Featured Member: EcoGardens

Basic Information    Organization name: EcoGardens      Contact: Jason Philip    Membership level:  Founding Member, Mobilizer Level

Foresight Design recently spoke with Jason Philips of EcoGardens about its sustainability activities.

Why did you decide to start Ecogardens?

Originally I had owned a traditional landscape company based in the suburbs. I ran it since 1998, and it was pretty successful and quite large. But our industry is extremely dirty. It’s a polluting nightmare sometimes. I wanted to look at alternative ways of managing residential and commercial green space. We had done a few rooftops with the previous company, but I was really fascinated by green roofs and wanted to jump in with both feet. I also wanted to focus on urban gardens and the vision of a sustainable-type business. We had moved the company to the city in 2003 but still had a huge suburban clientele base, so I decided to sell the company to a third party and start Ecogardens simultaneously in May 2006.

Ironically, I got the other company back. Without getting into specifics, the purchaser mishandled the business and ran into financial problems, and I wound up taking over the company again. But having it back is presenting me with a challenge. Do I continue on with that suburban portion of the business and try to manage it more responsibly? Or do I just walk away? Walking away would mean leaving behind decent revenue, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense from a miles-per-gallon standpoint when we’re in Chicago and we’re managing accounts out in Itasca. On the flipside, if I’m going to start changing the industry, I’ve got to step into that commercial green space. The business side of me says don’t walk away from it. But it is possibly preventing me from focusing on Ecogardens and some of the other initiatives I set out to achieve. I may have to open a satellite office, and hire more staff to either manage the older portfolio of accounts or to help with the projects that Ecogardens was started for.

It’s not an easy decision. I compete with some sizable suburban firms and they can be more competitive sometimes because they’re closer. But I have extremely loyal customers who want to stick with me. More importantly, I deal with some fairly substantial clients. One is a huge office supply manufacturer with its own sustainability initiatives. And I look at that as an opportunity to get them to embrace a more organic landscape maintenance system. And that’s where I look at maybe maintaining a certain slice of the old clientele.

You mean retain the clients who are ready to go where you are going?

Yes, for the most part. But it takes a lot of work to convince people. The first time there’s a dandelion in someone’s lawn, I’m getting a call. Getting them to understand that the “yellow in my lawn” is an indicator of something else going on. I have to convince them to let us get it fixed by working with the biology of the soil. There’s lot of chemistry involved, and getting the balance back to what it needs to be takes time.

A lot of people, both commercial and residential clients, don’t understand that when you apply all these synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides you’re actually destroying the biology of the soil. You’re completely disrupting what’s supposed to be going on. For example, when you see clover, that’s a biological indicator of nitrogen depletion. If the industry started to look at things more from a biological standpoint versus a superficial perspective, I think we’d be a lot farther ahead. One of the biggest obstacles is getting the industry as a whole to understand that.

What kind of services does Ecogardens provide? What makes them different from traditional alternatives in the market?

Rooftop gardens are extremely popular where real estate is at a premium, such as the city. We try to take rooftop gardening to a level of managing holistically by introducing organic fertilizers. We also use integrated pest management, or IPM, to look at ways of introducing a natural enemy to certain pests.

Another thing we try to push is using less wood. There are so many wood decks out there. And if we are using wood, we try to buy responsibly. FSC and some of the other certifications, as fuzzy as they may be sometimes, are really the only guides we have to where that wood has come from. We use reclaimed wood as much as possible.

We also try to use products that are highly durable and don’t require much maintenance. We’ll do a lot of decks on rooftops out of what they call “roof pavers.” These are made of precast concrete or natural stone set on adjustable pedestals that together form a nice level surface.

I think a unique part of our service is that we’re doing everything organically, without harsh chemicals. We try to use locally sourced materials as much as possible. We also recycle a huge amount of material utilizing the city’s recycling program.

If someone hires you to landscape their property, are they going to be getting a different kind of look from your work?

It depends. A lot our clients are high-net-worth individuals who want a clean, Lincoln Park look. They don’t really care how we get it to that point. They don’t want to be bothered with it, and we don’t need to tell them the story. But on Saturday morning, they want that place pristine. So they can have a formal, English-garden look, but we can still do it responsibly.

On the flipside, we have a lot of clients that are really into the environmental movement and want to do something to reverse the damage that’s been done. So we install a lot of rain gardens and quite a few green roofs. We’re getting more calls about doing true green roofs, but one thing I tell everybody is that anything green on a roof is better than nothing. With real estate as valuable as it is, I would rather see someone put some pots up there with some sort of foliage rather than just a bare roof. Even if it’s a roof with reflective material, it’s not mitigating some of the runoff and as much of the urban heat island effect that it could be.

I think the biggest challenge right now is getting people to disconnect their downspouts and manage their storm water on site.

Hearing about the different kinds of clients you have leads me to my next question. Who is your typical customer? Or is there a typical one?

We have a pretty broad cross section. Many of our clients have really cool spaces. We have a lot of families here in Bucktown that are concerned about chemicals affecting either their kids or their pets. We have people everywhere from middle income to the highest tax bracket.

Our mix now is about 75% residential and the rest commercial. It was reversed when I had the previous company. While our focus is on residential urban gardens, we are also looking at commercial work in the city. Multifamily and hotels are where the biggest barriers to entry are. Whether it’s a hotel or a condo complex along Lake Shore Drive, most of those places pride themselves on a certain kind of look. They want it weed-free, a lot of annual flowers. They don’t want that prairie perennial look.

Do you ever turn down a job because the client insists on the traditional uniform lawn?

