Ables Landscapes: Business Owner Shares Failure and Success

Welcome to SC Green TV. My name is Ryan Watkins and I'm your host. Our goal is to provide you with inspiration and education to help you grow your green industry business. This episode is brought to you by the Horticulture Program at Spartanburg Community College. Enroll today to grow your career in the green industry. Dream it, chase it, live it at Spartanburg Community College. Today we're going to be meeting with a successful design build firm in beautiful Charleston, South Carolina called Ables Landscapes. The owner, Mark Ables, is going to be telling us a little bit about their company. Let's go talk to Mark. Let's get a few business key analytics. So what is your gross revenue? This year we're on track to be right about seven and a half million. Okay, and number of team members? We'll be about 56 people right now. And how long you been in business? So my dad actually started the company in 1975, so that's 48 years ago. I bought the company from my dad eight years ago as he retired. So almost 50 years. Talk to me about the breakdown of revenue between design build and maintenance. We're about 60 percent design build, 40 percent maintenance. We run about 10 crews on the maintenance side, four installation crews. We've got a color plus, seasonal color crew. We've got irrigation tech, that kind of thing. What time do your crews normally arrive? So they get here at 7 and they're usually heading home around 5 30, Monday through Thursday. Fridays, the install crews still work Fridays, so they're getting almost 5 10s. Plenty of work out there. What time do they have to leave the shop? So the goal of maintenance is that they're out the door at 7 30. So they arrive at what time? Well, we give them a 20 minute window, so they're 7 to 7 20. If you're here at 7 21, it's late, but then the goal is that you're out the door, out the shop at 7 30. A little longer on install, depending on what all they have to load. So the maintenance team, if they're running late, they got 10 minutes to get their stuff, get in the truck and go. Yeah, usually, hopefully somebody on their team's already here loading the truck and they're out the door, but it holds them accountable. This episode is brought to you by Brownswood Nursery and Landscape. Growing quality plants since 1978. Now offering delivery across South Carolina. Visit BrownswoodNursery.com and mention SCGreenTV for a discount on your first order. So Mark, why do you do what you do? That's a good question. You know, early on, there was a few years when I was still working the crews and I was questioning that. But the more I got into it, I really fell in love with the landscape world. To see a project go from start to finish. We're working in Charleston, South Carolina, which has some of the most beautiful homes, beautiful gardens in the world. And it's easy to take that for granted, but when you step back, it is amazing. Some of the things we get to do on these properties and to see people's joy, they really get like a piece from what we do. To see it from the design all the way through is something special. What makes Abel so remarkable? Well, I think a lot of that goes back to the foundation that my dad laid of building the company and really just being committed to excellence. Just not wavering on that at all. You know, if something's going to go wrong, we're going to fix it. And so 50 years of doing that, you get a reputation of saying, all right, hey, that was not only a smooth project, but it was fun along the way. Sure, there were some bumps, but Abel's fixed it. They did what they said they were going to do. And they really take a lot of pride. So that's helped with the reputation for sure. What is the legacy you want Abel's to leave? Our vision statement is we want to create a legacy of excellence by being faithful stewards of God's people, plants, and purpose. So everybody wants to be excellent at what they do, but we had to think, what does that mean? So we want to be the best, the way we treat our people, our customers. We want to be known for that, how we treat our people. The plants is kind of with the work itself. We want to do like high quality work. And then the purpose is really like goes to our culture. It's what the reason we kind of get up every day. And for us, that's a kind of glorified God. I know that's the faith part of it, which is personal, but really it's, that's what gets us up every day. And that's what we want to be known for in a hundred years. So Mark, we'd like to ask, give us one mistake and one success, mistake first. One costly one last year, it was a job downtown, south of Barad, installed a pool, pool deck, a whole nine yards. I was in charge of setting the elevations for the pool deck and I miss it. There was another door around the corner. That was a different elevation. We laid the whole pool deck. It was just the wrong elevation. We had to put us, ended up having to put a step in it. And the customers were not happy. You know, some people might've been okay with it, but they were not. And so I had to own that. And that was probably a $50,000 tear out and put back. But after like a deep breath, I was like, you know what, if we do the right thing, it's going to pay off over the long run. We just got to eat it now and, and try not to think about it too much. And in the end, it turned out beautiful. Are you still thinking about it? Every once in a while, I still think about it. You know, when my people make mistakes, it's a, it's a good point for me to have grace with them and say, Hey, I've made much more expensive mistakes than that. We just got to get past it and don't do it again. Learn from it and move on. Now, could you give us a success, give us a win, something that you guys have implemented or done that you feel like has really worked well? We try to celebrate wins all the time. So you get those emails or those phone calls. And we share those with the team members once a month publicly. So everybody gets to hear their praise. So that's a lot of fun. Culture wise is one of the things I'm most proud of, over the last three years, really. A lot of that goes to our dream manager, Morgan, who's really dedicated to building a culture of engagement here and, and growing our people. We've had a shift in our mindset of really pouring into our people, kind of putting our money where our mouth is there and saying, all right, you're on a crew now, but what does that look like for the rest of your life? And so what can we do to grow you? And so we've seen some real big wins through that for personal, personally for our people. And that's something I'm probably most proud of. Can I meet her? Absolutely. I'd love for you to meet her. Okay, great. I want to tell her one of my dreams I had last night. It was crazy. Pizza was involved. I love it. We'll see if she can help. Yeah, hopefully she can interpret that. For more inspiration and education, please visit scgreen.org and check out our next episode. Until then, keep cultivating excellence in the green industry. And remember, stay SC Green. You excited? About to surf? Catch a big wave? Mark's a surfer. How fat do I look? And do you want to rotisserie me? Camera's rolling. Shake it out, Mark. Shake it out. So I'm gonna take the glasses off because I can't see. All right, here we go. Here we go. So, sorry. I'm tearing up because of my cough. I couldn't let it out. Check out our next episode as we help inspire, no, as we provide more content that will ultimately, nope. Until then, until then, until then, keep cultivating. We got something there, right?