We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Dean King a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Dean, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s start with a story that highlights an important way in which your brand diverges from the industry standard.

At Full Circle, we care about our team. That’s not just a ‘core value’ or something we say in interviews. It’s all about the actions we take each and every day.

We try our best to do all of the things that we feel are important to have a great team and a fantastic culture. We do performance-based pay, so team members have the opportunity to make more money the more efficiently they work. We give health benefits, PTO, and work four 10-hour days so that our teams can have a 3-day weekend. We give them the best equipment for the job, do monthly team lunches, and pay for industry education. There is a career path from laborer to branch manager, and training to get there.

Any company can put those benefits in place, and I don’t know why they wouldn’t. That’s the easy part. The hard part is helping team members achieve their goals, and not just goals within the scope of the lawn care industry. We try to view our company not just as a lawn care company, but first and foremost as a personal development company.

From the first interview, we try to keep the individual’s goals and dreams at the forefront of the conversation. We don’t just expect people to work hard to earn their paycheck. We hope that they will work hard because they are proud of the work that they do and the steps that they are taking to achieve their dreams. We meet regularly with every person on our team, thank them for the work they do, and talk about how we can help them grow in all aspects of their lives.

We are following in the footsteps of business leaders like Alex and Leila Hormozi with the idea of reward over punishment. Most companies, when a mistake is made, threaten to fire, cut pay, scream at, or embarrass their team members. We try to take a different approach and encourage team members when lawns are beautifully manicured, shout out exceptional performance, and offer coaching rather than penalties when mistakes are made. This philosophy makes Full Circle a place where people enjoy coming to work and feel as though their managers and coworkers are rooting for their successes.

We aren’t perfect, and will never claim to be. However, we will do our best to continue putting our team over profit. Because without them, there would be no Full Circle. Just a client list, trucks, an office, and some vendors. But with a team, we are unstoppable. As Andrew Carnegie said, “Take away my people, but leave my factories and soon grass will grow on the factory floors……Take away my factories, but leave my people and soon we will have a new and better factory.”

Dean, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I started as a sophomore in high school; just a kid without a driver’s license, with a quad and a snowmobile trailer. I ironed a green polo shirt, put on a pair of khakis, and had my mom drop me off in local neighborhoods to get doors slammed in my face all day. Once I sold my first customers I learned how to do the work on YouTube. I drove that quad around with my dad’s lawn tractor on it to service customers during my first year in business. While I was working, I listened to audiobooks and YouTube videos about lawn care, sales, business, finance, and operations.

I recruited one of my neighbors to be my first helper and paid him $10/hour in cold, hard cash. In my second year in business (2019), I was cutting lawns after school and on weekends (and still driving the quad around). By the end of year 2, I got my license, bought a truck and convinced my dad, after showing him my business plan to co-sign on a loan for my first zero-turn commercial lawn mower.

Year 3 was 2020-2021. Something happened that year: COVID hit. I was doing Zoom school from a lawn mower and on landscape jobs. I hired my first few employees off Facebook and Indeed, and worked with them during the day, doing estimates and billing at night. We started doing landscaping and I bought another truck: The nicest diesel F250 I could find for the cheapest price. The problem? It happened to be in Texas. I shipped it up here and put it into service with a brand-new dump trailer.

School started back up in person. The problem was, we had way too much work between lawn mowing and cleanups for me to do it on nights and weekends. Every morning I would meet with our team of 2-4 people and get them ready to go, then I would hop on the school bus and go to class. At school, I was checked out doing business all day. At lunch, instead of sitting with friends, I would go sit upstairs by myself typing up estimates and calling customers. I was lucky enough to have a supportive family and my parents would call me out of school so I could go meet with the accountant, and go to meetings. I did a college class after school so I could graduate high school in January and have all of 2021 to work on the business.

From graduating high school until now, I have worked 80-100 hours per week because this is my game. It’s all I want to do. Every day I get punched in the face (figuratively), and every day I get better. From 2019 to 2022 we did $140K, $250K, then $750K in revenue.

We are now a full-service lawn care company offering worry-free fertilization & weed control, pest control, mowing, and landscaping. We view ourselves as a customer service company that happens to offer lawn care. Offering all of the outdoor maintenance services our clients need, combined with our simple setup and quality work makes us the obvious choice for any customer in our service area.

I am proud of my tenacity and resourcefulness, and of the people I have been able to help. I am proud that we pay our team well and have built a great culture. I am proud of the work we do for our clients.

We are ‘The worry-free lawn care company’ and we will change the level of professionalism in the lawn care industry. Our client focus has given our competitors a choice to either keep up, or risk losing their clients to our better customer experience.

I want people to know that I want everyone to win: our clients, employees, vendors, and anyone else that we come into contact with. I give away every lesson I learn, for free, on my social media to help other people do what I did, faster. Full Circle also has social media dedicated to teaching people what we do, and about how to take care of their own properties.

Lastly, I want to thank the people who have helped me along the way. I couldn’t have done this without my incredible team, my supportive family, or my girlfriend Lucy.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

Alvin Miltz said, “Revenue is Vanity, Profit is Sanity and Cash is King.” Though revenue sounds cool at events and parties, the lesson that I learned is iif you don’t have a profit, you don’t have anything. If you don’t have cash, you’re out of business. For those new to the business, profit is what is at the bottom of our income statement (P&L) and cash is what is in your bank account.

I used to try to sell the most jobs not caring about profit. For example, selling $30,000 patio and retaining wall jobs that cost us $35,000 to build.

To build a sustainable company for the long term I had to learn how to not just “invest” every dollar we make in profit, and to focus on accurate estimating and profitable services.

This year(2024) we will probably do 1.5X-2X more revenue but do 10X the profit.

What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?

Building a local brand by painting our trucks pink, and taking care of our customers.

You don’t need to paint your trucks pink but I think building a local brand is huge. Have a website that ranks in SEO, a Google My Business listing, and a social media presence. It lets customers refer you easily, and people recognize you which builds trust. More people get estimates and your close rate increases when people know who you are or who have seen you before they call.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.fullcirclelandscapesolutions.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/Fullcircledoylestown
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FullCircleDoylestown/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/81214138
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@FullCircleServices
• Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/full-circle-landscape-solutions-doylestown-3