Scaling a Landscaping Business from 0 to 7 Figures with Chris McManus

Chris McManus is the owner of GC Landscaping, a landscaping business he built to multiple seven figures within seven years, right out of high school. He now owns that company as well as two other businesses.

He is competitive, and he is quick to say that fast is a relative term, because there are stories of people doing it in half the time. He graduated high school racing motocross and trying to do it professionally, making a little money but not enough. His parents were supportive the whole way, but when he graduated and turned 18 they told him he could keep living there and needed to help pay his bills. Racing was not letting him do that.

He knew he did not want to go to school. He never liked school and always liked working with his hands. He did not know what else to do, so he started mowing grass, because it was flexible, he could create his own schedule, and he could travel the country on weekends to race. He did that for a year or two before finally hanging up the racing boots. The first year the business did about $37,000 in gross revenue. He took all the energy and drive he had put into racing his whole life and put it into the business, because he did not know what else he was going to do with his life.

The commitment came at roughly the same time he stopped racing. He has always been the kind of person who goes all in rather than dipping a toe. It was not a burn the ships moment, because he did not have a plan B. There were no ships to burn. He was about 20 or 21 at the time.

He also names the advantage he had. A lot of people who go out on their own have families and children, and going out on a limb like that takes a lot of faith and grit. He had none of that pressure. If it failed he would go live at his parents' house and find somewhere else to work or go rent a house. He does not want to come off arrogant about it, but for him it was just something he was going to do, and it did not feel like a big deal. People asked how his little grass mowing company was going, a question he still gets asked to this day and one that irks him a little more now than it did then.

The move from yard maintenance to bigger projects came naturally. Everything was residential at first. People called and he mowed the lawn and pulled the weeds out of the beds, and that evolved into requests for new mulch in the spring, then planting a couple of bushes, then fixing drain lines. A year or two in, the company did its first job for a builder, a full new construction house with all the drainage, the landscaping, and the plants. That was in a nice mountain neighborhood, and word spread like wildfire. Before long that neighborhood was the only place he was working, because they were building a lot of houses.

Then people started asking for patios. He had no earthly idea how to build a patio. He has always operated the same way when he does not know something: research it, study it, do his homework, and build it by the book without shortcutting anything, even if he loses money doing it. He lost money on a lot of projects that way, and calls that his college education. Almost everything the company has added to its service portfolio has been self-taught. The pool side was the exception, because that acquisition came with relationships, vendors, and a lot of training.

Getting the word out in the early days was scrappy. He posted on his personal Facebook page. He left business cards anywhere he could, and does not think he ever got a single lead from them. He put flyers out wherever he could, including stacks at businesses owned by family friends, and he did get work from those. He called family friends who were building and told them what he could do, pestering them a little until they gave him a chance. Once they gave him the chance, the company ran with it. There were some direct mailers. Essentially any free organic advertising he could think of, he did, and he took anything that came in.

That evolved into networking, which he says he is still terrible at and describes as a learned skill for him. He was so hungry to grow and scale the business that he did not feel he had a choice about doing things he did not enjoy. He needed to go out and talk to people, meet people, and cold call.

He does not remember that season being stressful at all. He had one or two employees, probably high school friends. There was almost no debt because he barely owned anything, some wheelbarrows and an old lawnmower. If he worked 20 hours a week it was fine, and if he worked 50 hours a week it was fine. The only person he had to keep up with was himself, with no wife or children yet, and his nature was to go hard.

Today the company has about 24 people on staff, spread across three divisions in the landscaping business. Maintenance mows grass, does turf treatments, cleans up leaves, prunes shrubs, and puts out mulch. Install puts in patios, fire pits, and retaining walls. The pool division puts in pools.

