Landscape Management, June 2017

June 2017 LANDSCAPEMANAGEMENT NET S5 The family man Jon Georgio CEO Gothic Landscape No 12 Since 1984 Jon Georgio and his brothers have taken the company their mother and father started from 500000 to 130 million in annual revenue Through it all theyve retained a mom and pop vibe while providing jobs to more than a thousand people and operating in four states This is the story of three brothers Mike Jon and Ron taking a family business to new heights This is the story of what Jon Georgio calls a miracle This is the story of Gothic Landscape The Gothic Landscape story is not the Jon Georgio story My father Louis Georgio was a World War II Marine who served in the Pacific He was from Rhode Island on the East Coast and he went to Camp Pendleton in 1943 1944 and said California is amazing So he learned how to operate heavy equipment and he became a fine grade contractor in the post WWII housing boom in the San Fernando Valley My dad passed away fairly young in 1979 I think my father passing away was something that had us really focus on a goal which was to take care of our mom All the family pettiness goes away when you have a goal of making sure that moms OK and mom can pay her mortgage When I was in college in the early 1980s it was a difficult time in the economy and my mom and my brother Mike put me through school which I really appreciated They made it easy financially for me to go to school even though they were struggling When I went to business school I was kind of slated to go work in commercial banking Before I was supposed to start another job I came to help out the family company over the summer as a kind of payback and I fell in love Gothic Landscape is actually a womanfounded company by my mom Judy Georgio When I came on in 1983 we were doing about 500000 a year with 20 employees We only had two clients at the time but they loved us They did surveys on their vendors and we had perfect scores on both of them something a very small percentage of their vendors had The economy was difficult and grading involved so much heavy equipment so it was difficult to pay the equipment bills There was no business One of the clients said Wed like you to be our landscape contractor and I will teach you the business My dad had dabbled in landscape but it was ancillary So my mother and Mike listened to the clients needs and this client taught us the business Gothic Landscape is a funny name Its the street we grew up on When we started the company we were in a garage on Gothic Avenue It was our childhood home When we went to incorporate all the names were taken that we wanted We literally looked outside of our garage and said Gothic Landscape We thought wed change it later When we started the business we really focused on setting up a mission statement in our first week That was to develop a long term relationship with our customers through extraordinary service and I think thats what led to the miracle My mom my brother and I made a good team My mother and brother didnt like the business end They liked more of the operating end When I came in we were already in Las Vegas my brother had started that office He had a lot of ground to cover so my mornings were on job sites until about 3 p m Then I would come into the office and try to organize us by doing the accounting billing estimating My nights were full with that administrative work and it was a pretty big workload In the beginning youre outstripping financial resources youre outstripping people talent physical resources trucks equipment everythings tight You never have what you need Working through that was probably gosh the first couple decades We always seemed like we were tight on resources As you grow you have to have systems that grow with you Its not so intuitive you cant just shoot from the hip You have to add good job costing and accounting systems which was kind of my background and you have to have good data and information to work from The start was having an organized system of data that told you where you were at in the business so you could give good feedback to the operational people m Gothic Landscapes Jon Georgio PhOtO JEff Bandy