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Robert Taylor is president and founder of BIO Landscape and Maintenance, Inc. which began as a liquid fertilizer company in 1982. Since then, they have expanded and are recognized as a premier landscape services company in the greater Houston area. In addition, BIO announced last year that it had become part of the Yellowstone Landscape Group, one of the largest full service landscape providers in the United States.
Now a partial owner of Yellowstone, Robert Taylor and BIO’s leadership team retain significant ownership in BIO but will also be leading Yellowstone’s expansion throughout Texas. Says Robert, “My number one reason for making the change was risk reduction, since everything I had was in Bio. I haven’t regretted making the decision.”
He now has some liquidity and has spread out his risk. Even though he is still a partial owner—“I’m not just vested in the landscape industry and my own company. I am now searching for candidates for acquisition. My focus is to grow Yellowstone over the next number of years.”
Did Taylor first start in 1982 with a truck and a wheel barrow?
“No, I was actually in the liquid fertilizer business and it was pretty rinky dink—I sold, managed and applied liquid fertilizer to residential properties. I was also working full time for Exxon as a CPA. The choice to apply liquid fertilizer was an accident.”
At that time, Taylor had gotten married and was trying to buy a home. “I had found a 10 percent mortgage with a second at 17 3/4 percent. But I had to raise $10 thousand in 90 days. So, both of us took night jobs—my wife had a job at a Mexican restaurant. I was selling the liquid fertilizer, then I ended up buying the owner’s franchise.”
“I always knew I’d be in business for myself—but I hadn’t guessed that particular one. Over the next four years we added a maintenance department—I use the term loosely—and I got my irrigation license so I could start installing irrigation.” All this time Taylor was still working full time at Exxon. In 1986—a low point in the oil industry—Exxon offered him an early retirement package. “I used the $12 thousand to start up BIO and go full time. That money was gone in about three months, but I was 26—still young—and had one child so I decided to go for it.”
Taylor originally had one crew foreman and Taylor did everything else. It was a very simple organization. By the time he finally left Exxon, he had seven employees with sales at about $330 thousand. Now he has 350 employees, and the company is in the $20 million range. “We’ve done more than that in the recent past,” says Taylor, “but during this economic downturn, who knows. We will just have to wait and see what 2009 brings.”
BIO Landscape and Maintenance, Inc. offers a full range of commercial and institutional services: Complete landscaping (including hardscape); Tree removal and pruning; Irrigation installation and repair; Temporary truck watering; Drainage systems; Complete lawn and landscape maintenance programs; Tractor mowing; Turf management, including fertilizer (liquid) service and applicable chemical applications (insecticide, fungicide, weed killer).
“We’ve made tremendous changes to our business model since the acquisition, and we’re going to be very aggressive on sales,” says Taylor. “We went from two sales people to eight salespeople. Yellowstone is busy acquiring in Houston. They are growing by buying additional market share and will establish branches in Houston and the surrounding areas.
Horizontal integration is adding pond building, for example, but they aren’t searching for these specifically. They just assess what might be a fit—such as arbor care, hardscaping or turf establishment. Yellowstone is also entertaining the concept of serving as the prime contractor. i.e., where they can build a pavilion in a major park and be the prime rather than a sub contractor.
“However, what we don’t want to do is provide a competing service to the landscape architects we deal with. That would lose business referrals from them,” says Taylor. “One of our sister companies—actually that would be ‘brother’ companies, since we don’t want to be ‘sisters’ since we’re all men—Austin Outdoor, has a very nice design division, which we could use if we needed to.
“In the early days, we went through a couple of very serious patches because we didn’t have the right management in place. Once that was handled, however, we could move to the next level,” reminisces Taylor.
Taylor prefers to find people who are looking to better themselves. They’re already producing, they’re successful and they’re ready for the next level. “Whenever you hire, of course, you hope you can grow the person from within. The best place to find people is to find someone who’s already working. Those people are always anticipating growth anyway.”
“BIO is in the enviable position of being in Texas, so we’ve been able to maintain our staffing.” says Taylor. “We’re impacted by the economy, but it’s not the disaster they’re seeing in Florida and California.”
Taylor himself goes to process the visas for his H2B staff—about half of the group. Because he’s been doing it for 10 years, he doesn’t make many mistakes. He continues, “A year ago, the peso to the dollar was 10 to one. Now it’s 14 to one. Taylor visits the towns his workers come from and he can see how their lives have been changed.
“They're very good workers and model citizens, and I love my guys,” says Taylor. “They have an excellent safety record and it’s not by accident. We have tailgate meetings, safety training and monthly talks to make sure it stays that way.” Taylor gives many of the talks. They also give out bonuses for safe months and extra bonuses for drivers who have no traffic violations and take good care of their trucks. Says Taylor, “We have established an employee violation database where people can call in and complain about unsafe driving they see on the road—I even got on it once. We take those calls very seriously. If you get three complaints, that means you’re probably a bad driver and we can’t have that much risk as a company. As of now, our Workman’s Comp modifier is .76, which is very, very good and also lowers our insurance rates.
We are well equipped to handle projects ranging in size from one to several thousand acres. We have around 110 trucks, of which 75 are Chevy’s. Our fleet of maintenance trucks is heavily Chevy. We also have Isuzu cab-overs.
We like to use Gravely Z-turn mowers because they have an excellent warranty program. We like John Deere for the big tractors, which we use to mow highways. The John Deere 1545 is used in right-of-way mowing for schools. Our tractor department has a 15-foot Bushhog with Rhino cutters. We have heavier tractors where the deck and mower are all one unit giving us 15-foot tri-decks. We have enough of the properties that can use large equipment, which ends up being cheaper than labor every time, especially if you buy the right piece. We use Stihl products for our hand-held equipment.”
“Our focus on marketing has just increased ten-fold in the last ten-years,” explains Taylor. “We are trying to become active in as many of the trade associations that are applicable to our business as we can. We assign a point person to each association which brings in a relationship focus.
Taylor says he is having a lot of fun being a part of Yellowstone. “I went to a convention recently and the overall environment was depressed,” he notes. “All the discussions were, ‘What do you do in a down market?’ ‘How to protect yourself in a slowdown,’ and we happen to be in just the opposite place. We’re growing and looking for partners. We may have to accept a smaller profit margin but ultimately, we will get a bigger market share.”
Taylor is heavily involved with seeking out acquisition candidates for the Yellowstone Group. “Some people see they can sell part or all of their company and increase their opportunities for personal growth,” says Taylor. “Yellowstone really gets it. Their business model is to establish platform companies in major metropolitan areas and let the owners continue to run them with corporate support and no interference. The original owner’s nature is to be an entrepreneur. If you force a cookie cutter corporate approach on those kinds of people, you could end up losing them.
Yellowstone Landscape Group’s corporate office is in Dallas, Texas.
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