The focus for the last 12 months has been scaling the maintenance division, because that is recurring revenue. It is a subscription-based model with a flat fee every month, 12 months a year. Their market has far more residential opportunity than commercial, so they are heavy on the residential side. On the install side they do not take everything that comes in, and want to make sure the work is up their alley. Most of that comes organically through word of mouth and repeat customers, with very little marketing spend. The only marketing spend in the history of the company has been on the pool division, which they started this year and signed with an agency in late spring to push, because it was new and the trucks were not rebranded.

The target is 50 percent of revenue from maintenance and 50 percent from install. The recurring side gives some security. It is not a big moneymaker and is very low margin, not quite a loss leader but close. What it brings is additional work and a lot of exposure, with trucks constantly sitting at businesses, in neighborhoods, and on residential properties. It brings in a lot of work, and he says if he could figure out how to track that he would be doing well.

When the company does a residential new construction install, a full $100,000 or $200,000 landscape job, it is very rare for them not to also get the maintenance contract for that property once the install is finished. The goal is for all the divisions to feed the rest of the divisions.

The shift to a structured, strategic approach only happened in about the last two years. Before that they were flying by the seat of their pants. His definition of financial tracking was glancing at his checking account and making sure it had more money in it than it did last week. He calls it horrendous.

A couple of years earlier, when he was still in the field producing all the work, he would be on a lawnmower 30 or 40 hours a week with his AirPods in listening to music, thinking there had to be something more productive he could do with the time. Then he found Audible. That first year he got through 50 or 60 books, one or two a week. That was when he started seeing a longer-term goal for the company and wrapping his head around what he wanted out of the business, what it would require, and what the end goal was. It took a couple of years of maturing and developing before he really started structuring it.

Up until two years ago, the company was running 12 or 14 employees with no management. It was him. There was no admin. He did everything. He still carried a cell phone that the office phone forwarded to so he could take calls in the middle of whatever he was doing. He did all the sales, all the scheduling, all the invoicing, all the accounts payable. He prided himself on it, and remembers his accountant being impressed that the overhead cost was so low. It was low because he was doing all of it. On the back end it was an absolute mess, with no data and nothing he could track or keep up with.

His advice from that experience is to hire the admin first. Hire the admin before the crews, before the field workers, before the techs. Make sure somebody is answering the phone, checking emails, and paying the bills. He had vendors calling to ask whether he was going to pay them on bills two months late that he did not even remember seeing, and he would stop what he was doing to go write a check and take it to them. He built it backwards, which he thinks a lot of owners are guilty of. You stack levels onto the business without a foundation, sitting on a pile of sand. That works for two or three floors, and then at the third, fourth, or fifth floor you cannot build any higher because everything you are doing is propping up the foundation. So the last two years have been about taking a breath, maybe not adding so much revenue that year, and cleaning up what they had first so they could make the next jump.

The stress started showing its face around the time they crossed seven figures. He would look back and find maintenance contracts he had not invoiced in six months, with people owing thousands of dollars that was not their fault, because he had not sent the bill. Balls started getting dropped on quality control. Trucks were not getting washed. Tools broke or did not get serviced. Small things that add up until it feels like looking at a mountain.

It was gradual rather than a single wake-up call. He kept thinking he probably should hire somebody to help in the office, probably should hire this role, probably should hire that role, until it built to the point where he would spend two or three days scouring, recruiting, and cold calling until he found somebody he liked for the role.

He was a little nervous about that first hire, because it was the first one that would not immediately generate revenue, at least not directly. He paid the first office assistant around $30,000 to $35,000, the lowest entry-level position in the company, and says it was something he should have done two or three years before he finally did.

That person is no longer with him, and that has happened repeatedly. He has lost a handful of good people he hired without the systems and structures in place. When he hired them, the role truly only needed 20 to 30 hours a week. As the company scaled it became 30, then 40, then 50, and they ended up wearing 15 hats and burning out because they were doing too much. He lost good talent and people who had become friends after several years with him.

