon as we started looking at that and talking about it, the light bulb went off. And what I realized was that going into 2025, which is where we were a year ago, it was January, and we were just about to start our season. And I knew that we had enough field crew. We had eight field crew members that were all returning from the previous year, and that was exactly the number we wanted to get to our revenue target for the season. What I realized in looking at the growth chart was that we didn't have enough parking, that we didn't have enough support staff, and that we needed at least one other truck. And so, in seeing it all laid out so logically and clearly, I walked away from that conversation saying, I need six more parking spaces, we need another truck yesterday, and we need more than Andrew and I to run the company. Because at the time we had had yet to hire an administrative assistant. Andrew and I had basically been running the company for nearly seven years without any additional support. And we were really reaching the limits and the ceilings there. Sure. So I walked away from that conversation with you and then talked to Andrew either the next day or two days later, and I said, We need a truck. You get it, can you get us another truck? We'd already talked about it, but I was like, we definitely need another truck. And so he started working on the truck. I stumbled over and talked to Guy that manages the facility that we're at. And I said to Jason, we need more parking. And I need si four to six news parking spaces within a month. And a few days later, he started moving some stuff around and got us a couple more spots and found a couple more, four more spots in the way back for us. And we were able to achieve that. And then, you know, probably the most important part of all of it was the additional support staff. So that was the month that I really started thinking about hiring the administrative assistant. And within a few weeks of the discussion that we had, somebody that had applied for a different role actually entirely. This young woman had applied for a field crew role, but I didn't need more field crew. I needed somebody that could do admin. So she had applied for part-time field crew. And we don't usually do part-time field crew. We want people full-time. But I said, if you're really interested in the company, which it sounded like she was, I said, if you're at all interested in doing it some administrative work, that's what we really need help with. Like that's our biggest need. So I interviewed her for that position, and she's been a superstar ever since. And that was really what unlocked the potential because up until that point, Andrew and I were working 55, 60 hours a week. And Andrew was stuck at the shop, you know, doing data entry till after dinner time. Yeah, that gets old after all. Well, especially when your wife's getting mad at you for missing dinner and you're spending less time with the family and the kids because you're doing literal data entry. And so when we hired Nikki to help us with the administrative side of things, it really unlocked the potential for Andrew and I to have the work-life balance that we were providing for our employees, but that we weren't really providing for ourselves. And so that again, seeing that chart that you had developed with okay, if you're trying to get to this revenue target, you need eight field crew, you need four trucks, and you need two and a half to three support staff. Like I saw, like, I don't have enough parking spaces, we don't have enough trucks, and I don't have the support staff. But we had the field crew and we had the warehouse space. We had like several of the pieces of the puzzle, but the three choke points that were going to be hitting us hard in one to three to six months from where I was standing became just so clear. So we solved all of them within a month and it set up for a really amazing 2025.

Dennis 23:59

Aaron Powell But you didn't seem hesitant at all from what you're telling me. Like a year ago, January, you came away and you said, I got to do A, B, C, and D, and I got to do it now.

SPEAKER_02 24:09

Aaron Powell Well, and that was the thing is I realized that you know we were a few weeks away from hopping into our field cruise season. And if we didn't solve those problems, they were gonna be bigger problems in say April or June or September than than they were in January or February. Like I can envision the problems. I could see where the choke points were gonna happen, and I wanted to solve them quickly so they didn't become a major problem.

SPEAKER_01 24:30

Yeah. Kind of interesting because we this is a really hard point to get across to a lot of people that we talk to or a lot of the franchisees. And I'm just kind of amazed at how quickly you guys picked up on that. Because it's one of the harder things, this growth chart. We talk about the visionary aspect of being small business. Maybe that's what you guys are, because you guys picked up on it. And that's not a common thing when people we talk to.

SPEAKER_02 24:50

Well, it was probably because it was the 15th or 20th conversation I had had with Dennis over the years, and every other time he suggested something, it worked. So it it was, you know, clear to me that he wasn't just blowing smoke, that he was that he had developed this chart over a decade and had employed it successfully in this company and the franchises and all that. So I mean, I think the credibility that Dennis brings to the table is always why I'm so quick to act, because it's not like he he makes a suggestion, then I have to go vet it. You know, it's not like I have to take it to somebody and say, like, my uncle said this, but does this make any sense? Like when Dennis says something and it resonates with me, I I feel like it's it's time to act.

