How great company culture, Aspire led to breakthrough for Grunder Landscaping Co.

Years ago, after a speaking engagement in Washington, D.C., Marty Grunder stretched out on a flight back to Dayton, Ohio, where he runs Grunder Landscaping Co. 

His feet had crossed a fluorescent green line on the floor.

The flight attendant completed her safety announcements, then nudged Grunder’s feet and said, "That ain't going to work. Move them back."

His first thought: “Why couldn't you say something like … ‘Could you move your feet back? I'm afraid I'm going to trip.’ Same message delivered a different way, and look what it does.”

His second thought: “How many of us are kicking the feet of our team?”

A knack for finding lessons in life’s little moments and a willingness to adjust his thinking have made Grunder a thought leader in his industry and changed the trajectory of his career.    

He’s turned the company he started in 1984, with a $25 mower purchased at a garage sale, into a landscaping leader in southwest Ohio, with more than 90 employees and 60 national awards. 

He’s also the founder and CEO of The Grow Group–a green industry consultancy that provides innovative programming, online training, and operates peer groups. It works with more than 200 landscaping companies across the U.S. and Canada, so Grunder now devotes a good chunk of his working life to helping companies like his own solve problems.

“We have a really good handle on the industry, and we're able to tell you where your expenses should be,” he said. “We're able to see trends by having our mitts on those 200-plus companies.”

His advice for owners? Quit worrying about making money and focus on your employees. The way you treat your team is the way they're going to treat your clients. Create opportunities for them to advance, empower them to take charge of their own success, and you will get the results—and the profits—you want. 

“I don't ever tell my people I want a bigger bass boat, or a Porsche, or a house in Florida,” Grunder said. “We talk about reinvesting in them. We talk about giving back to the community. We talk about creating more opportunities for our team.”

He laments that it took him years to truly understand and embrace a team-first philosophy, pointing to a conversation with close friend Mike Rorie over a bowl of clam chowder in 2014. 

Rorie told Grunder the best reason to grow a company is to provide opportunities for your best people so they don’t leave.

“I was like, okay, yeah. Oh yeah, of course,” Grunder said. “And it didn't register.”

Turning $4.5 million into $14.5 million

Grunder can’t point to a moment when the epiphany finally “smacked me right in my face,” but in 2020, everything started to click for his team. 

That’s the year Grunder and his President and COO, Seth Pflum, adopted a more team-focused vision. And it’s the year they began using Aspire—the cloud-based software that has been a game-changer for companies like Grunder Landscaping.

The results have been epic.

Grunder said his company went live with Aspire in January 2020, with its sales at $4.5 million. Over the past four-plus years, he said sales have ballooned to $14.5 million, and the company has added a second location in Cincinnati.

“Aspire enabled us to get an insight into the business like I never had before,” he said. “It has opened my eyes to a business that was an incredible business, but we weren't leveraging all the assets that we had.”

When The Grow Group is working with a struggling landscaping company, Aspire is always on the list of solutions. 

Grunder can tick off several performance indicators that Aspire has helped his company track and improve—hour efficiency, the number of phone calls, hour management, and utilization rate, to name a few.

“When we started with Aspire, our utilization rate was 71%, which meant 29% of all hours were not being billed,” he said. “Fast-forward to August of 2024 and we're at 93.5%.”

Though he loves to log in a couple of times a day, Grunder says the platform’s real value is unlocked when companies train their employees to drive it well.

He has seen the results up close.

Empowering employees is key 

At Grunder Landscaping, Pflum creates dashboards and curates what information each individual can see based on their role. 

“We've done a 180 in information sharing (with employees) since we switched to Aspire,” Grunder said. 

As a result, he has seen improved engagement from his team, increased literacy about financials, and a better alignment of employees with the company’s goals and values. 

“We think more data means more engagement,” he said. “You put yourself in your employees’ or your team members' shoes, wouldn't you want to know more than less?”

Grunder loves that a quick look at the Aspire dashboard reveals whether he needs to jump on a problem.

“I can make a phone call and say, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We got to get a supervisor out on that job,’” he said. “‘That thing's in the red, and we got three days left. Come on, guys.’"

However, these days he often finds those calls have already been made by an employee, and he loves it, because it means the culture he has been striving to create for the past 40 years has taken root.

“At a certain point, if you're an owner or a leader and you're worth more than a hill of beans, you realize it's not about you,” he said. “When you make it about the whole team and you have a broader vision … people want to come and walk with you.

“All of my accomplishments now, what means the most to me is when my team accomplishes something.”