“It’s not like I sell the job and then there’s two or three other people that are in the mix and then they don’t ever see me again,” Matt says.
At many landscape companies, the person who walks a yard and writes the bid is gone once the contract is signed. Valley Pacific Landscape works the other way. Matt goes out on most of the company’s sales visits. The person who sits down with a homeowner to talk through a yard is the person that homeowner keeps dealing with once the work starts. “You build a relationship with the customer,” he says.
He credits that first meeting with a lot of the jobs the company wins. Homeowners, in his experience, tend to pick the person they feel comfortable with. He says the company is “not really pushy, from what I hear,” and that its design ideas usually land well.
One homeowner described how that first visit went for her family. Her neighbor had already hired Valley Pacific, so she asked for Matt to come by. He walked the backyard and came back with a professional drawing of the pavers, turf and plants the family wanted.
The jobs tend to be big. Matt puts roughly 80 to 85 percent of the work in custom residential remodels or new builds, combining hardscape, turf, lighting, planting and drainage. He calls the specialty outdoor home renovation. The company’s site makes a related case: a homeowner shouldn’t have to line up several firms to finish one yard, so design and construction stay under one company.
The crews are the company’s own people, Matt says, not subcontractors. Before a project starts, the team holds what he calls a job meet to walk through the plans, the steps and how everything’s going to take place. The aim is simple. “Nobody’s losing money and their customers are happy,” he says.
Once a crew starts a yard, it stays. “We start and we don’t get off these jobs until they’re finished,” he says. “We don’t jump around.” When a crew is running behind, he says, the company tells the customer.
He teaches that by example and through training and meetings. His own sense of how to run a job came from years of doing them. “Figure out what works, what doesn’t,” he says.
Matt grew up in the trade. His father had a landscape company, and he went into the same line of work. Valley Pacific has operated since 2013. The owner, Dave, started it, and Matt says he came on not long after and has worked alongside him ever since. He calls it kind of a family business.
The company’s website lists Orange County and the Inland Empire as its two service areas, each with its own phone line. Matt describes the reach as roughly a 40-mile radius. He’ll go as far as Temecula, or up to Claremont.