SPEAKER_01 25:27

So Yeah, that's interesting. Maybe that's the point we can take away from this discussion with our own franchisees, is maybe they just need to hear it more often, I guess.

SPEAKER_03 25:35

It was an overnight decision made on the back of eight years of mistakes.

Acting Early On Trucks, Parking, Support

SPEAKER_02 25:39

I mean, and that's the thing is like we probably and you know, one of the things that Dennis said to me, I think maybe in that same conversation and probably five other times, I uh and maybe I'm butchering the quote, but he's he said he would rather buy a six a truck six months before he needs it than when he needs it. Because sometimes it takes a month to get the truck and then it takes another few weeks to get it lettered, and then it takes another couple of weeks to get the the cap and the ladders and all the other stuff. So if you need a truck on Monday next week, you know, you're out of luck. So I think a lot of these things why I acted why we acted so quickly on the three items that we discussed a moment ago was probably because in that conversation, I realized we probably should have done all of them six months early. And so I was realizing like time was of the essence. Like we probably should have bought a a truck the year before. We probably should have hired the administrative assistant the year before. We probably should have been more proactive about you know figuring out the parking. So that was a big part of it for me, whereas like there's no way we're gonna get through the season without these, but like we probably should have done it a while ago, too.

Dennis 26:34

So it's very interesting because we all know people who are self-employed. Mike, your dad was self-employed. My older brother was a self, your uncle uh was a self-employed contractor for many many years. I've seen so many small businesses stay small. I've seen small businesses become medium-sized businesses. I remember my dad knew the owner, uh, the founder of Cape Cod Potato Chips back when it was a really small company, you know, and he was over the house, Steve, the founder, and he um they were just a small company at the time. And this guy was just amazing. He was dynamic. And I've seen small businesses stay small. And a lot of companies want to stay small. You know, I have a friend who's a landscaper, and Mike, you mentioned it a little while ago. You know, I see him every once in a while. I see him actually quite frequently because he lives near me, and he has the same recurring problem every year, is because he lays people off and he tries to keep them busy. He hasn't figured out how to keep them busy or how to keep them in a year-round paycheck. I don't know how to do that in landscaping, but you guys figured it out. Whatever it is, you figured it out.

SPEAKER_03 27:41

I mean, we're in the process of still figuring it out. We're able to do it, yes, but there are other problems that that has created. Sure, of course. Yeah. So we're solving those other problems. Yeah. So there's a reason why not many companies do that as the core service because it's really hard. Because right now we're in a period of like all cash burn. It's a large amount, and basically all our profits for the most part, every year are tied up in our winter cash burn where the profits from this season aren't realized until June, July, September, October of next year, because they're all tied up in this period. So the next problem that we have, we figured out the problem of the rates that we need to charge to get our people to be able to be gainfully employed and we can pay them without getting into debt for it. But the next problem is how do we maximize the edges of our season where we can get in increase our billable hours from where we are now and getting, you know, an extra 10, 20, 30% more hours. Cause that's the main crunch. We can keep raising our rates within the confines of that nine-month window, but really the outsized gains is reducing that burn over the winter by getting those more billable hours. So that's the next problem.

Dennis 28:53

Sure. And you're 100% right, Andrew. When you come up with a solution, it changes your business model. It changes your company. And once that change is made, the company can never go back to being the way it used to be. Once the mind is stretched by a new concept, the mind can never go back to its original shape. It just can't. And that's the same thing with a company, yes. And those solutions create additional challenges. And that's just ongoing. That's constant. And that's a concept that it's very healthy to get used to that because you fix a problem and it doesn't, okay, not everything's perfect. That created something else on the backside. That's just the way, that's the way business is, and that's the way life is.