Turf grass, or any kind of permeable surface, is better than concrete. If someone wants that traditional green lawn, I take the job if it makes sense financially. But my focus is to manage their expectations. I have to be upfront with them and explain that it may take a little bit longer to achieve it. Usually my due diligence is getting a soil sample, which gives me snapshot of the biology in the soil. I can then make recommendations to get the lawn where it needs to be and sell them on a program that 9 times out of 10 is more profitable than doing it the old traditional way. It requires more visits. It requires more care, but after things get balanced out, it actually becomes less expensive to care for. It can take 3 to 5 years for a soil profile to completely change for the better--especially when new construction is backfilled with clay or even rubble that’s covered with a couple inches of topsoil.

What are your customers’ expectations and how do you know when they’re satisfied with a project?

I think the biggest indication of satisfaction from a client standpoint is being referred to someone else. We actually have a program within our company to encourage referrals. We donate a percentage of the proceeds from referral jobs to the charity of choice of the referring client. We’re considering taking it step further and matching it with our own funds and contributing to organizations that we’re passionate about, such as Sierra Club.

Getting back to expectations, our clients want a well-kept garden. Weeds are an issue, even if it’s a more natural garden. They want pests controlled. They want a lot of activity, a lot of color. They want it to look kept, but they also don’t want it to look manicured. I call it “controlling the chaos.”

What is your competitive advantage? Does it stem from being a green business, from your experience, from the range of services offered, or from something else?

I think it’s the niche that we’re carving out right now. We’re small, but we have deep resources. We have a fairly substantial core staff, but we’re a streamlined, well-managed company. We can rise to the occasion and respond a lot quicker than some of our bigger competitors. I have a lot of personal interaction with our clients, which can make it hard as a business owner. But I’m figuring out how to delegate at the same time as I’m getting my hands dirty and treating Ecogardens as a startup.

How do you educate customers about the performance, environmental, and other benefits of Ecogardens’ services?

We are in the midst of retooling our Web site. We use a lot of e-mail blasts. We have a lot of “propaganda” that we can send clients if need be. We’re also putting together a fairly concise postcard-sized mailer that we’ll use to target certain neighborhoods. We’re capitalizing on overall environmental awareness, but also trying not to engage in greenwashing. We’re coupling service with performance that gets real results.

One thing that I’ve really tried to convey to the client is that each site we work on is a biology experiment. Not everything is going to work the same. Treatments may have to be tweaked differently for each location. One of the challenges we face is that a lot of the organic supplies we try don’t turn out to perform as advertised. We’re constantly modifying what we use because there’s so much new material on the market.

Do you encounter greenwashing from your suppliers? What about from your competition?

“Organic” is an overused term, even a misnomer, in the industry. We just had a big trade show last week with several organic fertilizer manufacturers, and I had a lot of questions for them. I was looking for endorsements from independent organizations and certification protocols. I try to dig into their documentation. What I’ve found with both the competition as well as a lot of manufacturers is that they’re just jumping on the bandwagon. When you start to dissect things, the products are basically the same, with a little green on top.

How do you deal with it?

That’s a good question. This is what keeps me up at night. There’s a ton of information out there. I have an obligation to the client to choose what makes the most sense. If the client has turf, they want it green. If we’re going to make it green, what’s the best fertilizer to use? It’s trial and error, and a lot of times we go back and redo things. A new product may not even come close. We’re kind of writing our own manual right now when it comes to organic lawn care and organic landscape maintenance.

The other thing I’m challenged with is green roofs. Green roofs are very labor-intensive and component-heavy. They require a lot of redundancies. There’s a reason behind that, but when you start breaking it down, there’s a pretty sizeable carbon footprint involved with doing a green roof. We finished a large project for the federal government this past fall and now I’m dissecting that entire job trying to see what the footprint is and whether the green roof really is going to offset that.

Are you blazing a trail for other businesses in your industry?

It seems that way. A lot of my vendors are probably getting frustrated with me because I’m always asking them about what’s new coming out. One of my biggest frustrations is that you have all these big companies like John Deere that make millions every year from diesel engines, but they’re not introducing these engines to the commercial landscape maintenance industry. We could be burning biodiesel in all of our lawn mowers, but we’re still using gasoline mowers, which are not the most efficient.

More and more people want green roofs. The city has done a great job of getting the word out. But one of the challenges I’m finding is educating clients about what a green roof really is—why it’s there and what it does. Most people think it’s a rooftop garden, but a true green roof is going to have a mixture of sedums or other high-performance drought-tolerant plants. It would be pretty low-profile. On something like a 20 by 20 foot garage, most of it would have to be vegetated.

And you can’t go up there to enjoy it if it’s all covered?

Typically not. And the other challenge is that if someone wants to go up on their roof, there are certain code requirements. I spend a lot my time educating the public. Typically the first hour of meeting with a new client is a lot of Q & A, and at the end of that conversation I may have talked them out of doing what I would have hoped they’d do. But I owe it to them to give them the best value. Sometimes it takes some wrestling back and forth to convince them that it’s the way to go.

What else has Ecogardens done to reduce the entire company’s ecological footprint?

Most of our equipment is low-emission. We use rechargeable electric mowers for most of our residential accounts. We use a lot of engines with California-rated emissions, which are a lot more expensive and sometimes heavier to carry around. We use biodiesel in our trucks, and we’re starting to look at burning alternative fuels in our mowers and equipment. I’m looking at a couple of options for using gas-electric hybrid engines in our mowers.

One of the biggest impacts horticultural industry has on the environment is the amount of plastic in pots and flats of flowers that we use. We found a company that is going to take all of those plastic pots and recycle them. That’s not the end-all solution, but it’s better than sending them to a landfill. And some of my competitors have found this service too, which is good. I’ve turned my competitors on to a source for biodiesel. I’ve told the supplier, “I’m just a small guy. You need to call on these larger competitors.” I’m about changing my own company, but I want to see the industry change.

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