Twenty years running landscape architecture firms · Boulder, then St. Louis
$2.5M to $8M, and what it actually took.
Every consultant has a growth number. The number is the least interesting part. What matters is which walls you hit on the way, in what order, and what you had to build to get past each one.
I have been through that climb twice. First as VP of Operations for a design-build firm in Boulder, Colorado, then as General Manager of a St. Louis firm where I also carried sales management, recruiting and the HR side. Two markets, two companies, the same ceiling both times. That repetition is the reason I trust the pattern.
2014 $2.5M2022 $8M+40 direct reports3 divisions
What I walked into
A good company with good people and no way of knowing which work made money. Job costs were tracked after the fact and never fed back into pricing. Labor went onto jobs at wage. Equipment lived in overhead. Gross margin was a company-wide number, which meant the divisions that were losing money were invisible, funded quietly by the ones that were not.
None of that is unusual. Nearly every company I look at now has some version of it, and it holds up fine until about $2M, when it stops.
What we changed, in order
- 01
- Burdened laborCosted a field hour honestly — taxes, workers comp, benefits, and the non-billable hours nobody was counting. The multiplier came in far above what we had been estimating with, which explained several years of thin margin in one afternoon.
- 02
- Overhead recoveryWorked out what indirect cost actually was per billable field hour and rebuilt pricing on it, instead of on a markup that had been inherited and never tested.
- 03
- Margin by divisionSplit the P&L so each division carried its own overhead. That is where the uncomfortable conversations were, and where the real decisions got made.
- 04
- The management layerWrote down the estimating process so someone other than me could run it, then hired into it. This took the longest by a wide margin and it is the step most companies skip.
- 05
- Sales, recruiting and the people sideThe GM seat added what the operations seat never had to touch — running the sales function, recruiting into a tight labor market, and the HR work nobody puts on an org chart. A pricing fix does not survive contact with a sales team that was never told why the number moved, or a crew that turns over every spring.
What failed first
The first manager hire. I hired a good person into a job that had never been written down, handed them standards that lived in my head, and expected them to reconstruct it. That is not a hiring mistake, it is an operations mistake wearing a hiring mistake’s clothes, and it cost us most of a season.
It is also the reason the install work now starts with documenting the role before anyone talks about filling it.
What I would tell you before you hire me
- None of this is fast. Pricing changes take a season to show up in the P&L, and a management layer takes longer.
- The numbers are usually worse than the owner expects for about two weeks, and then they are actionable.
- If your problem is that the phone is not ringing, this is the wrong work and I will say so on the first call.
Why I am doing this now
I still own McGrail Landscape, but it is a small boutique design-build practice serving a rural community hours from the nearest metro, running a few clients by choice. Semi-retired, deliberately. Compared to the companies I work with, I am on an island, and that is the point — I am not a competitor sizing you up, and there is no version of this where your numbers help me win a bid against you.
After thirty years designing, building and maintaining landscapes, the work that interests me now is handing it over. Training so a standard outlives the person who set it. Finding the efficiency already hiding in a schedule, or at the estimating desk. Getting a team through a complicated problem so they own the answer instead of being handed it.
That last one is not a soft skill, it is the whole job. The arithmetic is the easy part. A number nobody on the crew believes in does not survive the season, and the manager hire above failed for exactly that reason — I handed someone a standard that lived in my head. Finding the lever is half the work. Pulling it takes the team.