Handling New Challanges

SPEAKER_02 29:33

Well, and I think that speaks to the theme of what we're talking about here and what we spoke about the other day, Dennis, is you know, turning these challenges into opportunities because owning and operating a small business is not for the faint of heart. It's not, it's not like this easy thing where you just clock in and clock out and get your paycheck at the end of the day. Not that most jobs are easy, but every day and every week there are new challenges. And if you are burdened by those challenges, you probably shouldn't be owning a small business. And if you're excited by the challenges and the ability to turn them into opportunities, then you're probably playing in the right space. And I think that that's something that Andrew has really helped me to see over the years is that like, and because we face challenges all the time. And one of the things I appreciate most about working with Andrew is his very sort of calm and centered and balanced and grounded demeanor when even the worst thing. I mean, we've had some ridiculous things happen to us where like I'm pulling my hair out, and Andrew's over here, like, well, I think the next step is this. Like, we just whatever may have happened, but you know, and that's where I feel like Andrew is very much built for for owning and operating a business because I think he's got a very calm and balanced demeanor for when these challenges arise. And not to freak out about the challenge, but to look at it from a little bit of a different perspective and say, okay, so what are we supposed to learn from this? What's the next step? What is the opportunity that's now being presented to us?

Dennis 30:55

I don't know, Mike, if your passion is invasive species or small business management. But whenever we talk about this, you are 100% on board and motivated and interested. A lot of people aren't. A lot of people are just not that fascinated by what they do. And I don't know if it's the business or meaning the business your company, or it's the business of landscaping in general, or if it's the next challenge that you face. But you do, and you've been doing this now eight years, you do have a high level of enthusiasm and passion that goes into it, a level of passion that I just love to see in people. And it seems like you've found your niche. And as I say, I don't really know if that niche is the business itself, the nuts and bolts of the business, or the day-to-day operations of dealing with poison ivy and poison oak or whatever the heck else you guys deal with. But yeah, you you always seem so excited and so motivated. And to me, that's a huge piece of the puzzle when it comes to growing a company.

Transform Landscaping Industry

SPEAKER_02 32:05

Well, for me, it's both, right? So I had the opportunity when I was before I started my software career, I had I was working for a small business. A friend of mine owned a couple of cell phone kiosks and malls, and I was, you know, working for him, cash under the table, had just graduated college, had not a care in the world. And then my son was born and my perspective started shifting. But before I went to VistaPrint, I had the opportunity to become 50-50 partners with him. But it was the wrong business and the wrong time, and ultimately not the ideal partner. But I always knew from a young age, I was 23 at the time, I knew that I wanted to be involved in small businesses, but I had to go do something else. I ended up working for VistaPrint, which ended up being a massive international corporation. That gave me the stability that I needed, but I always knew I wanted to get back to being involved in a small business. And then in around the 20, uh, 2010, 2011 timeframe, I had a friend that was a landscaper. And he and I started riffing on a concept that was actually very similar to what Green Abundance by Design ended up becoming. We wanted to start an environmentally focused landscaping company. We're going to call it Sustainable Inspirations. And again, it was the wrong opportunity and the wrong time and ultimately not the right partner. But I always knew that I wanted to do something with a small business. And I also knew that I wanted to do something with somebody. Like I really love the way that Andrew and I kind of like work together and dovetail. Um, you know, his skills and passions are very different from mine. The kind of stuff that excites him is very different from what excites me. But together, like we kind of come together with this really wonderful partnership. So it took a lot of patience. Um, I always knew I wanted to do something with a small business. And then ultimately, when I realized my passion for plants, I knew I wanted to do something like this. So it took literally 15 years of patience before the right opportunity presented itself. And then there it was. So it's both. I I love the work and I love the nuts and bolts of it. And so I do feel like I have found my place. Like I've told Andrew this before, like, this is what I want to do for the rest of my career. Like I just this, I don't have any desire to go do anything else. I just want to grow this business because ultimately it comes down to like growing a successful business is really interesting and fun. But I look at Green Abundance having the opportunity to really transform the landscaping industry. Like I think that, and this is what, you know, Andrew can talk about sort of the vision of the company and and you know, where we want to take this. But I think I would be very excited in 20 years from now if we looked back and there was hundreds of other companies that were landscaping like us. Like I feel like we're at the forefront. I feel like in a lot of ways, we're pioneers in the new age landscaping, not just the traditional mow and blow, we're coming to mow your lawn every week, you know, and we're just gonna remove the leaves and remove any uh possible abundance that those might provide. Like we have these specialized services where we're really looking to integrate environmental and ecological principles on a quarter acre and half acre landscape that very, very few companies are doing. But I would be very excited to see people and other companies starting to copy us down the line because of the success that we're ultimately having. So that's to me, like I if we run a successful company and I have a good career and I retire, you know, at the age that I want to retire and comfortably, that's great. But like for me, the the real, the real work is transforming the industry, or at least attempting to do that.

