In 2022, SunWorks partnered with LMI Colorado, a leading landscape maintenance, enhancements, irrigation, and snow removal service provider. Since then, LMI Colorado has grown across the Rocky Mountain region, refined its training programs, and connected with partner landscaping companies throughout the Sunbelt – all while maintaining the same down-to-earth culture the team cultivated as a small business.
Despite the company’s current success, the initial partnership with SunWorks sparked some well-deserved anxiety at LMI Colorado. The team had seen what investing partnerships, specifically in the landscaping industry, could do to a well-running operation.
“Everyone in Colorado has seen investors come into the landscaping industry and create a disaster,” said Sean Lynam, LMI Colorado President. “It was like the playbook was written here on what not to do, so there was a lot of trepidation from our team.”
“We had just built something that we all poured our hearts and souls into. Then we heard about the partnership, and honestly, our hearts sunk,” said Nicole Stone, LMI Colorado VP of Business Development. “A neighboring landscaping company had recently been bought, and that had gone south very quickly.”
Though the team’s expectations were low, SunWorks surprised them.
“The partnership turned out to be a blessing in disguise,” Stone said. “We gained a larger support mechanism that we had no idea would be so beneficial at the time. If we would have known what we were gaining, our hearts wouldn’t have had to sink at first.”
By partnering with SunWorks, LMI Colorado joined a network of market-leading landscaping providers based in Texas, Florida, and Arizona.
“I can pick up the phone, call Texas, and ask, ‘Drew, what are you doing down there?’” Stone said. “There are differences between how we operate, depending on where we’re located, but we can still learn from our partners’ ideas and tweak them to apply to our situation. It’s nice to have those resources now, whereas before, we would only be able to work off what we knew in Colorado.”
Along with these industry resources, LMI Colorado itself has expanded its geographic reach, breaking into new customer markets through the capital and strategic resources provided by a long-term growth partner.
“We’ve gotten more aggressive with our growth, and it’s been a noticeable shift,” Lynam said. “We have more resources now to expand our operations. In the past, for example, we had always looked into going to Colorado Springs but had never pulled the trigger. Now we have an office in the area and can hit the gas on serving local customers. We can explore new markets faster than ever before.”
SunWorks has also helped the company sharpen its focus on learning and development. The company has implemented several training programs tailored to specific roles and focus areas.
“We train our team on new topics every month, and then on top of that, we have quick, 30-minute sessions with general managers and account managers across SunWorks,” Lynam said. “We also have our regular safety meetings and biannual safety rodeos, so we’re always running some type of training.”
On the business development side, SunWorks has enabled LMI Colorado to put more energy behind its sales efforts. By connecting business development professionals within each partner company, the whole organization’s sales expertise and strategy has evolved.
“We now have our monthly business development classes, and we also get together for annual sales summits,” Stone said. “SunWorks invests in their people in different ways than we’ve ever had before as a smaller business.”
Lynam has also seen how SunWorks’ prioritization of safety has encouraged a more hands-on attitude towards maintaining a healthy work environment. Through SunWorks’ commitment to both proactive and reactive safety training, LMI Colorado has been able to reinforce a safety culture among the team.
“In a smaller company, where you’re constantly sprinting to the finish line, sometimes safety training gets lost in the shuffle,” Lynam said. “Having the overall learning and development structure from SunWorks pushes us to take a breath and focus on the important things. Safety can be the easiest aspect of the business for people to forget about, but now that it’s top-of-mind for us.”
While providing these opportunities for growth and optimization, SunWorks has been careful to maintain the entrepreneurial culture LMI Colorado has built over decades.
“The culture here has generally stayed the same, and that’s a credit to SunWorks,” Lynam said. “They didn’t force a ton of changes. Instead, everything just kind of happened organically.”
Even with LMI Colorado’s success, the team is still hungry for growth. The company continues to iterate on its training programs, enhance operations through quarterly Continuous Improvement projects, and sharpen its business development strategy.
“There’s so much potential here. It’ll be fun to see how the company grows over even just the next few years,” Lynam said.
“There’s no end to this path. It’s always about developing more relationships, growing continuously, and finding new ways to do that,” Stone said. “LMI Colorado can touch so many people. What’s important is figuring out how we can do that best.”
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