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PROFESSIONALISM


Y Rich & Famous continued from p.25


while charging the normal hourly rate. He trains his staff of landscape professionals to devel- op a mindset that deals with super-wealthy clients and expects any comment or exceptional request from them.


“IF I CAN MAKE IT THERE, I’LL MAKE IT ANYWHERE...”


Long known as the pinnacle of the business world, New York City might not immediately come to mind as a ven- ue for landscape professionals. Most people think con- crete jungles, and they’d be right—except nobody told that to Don Sussman.


Don is the very successful president of Town and Gardens, Ltd., a “comprehensive landscape design-build company, which serves the New York City area.” Don has been advising his team on transforming urban areas since 1995, and they have created spectacular landscapes in the most spectacular city on the planet.


Due to the nature of the city, his clients are as demand- ing as a fast-paced environment supports. His clientele is always there—as long as he supports them. They never worry about cutting back, but they expect the best. “If you let them down once, you’re history.” The message? You can’t let them down. Don related how his landcape professionals always have to be at the top of their game. “It doesn’t matter how good you were, you have to be looking ahead,” he said. The advantage is that cementing these relationships (there’s a nod to the concrete jungle) pays off in longterm relationships. In a service business, there are many tasks that get done


routinely, but it is a dangerous mentality to get complacent. “Your operations department has to go to great lengths to work through a problem to ensure every detail is translated to a new member of the team,” he said. Like Chris Joyce in Cape Cod, Don told how Town and Gardens staff are empowered because “they have a high degree of responsiblity. The staff we have working on key commercial accounts are very important ot us.” A typcial problem in working at home accounts—small urban spaces—is that “you have to wait for all the other trades to finish. You can’t be putting in the terrace if they are still putting in widows.” This would be difficult enough if you were wroking at ground level, but in New York City, an urban landscape may be twenty stories up in the air.


In this urban world, “the general contractor is the per- son we have to work with.”


While dealing with the clientele might seem to be diffi- cult, “Consistently our biggest challenge is we can’t get to our work. It is a contant problem,” Don said. One of the major components of landscaping a ter- race on top of a highrise in Manhattan is the permitting process. Traffic needs to be rerouted in order to bring in cranes to lift trees. “I lose sleep when we shut down 5th Avenue to bring a crane in,” he said. Don discussed one job that involved designing a unique terrace for a real estate mogul who purchased an apartment on Central Park West— one of the most premium addresses in the world. His firm was pushing the envelope, including craning a set-top terrace onto a rooftop. A tremendous amount of permitting was required and after months of planning, every- thing was falling into place. Then a few weeks before the onsite work was to start, he learned that the client was selling the apartment to a bil- lionaire Mexican industrialist. Time to get nervous, especially after learning that the buyer was flying up with his family to see that apartment with the express purpose of being sold on Town and Garden’s plans. This was a $10 million+ sale—talk about pressure!


As Don told it: “The crane is coming; everything is in motion


Rich & Famous continues on p.31 2 26 THE LANDSCAPE PROFESSIONAL > JULY/AUGUST 2017


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