We were growing the business. We didn't want it to own our lives.
How are we going to have kids if this is the reality?
For a long time, too much of ProGreen depended on Michael. Everybody went to him for answers. Mornings could turn into hours of figuring out what crews were doing that same day.
There were late nights on the computer, Saturdays spent catching up and a lot of reacting to whatever came next. Then we started seriously thinking about having a family.
We knew something had to change.
We finally found the playbook we'd been looking for.
Michael had spent years in peer groups and visiting other landscape companies looking for answers. There were lots of good ideas, but putting them together was another story.
LeanScaper simplified it.
We joined the Accelerator at the very beginning, and every Wednesday our leadership team started watching the weekly sprint together. Instead of Michael learning something and trying to teach everybody later, we were all hearing it at the same time and deciding what we could change right then.
It gave us a rhythm for making small improvements every week. That structure was what we'd been searching for.
We're doing more with the team we have, and getting our time back.
The same team is producing more.
One of the clearest changes has been efficiency. We used to run around 60–63%. Now we're around 74%.
A big part of that came from paying attention to a few numbers that actually matter and planning work before the morning starts. Last year around this time we had about 50 people. Now we're closer to 45—and we're doing more work.
That's the kind of growth we want. Not just adding more people every time we want to add more revenue, but getting better at what we already do.
Revenue moved beyond where we'd been stuck.
For a few years, we were sitting around $3.8–$4.2 million in revenue. Now we're around $5.2 million and expect to finish around $5.8 million.
There wasn't one thing that caused that. We planned better. We paid more attention to revenue per hour. We adjusted pricing. We got more intentional about the jobs we wanted.
We started looking at the business through the numbers instead of just staying busy. All of those small changes started adding up.
We're getting our time back.
This is probably the result that matters most to us. People see the trucks around town and say, “You guys are killing it.” That's nice. But that's not really how we define success anymore.
We're having a baby. We want to have a family. Michael wants to be able to go coach at 5:00 without saying he has to miss practice because a crew needs him to finish laying sod.
We want our team to have that kind of life too.
If we can take Saturday and Sunday off while the business keeps moving, that's success.
We want a bigger business—not a business that takes more from everyone.
We're still ambitious. We want ProGreen to keep growing. But we're looking at growth differently now.
If we can produce more with the team we have, create more opportunities for our people and build a company that doesn't need every hour we can give it, that's a much better business to grow.
For us, the next level isn't just more trucks or more revenue. It's having the capacity to grow—and still having a life outside of it.