Dennis 35:15

So interesting. Andrew, why did you 2014 were you uh out of high school, out of college? What was your level of education at the time?

SPEAKER_03 35:24

I had lived in LA for the past seven years. I was pursuing my first career as a filmmaker. So I was doing that completely separate from landscaping, horticulture, and everything. And then it was when my I married my wife, and when we were expecting our son, it was at that point where all the misgivings I had with working in that industry were kind of like brought to the forefront of like, okay, am I gonna be doing this as my career, or are the things that I'm seeing at problems now just gonna be getting worse? And it was at that point where I made that decision where this, if there's ever gonna be a time for me to do something different, now would be the time. And I knew that grounding my career in the natural world and plants and working with that, part of green abundance by design, is seeing the operation of how nature functions from an abundance model. And that's where I saw the best way to approach a business was attaching itself to something that was naturally of an abundance mindset or an abundance, it was the feature to the system, not a bug. And I just didn't see that same level of possibility within the industry that I was working in. So that was really the it was my son's arrival or imminent arrival that was the impetus behind making that shift.

Dennis 36:37

The whole family thing.

SPEAKER_01 36:39

So did you have parents involved in in the industry of landscaping or anything? Where did you get your your love of plants and and that sort of thing?

SPEAKER_03 36:47

No, I mean my dad was similar to Mike's dad, was a general contractor type. He did, you know, work for clients in Framingham and Sudbury and the surrounding areas. So there was never that. I mean, we had he was planting stuff at his at our house, but I had never touched a plant or planted anything in my life up until that point. Did you cut lawns?

SPEAKER_01 37:06

Because we're big lawn cutters.

SPEAKER_03 37:08

I mean, I would cut my my grandmother's lawn begrudgingly when I was a kid, but that didn't light your fire, the lawn cutting. It was more because I I mean the this is how I kind of look at my role in in green abundance, but it it's it's the the systems and the vision behind it. And that was where the the problems that I was seeing in the world at that time that it was focused on, the solutions that I saw for them were through the natural world, through plants, through, you know, systems that were outside of necessarily the reliance on um human beings like making it go. Like I understood that a tomato plant left into its own devices would still grow somehow. A tree would still grow even if we weren't there doing it. And I liked that idea of a system that was centered around that principle. And that was as a core fundamental, you know, ethos is I knew that would be a durable system. And again, I didn't have the horticultural background, but I knew that that as a system made sense. That was the most stable ground that I could pivot towards. And that was, you know, a new opportunity for me to learn something completely new. I I really enjoy taking on those new challenges and and new learning experience.

SPEAKER_01 38:18

Yeah, that's interesting. Because going from film to landscaping or small business like this is quite a leap.

Faith In Your Business

SPEAKER_03 38:23

I mean it's it is and it isn't because I was always self-employed in the industry. I never had true, yes. Like I was always of that mindset. So like I never got into the like the paycheck standard nine to five type role. So I always had that unstability. Like working in the industry, it's it's a lot of time building itself up to a network because it was all just like personal connections, really. And until you could actually work as a stable career in that. So it was a lot of faith involved with like pursuing that because at the end of a show, at the end of a project, you don't necessarily know where your next job is, but you have faith that it's going to come because it happens every week, every month. Like this is the pattern that develops, and you just end up having faith in that. And I think that's in large part analogous to running a service business because there's a lot of faith involved. Like every year, you know, winter comes, we have this great time off, but it's a lot of faith that the clients are going to come back, that the season is going to be as, you know, successful as the previous one or better. And that's that's something that comes through the experience of having that happen, that you're doing this work, you're not guaranteed anything, but because you're doing it and you're doing it well, people will come back to that. And that's the faith that you have in the systems that you're developing and the business that you're developing. So I would say that would probably be the best lesson that that came from that previous career.

SPEAKER_01 39:43

Yeah. So you got kind of you kind of learned the hard part early on, having faith in yourself, you know, being able to take a chance, not worry too much about the outcome of the yeah.

SPEAKER_03 39:51

Yeah, it was it was a long slog because it was, you know, my son was born and money was not rolling in, and there's a lot of uh challenges that came with understanding that this is the beginning of something. I don't know where it's going, but again, having that faith that what was being built was worth it.

