About fifteen miles into the marathon leg of my first Ironman, I hit the wall. Not a metaphorical wall, the real one. My legs stopped answering, people I had passed hours earlier began passing me, and the negative tape started playing in my head: Do I quit? Do I keep going? What saved me wasn’t
Years into my Ironman training, a coach filmed me swimming and made me watch it back. I thought I had a decent stroke. The video said otherwise: dropped elbow, crossed centerline, a kick that was burning energy and going nowhere. I had been reinforcing those flaws for years, getting comfortable with a technique that was
I was sitting across from a landscape business owner recently when I asked him a direct question: What did his coach actually help him change last year? He paused. Then came the answer I didn’t want to hear: “I’m not sure.” His company had finished the year with margins below what they should have been.
“Pressure does not create capability. It reveals it.” Spring is the one season when landscape companies never worry about being busy. The phone rings. The schedule fills. Crews roll out early and come back late. Revenue climbs. And somewhere in the middle of all that activity, margin quietly leaks. It happens every year. A company
Why elite operators use data to sharpen instinct, not replace it I’ve trained for Ironman races with enough gadgets on my wrist to launch a small satellite. Power. Pace. Heart rate. Sleep. HRV. Recovery scores. Training load. Fueling alerts. Weather overlays. Route gradients. Cadence targets. Every number promises the same thing: follow the data, and
There’s a moment in every long race when effort stops being the differentiator. You’re still moving. Your heart rate is up. Your legs are working. You’re doing what you’ve always done, pushing, grinding, muscling through. But the results start to wobble. Pace slips. Form breaks down. Little mistakes show up in places you didn’t expect.
The recent State of the Industry conversation with Lawn & Landscape, including perspectives from Robert Clinkenbeard and Bruce Wilson, confirmed what many experienced leaders already feel. The landscape industry is still growing, but expectations have sharpened, and mistakes are less forgiving than they once were. What follows is not a summary of that discussion. It
Last week, I returned from an incredible trip to Scotland, where I had the privilege of traveling with five other landscape business owners. Although we set out with a loose agenda that included some sightseeing, golf, and the occasional whisky distillery visit, the experience turned into something much richer — a blend of camaraderie, candid
Too many companies treat the annual budget like a box to check: finance builds it, leadership reviews it, and then it gets filed away until next year. That’s not a budget—that’s a missed opportunity to lead. Build It With the Right People A strong budget is more than numbers on a spreadsheet. It’s a tool
The New Face of M&A: Small, Nimble, and Game-Changing Imagine this: The next transformative leap for your business isn’t a billion-dollar mega-deal—it’s a handshake with the owner of the company down the street. In a market where headlines are dominated by colossal mergers, the real action—the deals that quietly reshape industries—are happening in the small
