Thanks to Heritage Landscape Supply Group for sponsoring this year’s program


These four business leaders encouraged growth by empowering employees.


By Kyle Brown F


or professional irrigation and landscape light- ing contractors, maintaining company growth while dealing with a booming market for cus- tomers often comes back to understanding the importance of good employees, empowered to make the right decisions.


Te Watch Us Grow: 2022 Industry Standouts pro-


gram celebrates those service providers who have not only had a successful year but tried new ideas to encourage that growth. For most of this year’s class, that meant focusing on developing their hires into the high-functioning team they needed to reach their goals. We hope their stories guide your company’s next steps toward stronger employees and greater success.


The Department Developer For Bradley Hill, CIT,


irrigation services operations


manager for Par 3 Landscape Management in Las Vegas, building an effective irrigation team took someone who could see that all the parts were already there in the com- pany. Tey just needed assembly and investment. While Hill was just completing his bachelor’s de-


gree in horticulture, he had interned at Par 3 during the summer. With his background, he was focused on water conservation, especially in a part of the country that has struggled with drought. “As a horticulturalist, I was focused on the plant health


aspect,” he says. “Let’s not just cut water to cut water. Let’s save water but also let’s keep the plants alive and promote healthy root systems.” He was impressed with the way that Tom Raden,


landscape irrigation manager at Par 3, recognized the im- portance and value of water conservation, but he realized the company hadn’t built an infrastructure around it. “So, I pitched the idea to Tom and the owners of the


company,” he says. Te owners signed onto the idea, and Hill and Raden worked together on building the depart- ment from the ground up. While many of the technicians had been working on


irrigation issues for more than 30 years, they didn’t always know why they followed specific procedures. Hill collect- ed education materials from his own recent graduation and other resources and developed a full curriculum of topics to train the team to develop them into qualified ir- rigation professionals. Every month, he trained his group on concepts such as flow, velocity and pressure, and after about six months he started to see a shift. Not only were


irrigationandlighting.org


they understanding the lessons, they were approaching Hill on off days to ask about more advanced ideas. “It was really interesting to me to see these guys for the first time take interest and pride in what they were doing,” he says. “Not that they weren’t before, but it be- came important for them to actually understand it now.” Hill built the curriculum to provide knowledge first, so when he pushed for new tools like multimeters and wire trackers, they were able to use them effectively. One of the biggest investments was to trade out the teams’ trucks for full-size service vans, he says. Te new vehicles allowed the technicians to organize parts and tools, reducing costs in buying the same part repeatedly and allowing them to spend more time specifically on the repairs. It also helped the team present themselves as professionals separate from just another branch of landscaping. “As soon as we did that, it was a night and day difference. Tey’re walk- ing billboards for Par 3 in our irrigation division with professionalism.” With the investment in education and tools, the team was able to move past just dealing with ongoing repairs and getting the job done to a place where they used their expertise to get things right the first time. Hill is grateful for the opportunity to build and es- tablish an entirely new department within the company, especially when it took some investment to get things moving. “Par 3 was gracious enough to take a chance with me,” he says. He also credits his management and his crew for stepping up to the challenge. “I was merely lucky to get with this great group of people. Without them, none of this would’ve happened.”


The Communication Specialist


Jason Walker, CIC, owner of Pate Landscape Compa- ny in Montgomery, Alabama, started at the company by working in the field after he graduated with his degree in horticulture. He worked his way up, connecting his learn- ing to hands-on practice, eventually purchasing the com- pany in 1994. “Tat experience is tremendous, it’s one of those things that you don’t want to repeat but you’re glad you did it,” he says. Part of what he learned in his time coming up through


the company was the importance of staying connected. A lot of trade industries are somewhat known for tradition- ally “being rough and gruff, where people don’t talk and they don’t communicate,” he says.


Summer 2022 Irrigation & Lighting 33


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