Dennis 40:08

Yeah, it's interesting. So looking forward, tell us uh a little bit about your marketing, public relations, what however you view branding, how does it work? What do you guys do?

Marketing Green Abundance

SPEAKER_03 40:17

So it was 2023 where we got more serious about that. Up until then, it was a lot of word of mouth, intermittent social media posting, a really nice website that had our portfolio and people could go to, but not as much outbound type marketing. It was more of the organic content side. And 2023 presented an opportunity where an old friend of mine that I went to film school with was looking to, ironically enough, get out of the direct film industry as its own toxic issues. But he was available to, you know, start shooting content for us. And I was like, okay, this is something that I started doing for the business when I first started it because I had the time. I had more time than than jobs. So I was, you know, shooting time lapses of every job that I was installing. I was taking tons of pictures, I was documenting everything very thoroughly because I mean I was also fresh on the filmmaking mindset. And so come 2023, this is after, you know, we changed the business model around the more employee-centered focus of the salaried employee. And it was just like a whole level of more responsibility was added to my plate where I couldn't focus on the marketing as much. So I brought in my friend there to start shooting that content for us and start developing that content. And for the past now, basically two and a half seasons going into the the third, it's really been focused on organic content and building a brand. Because I always saw that I always had this vision for green abundance being the premium offering in your neighborhood, almost like the kind of Apple type product, if you will, within the thing where it was accessible, but also, you know, we weren't chasing the$5 cell phone. We were always trying to be, you know, the iPhone, if you will, from that kind of branding and marketing perspective. So I really looked at how the companies that were much, much bigger than us, like I look at Apple and Budweiser and their marketing when they don't necessarily need to, right? They just are always forcing the brand in your consciousness. It's always present.

Dennis 42:16

Well that's called branding. That's exactly why they call it that.

SPEAKER_03 42:19

So I realized that it was less about short-term gains, about getting clients right now. That's part of it. But it was working on developing a much bigger picture of building the larger brand through this initial organic content approach where we needed to document the uniqueness of this business through the uniqueness of how we are capturing it from a more filmmaker's perspective, less from a you know amateur kind of social media thing. And that has really developed to the point where now we have a really amazing catalog of content that we can start using in a much more sophisticated manner. And part of our marketing was a lot more paid marketing, outbound marketing was a lot less refined in our approach. But, you know, every year and this year in particular, it's really about dialing in the data collection of the metrics that come from these paid advertisements through social media and really dialing in the system because part of the scaling and growth that comes with the business is your marketing budget and is your marketing. But if you're just throwing money at Facebook or Instagram without getting the data back or understanding how that affects this other lever in your business, it's it's not wasted money, but it's a missed opportunity. So I never threw a ton of money at paid marketing with the understanding that I didn't want to waste that money without getting the necessary data. And now we're at a point where all of this stuff can be tracked, where we can have, you know, our our Instagram ads funneling back information to us. We can have our Facebook ads funneling this information back to us, Pinterest, YouTube, all these different things. So we're really focused this coming year on a much more consistent, evergreen marketing that's not stopping in the winter, that's not stopping. In the summer, when we have enough work, it's just a constant ongoing thing because we'll have the systems in place to be able to collect all that data and understand where our efforts are going to be best spent. And that's that's the opportunity right now where every business has is there's so much information that you would never have had access to before, right? With like Nielsen ratings and other like it was much more woohoo, like it was only big players that had any sort of leverage. Whereas now you have a lot more leverage with much smaller budgets, but it's so hyper-focused. Do you have a monthly budget?

Dennis 44:30

Uh or is it an annual budget? How do you how do you approach that?

SPEAKER_03 44:34

Up until this year, it was more just including the cost of our actual marketing efforts and team. A lot more of the money was spent in the branded organic content of being able to capture it. But now that's part of the the work for this winter is developing a game plan as like our 1.0 version of how that budget for the year is going to be spent. But yeah, there is a general annual budget.