Now he will not hire a management role until there is a very detailed job description, SOPs, and essentially everything written out across the board, so he can hand them the sheets of paper or an iPad with the Google Docs and tell them to study it, go back to it with questions, and then cut them loose. Before he even starts interviewing, the question he asks is how he can make sure this person is set up to succeed and grow with the company.

A couple of years ago there were no core values in the hiring process. If you walked in with a driver's license and a pulse, you got a job, which he thinks most people in blue collar industries are guilty of sometimes. There are still roles where he wants what he calls gray hair, somebody with experience. But over the last 12 months it has evolved into wanting a good attitude, a positive outlook on life, a good work ethic, and a go-getter. He would take that over experience, because they have hired experienced people whose knowledge and life experience were great, but who did not get along with him or the team, or created a culture shock that did not fit what they are building.

He describes himself as a Gen Z running the business a little differently than a boomer or a millennial might. They have younger people on the team and older people on the team, and he believes you need at least the awareness to approach each team member differently, because they communicate differently and come from different generations and backgrounds. Somebody older takes a more stern talking to about what went wrong and making sure it does not happen again. A 21-year-old handled that way will probably walk out feeling deflated and may not come to work the next day. That does not mean the younger person lacks potential. It means the approach and the communication style are different, and a leader needs to be flexible enough to adjust rather than being rigid about my way or the highway. He has never believed in that. He believes in setting parameters, and as long as the work gets done inside those parameters, in the time and budget available, he does not much care how.

Learning to communicate across generations was easier for him with the younger generation, which he suspects is partly his age. With more experienced team members, he was approaching them with the same line of communication and could tell over time that it was starting to get abused. It took one or two situations going a little too far before he learned to set a different tone. Part of that came from hiring people with experience and watching how they handled those situations from the background, noticing that it was not how he would have done it but that it worked well, and making a mental note.

His biggest lesson on who to hire is attitude over everything. Attitude, morals, work ethic. Work ethic is hard to find in an interview or even a second or third interview. He has had people come in with a resume that trounces his own, but they walk in pissed at the world, and he can pretty much tell when they walk through the door that it is not going to work. For the last two or three years he has been looking for a positive attitude and somebody who wants to grow rather than treat it like a job.

Tenure comes in seasons. He has about 10 people who have been there three, four, five plus years, and another half who have been anywhere from a few months to a year or so. It frustrates him because the company is one of the higher priced, if not the highest priced, in their area, and that is deliberate. They want well-maintained trucks, well-paid employees, at least some benefits, and a professional look with guys in full uniforms, hats, shirts, and pants.

The difficulty is that lawn mowing has a very low cost of entry. His perspective on that has changed, and the answer was refining the ideal customer. Over the last two years he has eliminated 80 to 90 percent of the lawn maintenance accounts he had held since he started, through price increases. With those increases came a lot more services. If somebody calls now and asks him to mow the grass every week, there is a base package with a long list of things included. Or that person can hire the guy down the street for $35 a cut who shows up in a beat-up truck and trailer wearing a t-shirt and old shorts. That is fine, and it does not bother him. They are just not the company for that customer.

For the customer who wants a company that arrives within 15 minutes of the same time every week, with the guys in full uniform and the yard immaculate, and somebody sent back out that same day or the next if it is not, the price reflects it. The goal behind all of it is that somebody who is happy mowing grass for the rest of their life can make a healthy living wage that supports a family. He feels the company is right at the top of the market now, so they are working on getting creative about services that bring enough value to justify what they charge.

Getting clear on the ideal customer also took the last 18 to 24 months. Until then he did a really poor job of saying no. He started learning that taking every piece of work that comes in is often more trouble than it is worth, especially when it is outside what they are good at. Rather than simply turning work down, they built a small network of referral partners who specialize in other things or serve other areas. He does not want to say no and leave it there. He wants to help and make the customer's life easier, because that is who they are as a company.

