It may seem counter-intuitive, but even when mired in one of the deepest economic downturns in memory, Bret Achtenhagen sees nothing but opportunity for his high-end landscaping company, Bret Achtenhagen’s Seasonal Services Ltd., in Mukwonago, Wis.
In fact, Achtenhagen has ratcheted up the company’s budget for radio advertising in 2010. And he used the recession as motivation to do some internal financial house cleaning, trimming costs and improving collection efforts along the way. As a result, while some competitors have fallen victim to the economic decline, Achtenhagen is poised for the kind of growth that’s been the company’s hallmark since it started in 1994.
“We boosted our radio advertising budget to 3 percent of gross sales, up from 2 percent,” Achtenhagen says. “At this point in time, I want to attack the market and gain share. There are people out there who’ve lost (landscaping) service providers and need a new one, so we want to expose ourselves to them as much as possible.”
SENSING STORM CLOUDS
Achtenhagen saw economic storm clouds on the horizon a few years ago. At the same time, the company was suffering from the kind of growing pains that come with exploding from $100,000 in gross sales in 1994 to $6 million in 2007. So in the timing-is-everything department, the recession coincidentally presented a perfect time to pull back the reins, he notes.
“We realized we needed to check our growth because we weren’t able to manage the company the way we needed to in order to continue that rate of growth,” Achtenhagen says. “Our foundation was getting shaky. We were struggling with things we never had problems with before, like keeping projects on schedule, which is a huge deal in contracting when you promise start and finish dates.
“We also started hearing grumbling about project quality, and I could tell our foremen and supervisors were stressed out,” he adds. “We had given them more work than they could handle and still maintain quality.
“At the same time, we started to see a decline in building permits. Had one happened without the other, we probably would’ve steamed ahead and got into a lot of trouble … I believe there was a lot of luck involved,” he concludes.
To cut back on expenses, Achtenhagen decided not to add staff or replace employees who left the company in 2008. In addition, he didn’t actively seek out new business, and deferred the purchase of new equipment as dictated by the company’s normal replacement cycle.