Brand Building And Always‑On Marketing

Dennis 44:57

Yeah. I budget like you sort of flirted with this concept. For my current group of companies, I spend the same dollar amount every month. I sign annual contracts with radio stations and other media, primarily radio stations, but I also have uh a marketing consultant team who's uh Warren and Lori are good friends of ours by now. But yes, we spend the same amount every month. So it doesn't increase or decrease, you know, during the busy season or the slow season because the potential customer or the repeat customer is always there to be reminded of who we are and what we do. So I don't change my market. I hear, I hear this strategy, this philosophy. Well, I don't need to market. I have plenty of work, all that I can handle. And honestly, if you're a one or two person company, you probably don't need to market. You only need to keep one person busy. But if you're a constantly ongoing, growing company, you always have to address that. And there's advertising, there's marketing, but then there's branding. Like nobody knows why you go to McDonald's. You just know the name. So if you're traveling or if you like Burger King or you whatever you like, you just pull in because it says Wendy's and you like fresh, never frozen over, you know, McDonald's special sauce. We don't know why we've heard of McDonald's. We just grew up with it. And that's called branding. And I believe in branding. I think it's the most powerful form of marketing that there is. And I think that branding occurs 24 hours a day, seven days a week in its most perfect form. And so that's why we logo our truck. That's why we all wear the same apparel with the same company name on it when we all go out to work. And that's why we advertise on, that's why we do all of those things, is because branding is always working. I spend a lot of money on monthly budget for radio advertising. And there's three reasons why we advertise. Number one, to make the phone ring, right? Isn't that the number one reason you would think? Number two is to remind all of our existing customers who we are, that we're still here, we're alive and well, and we're bigger and better than we were last year. And number three is to put out a constant presence because we specialize just like you do. So we specialize in gutter cleaning and gutter installs. So we want to put it out there that we are the Cape Cod gutter monkeys, for example, and we clean gutters on Cape Cod all year long. So if you want to get into the gutter business, don't do it here. Go find somewhere else to play because we own this sandbox. This is our world. And so to play a little bit of a sort of a power role in once you attain what we would call, and I believe we're the leader in the industry on Cape Cod, and I want to maintain that position. So that's another reason that I I market and I advertise in the fashion I do. Number one, to attract new customers. Number two, to remind my existing customers. And number three, to let other people who are industry, in the industry know that that you don't want to play in our world. Find go build decks, do replacement windows, do something else, but don't come into our world because we are growing and it's going to be very difficult. And we have a lot of competitors. And um, and I look I know those guys and I like them. I don't dislike them at all. It's a game, it's a challenge, and it's fun. And that's that's my sort of overall philosophy on marketing, and with the understanding that branding is most important. Branding is I want to be branded on your brain. My brand, in this case, Cape Cod Gotter Monkeys, or South Shore got a monkeys or a South Coast Gotter Monkeys. We want to be branded on the brain of our customers and our potential customers. And um, it's a powerful thing to do. And you guys are still growing. So tell me about what's in store for 2026. What's what's the year going to be like?

SPEAKER_02 48:51

So I think some of the big things for us in the year ahead, and I told you this the other day as well. We just got our first office. So Oh, yeah, you did. Yeah, we've been operating out of uh two shops. We have two separate bays at the same place, and it's worked pretty well up until now. Andrew had um kind of taken a corner of one of the shops and turned it into a makeshift office. Pretty, pretty good for what it was, but uh certainly not a place where we could have support staff. It was mostly just like Andrew had a desk. So um now that we have four full-time support staff, we felt like we needed an office. So Andrew has uh secured us a place about 10 minutes down the road from our shops, um, a nice four or five room office space. So we'll all be have offices and we'll have a conference room and we have a bathroom and a little kitchenette and maybe even a little podcast area like this. So that's that's the big thing for us, I think, is this season is being able to have like a real place to run the company from um as opposed to you know all the support staff working remotely, which is what we do now. And it works fine, but there's there's challenges and limitations and certainly missed opportunities in terms of collaboration. So that's a big one for us going into the 2026 season. And I think from there, it's it's about really taking a lot of the successes from the last couple of years. Like Andrew's done a lot of really incredible uh systems development. So, in terms of like how our back-end system is organized, how we track uh, you know, our proposals, our quotes, and the jobs, as well as the data that we collect on behalf of the invasive plant management that we do. So continued work in in terms of systems development that allows us to really thoughtfully grow and scale the company. So I think those are some of the big things that we're looking ahead this year. Andrew, do you have additions to that?