For an existing customer it is different. If a customer calls and wants a deck, which is not in their wheelhouse, he will capitalize on the relationship and say yes, then call a subcontractor or affiliate who specializes in deck work and meet them the next day to measure it out. He is not looking to be a general contractor and make money subbing the work. He wants to take care of his customer.

On reputation, he wants to be known as professional, reliable, and honest, and as the guy. If a customer needs something and he cannot help, he wants to find somebody who can. Some of that is personal brand, but mostly it is that these customers pay the bills and he genuinely cares about them. To this day, if they get fired off a job he loses sleep that night and probably the next two or three, even when it was completely out of their control. They have had customers they could never please, where the relationship continued longer than it should have before it was finally cut, and even knowing it was not on them, it still burns him up.

Three or four years ago a customer would ask for something off the wall, clearly not in their wheelhouse, and he would say yes. That typically meant working until nine or ten at night and falling behind on what he should have been focused on. Because it was not in his wheelhouse he might not be the best at it or might screw something up, which led to calls over the weekend asking him to come fix it. It is the kind of snowball you do not want. He is stubborn, so it took that happening more times than he cares to admit before he wrapped his head around the idea that he could say no, or connect them with somebody who is good at it. He does not have to be good at everything.

The bigger changes two years ago came from a lot of things at once. Growth from 2023 to 2024 was another big jump, and he could see balls getting dropped. His whole day was putting out fires, with a lot of employee turnover. That was also when they did the acquisition of the pool company. He had the foresight to see that it would take a lot of his time. It was a big purchase, outside their normal operations, and he wanted to be heavily involved, as he still is on the pool side. There are weeks where he will work a good 40 hours in the field, which he calls horrible, but a topic for another day.

He was also reading a book, possibly a Dan Martell book, about direct reports. Past somewhere between six and eight direct reports, people get mismanaged and you cannot do it well. He had about 15, and he could tell. So they hired a general manager, then quickly a production manager in charge of field operations, then a maintenance manager to run the maintenance division. That added overhead cost, and it immediately bought him back. If there was not a pool project he was working on that week, he could take the whole week off and not really worry about his phone, and things would keep rolling. Seeing that was a cool feeling.

The other side of it was money. They were getting into low to mid seven-figure revenue, where the payroll number every week is huge and the vendor bill every week is huge. Collections had to be on point, and they had to make sure everything they worked for was coming in. They had to watch material spending, because now they were buying material for six jobs at a time instead of one or two. A couple of years earlier, if he screwed that up he could work all weekend and make enough money to cover it. It was getting to the point where he could work all weekend personally and not make a dent, so there would be no point. It was the culmination of all of it: the business was big enough that he needed to pull his head out of the sand and start working on the business rather than in it.

Asked where he brings the most value as an owner, he says nobody has ever asked him that. He lands on morale, leadership, and sales, and then on being the voice of reason. His maintenance manager is a younger guy with limited experience, only about a year in, and has done a nice job running seven or eight people and around a hundred accounts. When a fire comes up, that manager gets uptight and hits the panic button, and Chris's job is to say it is okay and ask how they should fix it. He is working on not handing over the solution. For the last three or four months his rule has been that nobody brings him a problem without a solution for it, and he does not want to hear about it until they have one. That helps their growth tremendously, once they realize there is trust there and that screwing it up is survivable. The only time he steps in directly is when it starts getting really expensive, and then he will say they can learn, but maybe not this time.

His favorite part is all of it, including the tough days. This is his first business, so every level has been new. He did not know how to run a million dollar business, then a two million dollar business, then three. Every day he feels like he has no clue what he is doing, and within reason that part is fun to him, because every day is a challenge and probably something new. The pool side is new and exciting for the same reason. Even a small, basic, lower-cost pool is usually something that homeowner has wanted for 30 or 40 years, and the biggest purchase they have made outside their house. Finishing one and seeing those people over the moon, jumping in the first second they get, and getting pictures of the grandkids swimming that weekend, is very gratifying.

