The salesman who walks a yard for Great Lakes Landscape does not disappear once the estimate is written. When the crew pulls up, he is the one waiting for it.
“When you have a guy out for an appointment and you give them details about your yard and your property, he’s also the one that meets the crew on site and runs them through the project and ensures that things are done properly,” says Tom Placek, the company’s general manager.
Placek does a lot of the selling himself, so he is describing his own job as much as anyone’s. “My salesmen are also my direct project managers,” he says. The homeowner explains the yard once, to one person, and that person carries the explanation to the people holding the shovels.
He ties the arrangement to the company’s size. “We’re the right size,” he says. “We’re small enough that you kind of get that at-home feel.” What he wants out of it is a finished yard that matches the conversation. “Delivering the right product at the right time is really a big part of ours.”
He does not claim the weather lets him do that perfectly. The company takes pride in its reliability, he says, and it is something he would love to brag about. Then he adds a caveat. “I think just being realistic in this business with the way weather conditions are and stuff like that, it’s tough.”
Weather sets the shape of the whole operation. Based in Menomonee Falls, the company takes jobs up to about 30 miles out. Its main work is residential construction and landscape renovation. When snow comes, the trucks turn to commercial plowing. “Obviously our big focus is pushing snow,” Placek says.
The business grew out of hard times. The owner started it during the recession, when, as Placek puts it, there was “not a lot of good stuff going on.” He knows of no plan to sell it or hand it down. He expects it to keep getting bigger with “a couple hungry salesmen, a hungry owner.”
One customer who hired the company for a dry-stack stone wall later described a crew that needed far more work than planned to get the stones right. The job ran past the quoted time, the customer wrote, and the bill never went up. The project manager got a mention by name.
Placek describes that habit without dressing it up. “We take very good care of our customers and chase our projects till the end,” he says, “sometimes to our own detriment.”