New Office And Systems Year

SPEAKER_03 50:34

Yeah. I mean, this year I really look as like the systems development year and really codifying things because you know, I think we at this point we figured out our full season service approach. Whereas when Mike first joined up, it was like, what do we do now kind of thing when there was no more plants to plant and it's fall now, so we don't want to just haul leaves away. How can we do that? So over the course of the past eight years, we've really dialed in the service offerings that we have and really understood the nuances of being able to offer all that and not offer too many and and really have it fit within what works for us to the point now where it feels we're at that appropriate point where if we can codify these things that make all these things run and work into a system that can be much more repeatable, scalable, hand off this thing. Like Mike's working on, you know, standard operating procedures right now for the hiring process. Instead of it just all falling on Mike, I told them, no, you're documenting your pro process right now. You're not just doing what you've done every year before and taking it all on yourself. You need to document this so that we can hand this to someone else and be like, here, this is how we hire. That's a really good idea. So this year is is all about developing all those things that have been previously between myself and Mike in terms of how we handle operations or or service offerings, things like that, and externalizing all that internal data and and thought processes so that it can be that much more easily taught and shared with everybody else. So that because we're we're at this inflection point where the physical constraints of our location are the main limits right now. I think we could get ourselves in a lot of trouble, but scale to a bigger company, but we just don't have the physical space. And we up until now haven't used debt at all as part of our scaling process. It's been very slow but organic, and we've kept our mistakes much smaller. Are you a debt-free company? Outside of some auto loans, yes. Right. Wow, good, nice. So yeah, we just have vehicle loans, but nothing too crazy. So, but when it comes time for us to be able to move into our next space, we're gonna be severely limited cash flow-wise to be able to afford the multi-million dollar commercial spaces in our area that are gonna be the two to three acre space. Right. Yeah. So our constraint for that level of growth is gonna come from the cash constraints that we have now around getting bigger than where we are. So debt is going to be involved in that process. And it's my goal to have the system in place and basically understand as much as possible. We pull this lever on marketing, we had this amount of budget here, that's gonna correlate to an average of this many calls per week, which will correlate to this many average sales at this average ticket price. We have all these things in place so that when we know we need to get to the$5 million business, these are all the levers that have to be pushed so that when we're in debt to do that, it's the shortest time frame period possible. And we're getting out of that as quickly as possible and not mired in it. So that's the main thing this year for me is getting all of that in place so that we have a very clear direct roadmap so that when it's crunch time, when 8% interest rates are bearing down our necks, we can get out of it as fast as possible and efficiently as possible.

Dennis 53:49

Is the is the long-term or the medium range goal to purchase or build your own facility?

SPEAKER_03 53:56

That's nothing really fits what we do. And you know, I'm developing software systems essentially that fit our business and the data that we need for it. So I don't really there probably is a building somewhere that we can make work, but the ideal scenario would be to customize something to our So the ownership is sort of a mid-range goal at this point.

Dennis 54:16

Eventually.

SPEAKER_03 54:16

I think in order for us to be able to grow the company, that's that's the real constraint.

Dennis 54:20

We'll talk about that at a we'll have you back in a year. Yeah. Next January. Let's do that. Yeah, I look forward to it.

SPEAKER_01 54:27

So I'm gonna get to a hard question now. Burning bush, good or bad? Raging debate my family about burning bush.

SPEAKER_03 54:34

So we operate to clarify, no plant is good or bad.

SPEAKER_02 54:37

It's in the wrong place. Yeah, good point. Yeah, I always say that right plant, wrong location. That's what's something I say all the time. Um, so yeah, we operate our invasive plant management service off of the Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources invasive species list. So they maintain a list of uh species that are categorized as either invasive, likely invasive, or potentially invasive. There's like kind of three tiers. And then there's like probably some back-end uh series of plants that are it about to enter that pipeline. Burning bush uh wing bark uanymus is squarely in the invasive category. There's no uh doubt about it in the state of Massachusetts, whether it's invasive or not. It is definitely invasive. The challenge with a lot of these plants is, and this is a great example. I'm glad you brought this one up because Burning Bush is one that was planted extensively in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, and maybe even into the 90s ornamentally. So you'll see the way up until the 2000s.

SPEAKER_01 55:31

You see little freeways all the time. They're all over the place. Yeah, planted.

