Today we’d like to introduce you to Richard John Bare.
Richard John, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I grew up in the Green Industry in Youngstown, Ohio. My father and uncles had a large landscape/nursery/garden center business and they were very well known and used by folks like the Mellon Banking Family, General Motors Executives, Steel Mill Magnates, etc. They did work in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and all points in between. The President of the company, Terrace Gardens, Inc., was a very gifted and renowned Landscape Architect. His name was Dave Metzger, and when I first attended The Ohio State University his drawings were hung around the walls of one of the LA classrooms.
I couldn’t handle the math requirement for a degree in Landscape Architecture so I enrolled in Landscape Horticulture and Design, and I also took some Arboriculture courses as I loved trees.
After earning a five year degree from OSU, I couldn’t find a job in Columbus where my wife and I wanted to stay so I started my own landscape business, Fern Hill. Not knowing a thing about how to run an actual business, I plowed into mowing maintenance, tree work, snow plowing, and whatever else I could muster for work. I made good money when I did all the work myself, but employees ate me alive as I had no idea how to create measurable systems to organize their work. So after three years of dismal earnings, a large utility line clearing company bought me out and things improved greatly. I learned a lot from one of the owners, Jack Brown, and it was an invaluable experience learning how to create the infrastructure for a business.
After three years at Karl Kuemmerling Associates I was made an incredible offer from a new upstart, ChemLawn, where I also learned an awful lot about business, too, from the owner Richard L. Duke.
I stayed there for three years until Dick died tragically at the young age of 48 from a heart attack. That’s when I started Arbor-Nomics, in 1980, almost 40 years ago.
I got to where we are today by enticing great people to join up with my vision to be doing over 15mm by 2017, and 20mm by 2025. I also incentivized a few top people with phantom stock options which pay them off handsomely when they retire. Now we are working on a program to become an ESOP upon hitting some financial goals like Davey Tree, and Publix.
I also have taken many a great businessman to lunch and use them for mentoring and leading me on how to grow and manage great businesses. People love to tell about themselves and the conversations are usually mutually beneficial.
I also belong and have belonged to professional mentoring organizations such as Vistage International where you meet monthly with business peers and discuss your problems after listening to a professional speaker on some important topic. One of the biggest advantages to these groups is the networking that you get into, some of which continue today. These groups are attended by top M&A and labor law attorneys, CPA’s, business leaders from very large construction companies, utilities, and retail stores. You hear about their challenges and can hear the wise advice that is shared with them.
Another big boost that I’ve gotten is from reading great books, number one of course being the Bible, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Think and Grow Rich, First Break All the Rules, The E-Myth, and Traction with the EOSystem.
Four times per year myself and some of our employees meet up with competitors from around the country and we discuss employment issues, marketing and advertising, growing our companies, cutting expenses, etc. It is a great means for venting and realizing that your problems are not just yours alone, they are universal to all businessmen.
Has it been a smooth road?
At first, my biggest barrier to success was just running the business. Creating systems, organization, avoiding unwarranted risk, etc. I learned how to listen to my employees more, and I learned all about cash flow, the danger of debt, and following the rules from cities, the federal government, and local municipalities.
It is an interesting conundrum for small business because you can advance over your bigger competitors by not following the rules that they do, but you have to be sure the risks are calculated. So you may skip the expense of having non-compete agreements but then you might have a key employee clean your clock while you stand by helplessly and watch.
We just spent $200,000 out at Graham Manufacturing to get three new machines that are OSHA compliant but now that Trump is in office, I regret the outlay because I don’t think he is going to continue all the government watchdog stuff as much as previous administrations.
So there is that constant balancing act, risk versus reward, and the bigger you get, the higher the stakes can get. The choices that you have to make are gut wrenching. That mate you pick, the way you raise your children, the neighborhood you live in, the church you attend (or choose not to), these build up slowly to form a house built on sand or rock. If you allow lying to go on, drinking, cheating of clients or employees, these can all bring you down. The Golden Rule is huge!
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Arbor-Nomics Turf story. Tell us more about the business.
Our biggest unit is the Turfgrass treatment company, (Arbor-Nomics with over 66 trucks and five locations in two states. It is 37 years old. We service almost 19,000 properties.
Next is Capital City Manufacturing (dba Graham Spray Equipment), that we bought about five years ago. It is almost 40 years old, (1978) and Max Graham built all of our trucks from day one. Without his help, I probably couldn’t have gotten started. We doubled the size of Graham in four years and are slowly working our way towards profitability. There is no end to the equipment you can buy for manufacturing.
We picked up Simply Organic four years ago, it has been rough getting the right people in the right seats on the bus but now we are growing it well and slowly working towards positive cash flow.
About one year ago God dropped a great opportunity in our laps in the form of an off road bumper manufacturing company, so now we have a web page with a cart and we are ready for business! It is called WAM BUMPERS which stands for Winchers and Multicarriers, our website is wambumpers.com.
Contact Info:
- Address: Arbor-Nomics® Turf, Inc., 651 Langford Drive, Norcross, GA 30071
- Website: http://www.arbor-nomics.com
- Phone: 770.447.6037
- Email: richard@arbor-nomics.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/arbornomics/
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