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Building a landscaping firm Brickman by Brickman

Friday, Dec. 2, 2005

Click here to enlarge this photo Brian Lewis⁄The Gazette Francisco Velasquez is one of the Brickman Group’s 600 employees in Maryland. The Gaithersburg company is one of the nation’s largest landscaping companies, with revenues expected to approach $500 million this year. Click here to enlarge this photo Brian Lewis⁄The Gazette Brickman Group workers Jose Luis Perez (left) and Felix Perez tackle some late autumn landscaping at Milestone Business Center in Germantown.

That’s a five-fold increase since 1998, outpacing the industry average of 11 percent per year.

That year, CEO Scott Brickman, then just 35, took over the company from his father, Theodore ‘‘Dick” Brickman Jr., who had built the privately held company to $100 million in revenues since becoming the first employee of his father, company founder Theodore Brickman Sr., in 1957.

The Brickman Group is now one of Montgomery County’s largest employers, with about 7,000 workers nationwide in peak season, including about 600 in Maryland.

The company had revenues of $383.6 million in 2004, up from $349.4 million in 2003, according to its Security and Exchange Commission filing. Profits soared from $1.2 million in 2003 to $9.2 million last year. Revenues this year are expected to exceed $450 million.

Scott Brickman, sitting in an austere boardroom in a second-story corporate office that looks more like a humble condominium, said the success stems from a radical change that has evolved in the company’s business plan.

‘‘Until the mid-1990s, we were a business of 85 percent landscape design and build and 15 percent maintenance of gardens and grounds,” said Brickman, who has won one of five 2004 lawn and landscaping leadership awards from Lawn and Landscape magazine. ‘‘Now, we are 85 percent maintenance and the rest design-build.”

That’s because landscape design jobs are low in profit margins, due to a typically heavy investment of human resources into one-shot projects.

Maintenance jobs, on the other hand, mean steady money.

Dick Brickman credits Ray Kroc, founder of the McDonald’s Corp. restaurant empire, with inadvertently ‘‘showing me the writing on the wall” regarding the bigger profits that could come from maintenance work.

In 1970, Kroc wanted the Brickman company to maintain the grounds of Kroc’s new corporate headquarters in Oak Brook, Ill., near Chicago, the city where Dick Brickman had made his reputation in landscape architecture.

‘‘I told Kroc, ‘Ray, I didn’t get a degree in landscape architecture to mow grass,’” Dick Brickman said. ‘‘That was a Friday. Kroc gave me until Monday to make up my mind.” Brickman took the job.

Thereafter, Dick Brickman said, he noticed that ‘‘when the economy slowed, construction slowed and landscape design jobs dried up. But when you have $100 million in accounts in design, you may not have that the next year.”

Acquisitions key to growth

The company’s rapid growth has also been fueled by acquiring nine other landscaping companies. Spokeswoman Margie Holly said the company targets other companies ‘‘with like-minded management with a service ethic.” Some were strategic acquisitions that opened both design-build and maintenance markets for Brickman in Houston, San Diego and Denver.

The acquisitions, part of a nationwide consolidation of the landscaping and nursery industry, have helped Brickman expand from 52 branches in 1998 to more than 125 branches in 23 states this year, Holly said.

In this region, Brickman’s clients have included Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, Reston (Va.) Town Center, the town of Columbia, AOL headquarters in Vienna, Va., and the Fannie Mae headquarters in Washington, D.C. Brickman is also one of two preferred landscape providers to all Marriott locations.

‘‘The corporate leaders at Marriott’s headquarters are very happy with the job that Brickman is doing there and at 150 other Marriott locations,” said David Blackburn, manager of contracts at Avendra LLC, a procurement company partially owned by Marriott. ‘‘They are doing an awesome job, I think.”

Blackburn is not alone is his assessment.

‘‘They have a very good reputation and the leadership award says that they are not only an industry presence but they are recognized presence in a lot of local communities,” said Lauren Spiers, an editor with Lawn and Landscape magazine.

The Brickman Group is one of the nation’s five largest landscaping companies, Spiers said. According to Lawn and Landscape’s annual industry survey, the top 100 landscaping companies in revenues for 2005 are projected to generate $11 billion, up from about $9 billion last year.

Sales of landscaping services grew nationally at an annual rate of 11 percent from 1987 to 2001, according to a study by the American Nursery and Landscape Association. Maryland’s landscape and nursery industry has averaged 5 percent annual growth in recent years, according to the Maryland Nursery and Landscape Association.

‘Unique’ management style

Each Brickman branch operates with a standard production model that the company developed in the late 1970s with consultant and renowned statistician W. Edwards Deming, who is best known for helping Japanese manufacturing recover from World War II and improving U.S. productivity during the war. Scott Brickman said the model emphasizes continuous improvements in communication with its nearly 10,000 commercial customers and education and cultivation of its employees to learn and advance within the company.

‘‘I think we are unique because we are the largest company of our type in the industry and it’s about our culture of people and servicing customers with quality,” he said.

Theodore Brickman Sr., who founded the company in 1939 with a pickup truck and lawn tools, ‘‘always said that your handshake and your word are your bond,” Scott Brickman said.

The family still has a home on Gladish Lane in the Chicago suburb of Glen View where Scott Brickman’s grandfather taught himself horticulture and landed a job landscaping at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933. He was the only certified horticulturist with only a high school education in the Chicago Park District, Brickman said.

Brickman credits his father with ‘‘the ability to turn over the thing he had created” and walk out of the company’s day-to-day operations. His father, now chairman, said he didn’t just walk away, but had been planning a line of succession for five years.

‘‘I am fortunate that we had three children who worked in the family business for a time,” Dick Brickman said. ‘‘Scott stepped up to really make it work.” When Scott was 10 years old and his brother Steve was 12, their dad started them mowing lawns to stop them from fighting so much around the house, Scott said. Their sister managed a branch in Baltimore, but is now a full-time mother, he said.

Control has shifted

In 1992, the company sold 70 percent interest to two outside equity partners, CIVC Partners of Chicago and Banc One Investment Management Group of Columbus, Ohio.

‘‘Our family business success is in the planning,” Scott Brickman said. ‘‘But in 1998, two-thirds of the company was not in the family. I always had in mind to get control back.”

In December 2002 the company bought out Banc One’s interests. ‘‘They should be pleased. They made a big profit,” he said.

Today, 70 percent of the company is again in the hands of the Brickman family and management, he said. ‘‘Most of our managers are also in their 40s and we have known each other for 20 years.”

The company supplements its permanent workforce with seasonal workers.

‘‘We really manage labor mostly,” Scott Brickman said. ‘‘But the notion that the nursery business is run on migrant workers is no longer the norm. Most of the seasonal workers stay here year-round and we also get some through the H-2B,” the visa program that allows employers to bring foreign workers to the United States. ‘‘We bring them up in full growing season. But we do keep an ear out for what the crazy politicians may do on the immigration issue.”