SPEAKER_03 55:35

But it's in it's in every landscape. It's people's home foundations, hedrows, commercial landscapes, like the whole foods by us. They're the entire parking lot is ringed by them because they were planted when the first development of the space happened.

unknown 55:47

Right.

SPEAKER_01 55:48

Yeah. I live in Worcester and I have a tree in my front yard. We haven't been able to identify it without maybe a cork or all kinds of different things. We couldn't get it. And uh even my mom, who worked at Garden in the Woods in Framingham, was pretty good at it, and she couldn't tell us what it was. We had an arborist come by for some other work. Turns out it's a burning bush, it's over two stories tall, and it looks like a tree. Wow. He said in 40 years he's done it, he said, I've never seen a tree like this. Wow. So we're in love with burning bush because it's beautiful and it covers my porch. And my mom absolutely hates this tree and wants us to cut it down. So there's a raging debate on it right now.

SPEAKER_02 56:17

Well, and and that's a great species, like I said, to bring up because you know, just because something's invasive doesn't mean that we remove it from every landscape. So there's a lot of burning bush that have been planted thoughtfully or just intentionally that provide functional benefit. So, you know, beyond the beauty of the two to three weeks in autumn when burning bush has this like really beautiful red color to it, a lot of times they're privacy screening between clients and their neighbors. So, you know, as much as I hate the species and would like to take out the 12 of them between this house and the next one and get paid for that, like I understand the functional benefit of having that as a privacy hedge between you and your neighbors. So of all of the species that we do remove consistently, Burning Bush is the one that I leave behind the most because of client request. And so I'll point it out to people and say, Do you know this is invasive? And they're like, oh, I know, but that one ain't going anywhere because like I don't want to look at my neighbor's deck or their hot tub or wherever, whatever sight line is being obscured by the Burning Bush. So that's one where, you know, I shrug my shoulders and say, I know it's invasive, but you know, obviously it's the client's landscape they get to make the final call on those kind of things.

Debt, Scale, And A Clear Roadmap

SPEAKER_03 57:21

And that's the nuance of our business and the environment that we're in. We're not managing natural, you know, forests. You know, we we have some clients like conservation groups that we do manage those types of areas, but our main client is a residential landscape. And we're not ripping up their lawns and hold replacing them, we're working working with them, right? We're replacing sections of it. We're not just trying to like up-end and turn your place into a forest. Like we understand there's natural, like practical limits that the suburban environment naturally has. So we're not trying to just like undo all of that. We're just trying to take the nuanced approach to like, okay, what can we do that's better than what's currently here? How can we just start moving the needle forward? And I think that's where you get like in within like the native plant community and like the invasive plant, you know, groups, you have kind of like the extreme ends of things where there's like, there's no place whatsoever for an invasive plant in any landscape at all. And, you know, there's no place for a lawn at all. It's all just a complete biological sink. But that's just not the reality when it comes time for like interfacing with the larger public. And I think we're a great middle person for that thing where we're pushing people towards something that's what we see as a better, more proactive, environmentally conscious approach to transforming this space, with the understanding that we're not going to do it by just ripping the band-aid off and changing everything overnight. Like we can't just remove everybody's 13-foot burning bush that, as Mike said, is providing that necessary privacy to make their home a home. And I think that's the important thing is to understand that there's nuance to all of it. And that's where we can excel at. We understand the problems with this plant, but we also understand how to perhaps better be able to embrace that plant, whether we're pruning it when its berries start forming to, you know, reduce its further spread or, you know, planting natives in an area near it to offset the the you know ecological impacts of it. So it's all nuance. And that's where the suburban environment is a nuance space. And I think that's the opportunity that we have with it, and why I'm excited for us doing work in this area is there's so much room for doing things better, even if it's just tweaking things.

SPEAKER_01 59:32

That's interesting. I guess as Dennis said, we're gonna have to have you guys back next year, year from now, and see how things are going. It's a great topic, interesting topic. So right kind of at the end of the show here.

Dennis 59:42

Dennis, any other thoughts or no, no, it was it was fun, it was enjoyable. Good to see you, Mike. We talk a lot, but we don't see each other all that often. And yeah, thanks for visiting. Absolutely. Thanks for having us.

SPEAKER_01 59:52

All right, so we'll head out. Great show. Thanks for visiting. And Dennis, why don't you take us out?

Dennis 59:57

No monkeys were harmed in the making of this podcast.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:00

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