He does not disagree with being described as the visionary rather than the integrator, but adds an asterisk, because it has burned him. A couple of years ago he was not happy with the pace of growth, even though they were growing about 100 percent a year, and it was not fast enough for him. He started poking his nose where it probably did not belong and found a local company whose owner was ready to retire and, by word of the grapevine, thinking about selling. He pushed and pushed. It was a six-figure purchase and he did not have it sitting around, so financing was required. He kept walking into banks and kept getting told no. He finally found one that said yes, but split across lines of credit and equipment finance, essentially making a hefty six-figure purchase on a three-year term. That meant a huge bill due every single month.

He forced it through because of his own stubbornness and impatience, wanting it done by year's end for a clean break. The bank told him that if he could stomach the payments for a couple of months and the finances held up, he could come back in the spring and they would roll it into an SBA loan on a 10-year term. He leveraged his house. He leveraged every single thing he owned, including his personal vehicle. Everything he owned had a lien on it. He was married at the time and did not have kids, and says he is not sure he even told his wife their house was on the hook. He just knew he would figure it out somehow.

A couple of months after closing he went back to start the SBA process, and the bank said their guidelines had changed and they were not interested. He went home and stewed about it, then decided they had made it a couple of months and it had not been a big deal, and that he would have the thing paid for in three years and be printing money. He wishes he could go back and smack that version of himself in the head.

That worked for about six months. Then they had two large install projects running simultaneously, both six-figure projects and the two largest they had ever done, and he underestimated both. They lost about 60 grand on one and about 65 grand on the other. Almost 130 grand in the span of a month, which was a lot of money then and still is.

That dried up any nest egg he had. He had no lines of credit left because he had maxed them all out to buy the business, so he had to borrow some very expensive money. That was the closest he has come to being scared, because by then he had built up enough of a business to have something to lose, and he did not want to lose it. They dug out of it and eventually got an SBA loan, which took almost another year. But there were a good six or seven months where he did not get to think about growth or expansion. It was pure survival mode, juggling every week who got paid and what got paid. It taught him a lot about forecasting, about paying attention to the finances, and about job costing. He wishes he could go back in time and tell himself to breathe, do it correctly, find investors, and not force it. When they made the pool acquisition, he was not in a rush, and made sure that if it got done, it got done correctly.

The growth target he had been chasing was five million in sales. Asked what that number represented, his answer is that it did not represent anything. It just looked good and it was where he wanted to be. He has always had goalposts: if he could get to four crews he would be in great shape, or a hundred thousand dollars a year take-home salary, or a five million dollar valuation. Two or three years ago he paid a lot of money to go to an event, and one of the things they covered was whether your goals are big enough, because if you do this correctly you can go as far as you want.

That was a wake-up call. He does not need a private jet and has never wanted to be a billionaire, but he has always been financially motivated, both for selfish reasons and because he wants to be able to help people, since he knows what it is like to be in a spot where you feel you cannot get any help. The new target is a $25 million valuation, and that number comes from what it would allow: everything materialistic he could have dreamed about, plus 10 or 15 million in investment money, money to donate, money to give back to the community, and probably seed money to start another business. He tells himself that whenever he exits this business he will retire for a year or take a sabbatical, but he knows better. It will probably last three or four weeks before he is going crazy.

In the meantime, he has a son at home who is about a year and a half old, and he wants to be there for him. He does not want to work a hundred hour weeks, and had mostly gotten past that season before the pool business put him back in it, which is okay because it is a season. He admits he is so laser focused on the end goal that the journey is just a byproduct, and he has tried to do better mentally since about the time his son was born, because life goes by fast. They bought a nice little boat last year and are looking at property on a lake. They are out on the lake most weekends as long as he is not working. It is tough for him sometimes, and he keeps reminding himself to enjoy the journey and take every day as it comes.

There are about five years he can barely remember, where he did nothing but work. He did not see friends or go to parties. He was 21 or 22 with childhood best friends he would go years without seeing, because they were out hanging out and he was working at 9 p.m. on a Saturday. He has no regrets about it. But he is bad about the guilt of not working. If it is not dark outside, he feels like he should be working, regardless of the day or the holiday, and he is trying to do better at allowing himself not to work.

Of all the business books, the one that flipped the light switch was The 10X Rule by Grant Cardone. He says that might get him some hate, but if anybody asks what the book is, that is the one, no question. Asked whether he sees himself in Cardone, he would like to think so but is not sure he is justified in giving himself that compliment. He listened to Be Obsessed and came away thinking he is not Grant Cardone, that they view life very differently. He also has a close friend who owns his own business, works at most 40 hours a week, and is killing it, with a bigger business and a pile of money in the bank. He thinks the traits associated with Cardone can be detrimental if they are not focused in the right areas, and says he is guilty of that himself, so worried about operations or sales or estimating that he is not spending time where he should be, when he should be zoomed out at the 50,000 foot view.

What has helped is going into each day with two or three things that have to get done, the biggest needle movers, and disregarding everything else as best he can until those are accomplished. He only started doing that this year, and it has made a substantial difference.

On a personal level, 10xing means cutting down on hours at work. There are materialistic things, a house and some property, that he would like to accomplish, and he has been fortunate enough to buy some of the adult toys along the way. He is reaching the age where the question is how to get to the dream house or dream piece of land while only working 40 hours a week and actually being able to enjoy those things. On a business level it is hitting the $25 million target, and doing it while being as efficient and lean and well-oiled as possible without losing the culture, the quality control, the servant leadership, or the care they have for their customers.

The two things he has been focused on lately are getting obsessed with systemizing the business across the board, to the point that he had the admin label everything in the kitchenette and got yelled at for it, and the networking and communicating side. If he spends the day on a golf course or at an event or an open house, he is only now getting to the point where he can tell himself that counts as work and is a big needle mover for the company, even when it feels like wasting time. Those are the things that drive leads, sales, and affiliate partnerships.

Asked what differentiates the company, he says he has revised the answer a hundred times and they change almost weekly. The first is professionalism, because a lot of blue collar businesses lack it to a degree that blows his mind, and they win a lot of customers and goodwill honestly just by answering the phone. The second is the pure care they put into everything they do. The third, which he knows sounds arrogant and does not mean that way, is that if you hire them, you get him. He promises he will prove why that actually matters, and admits he has not quite worked out how to sell that on the front end.

It is levels, and you do not know what you do not know. What gets you to half a million might get you to a million, and then it breaks, and at two million it definitely breaks, and then three. Some of it cannot be taught and has to be experienced. Some people will systemize everything out of the gate and have clean financials out of the gate, and on his next business everything is going to be labeled. But he is not sure you can teach charisma, personality, or communication. Everybody has a strong suit, and you do not know what your weaknesses or strengths are until you go through the fire. Then you find out you really suck at something and need to hire somebody or educate yourself, or that you have no clue what you are talking about but just sold a $3,000 project.

Being self-aware about what he is good at and bad at, and being okay with not being good at everything, is what he credits for helping him avoid some pitfalls over the last year or two and compress the growth timeline. He was listening to an Alex Hormozi book recently, full of great marketing information, and it simply was not resonating, even though marketing is a weak point he wants to expand on. Everybody is different, so the answer is self-awareness: knowing he is not good at advertising means educating himself a little, vetting agencies, and hiring them, because it should not be where he spends his time. You have to go through the pitfalls and the fires. He looks back at things from a year ago that would have cost him sleep and now it is just another Tuesday, and at things from five years ago he would have sweated for a week over that do not bother him for two minutes now. Going through it is what grows you as a leader and as a business owner.

GC Landscaping can be found at gclandscapinginc.com, and the company is also on social media.