Lawn Doctor

Spring is just around the corner, but many<a href="https://lawndoctorfranchise.com/?utm_source=1851franchise.com&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=lawn-doctor-franchisee-chris-clark-sows-seeds-of-a-successful-2020-after-fall-training-program-2712251" target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> Lawn Doctor</a> franchisees have already spent months ramping up for the busy season. The<a href="https://1851franchise.com/lawndoctor/top-5-reasons-to-invest-in-a-lawn-doctor-franchise-2709778#brand-latest-stories"> custom lawn care solutions service</a> boasts best-in-class customer service, over 50 years of experience and the highest customer retention rate in the $78-billion-a-year lawn and landscape services industry. These accomplishments, in part, are the result of&nbsp; a collaboration between<a href="https://1851franchise.com/lawndoctor"> Lawn Doctor’s</a> experienced executive leadership team and its dedicated community of franchisees. One of those franchisees is Texas resident Chris Clark.Taking over the territory in East Texas, Longview and Tyler, Texas, Clark, discovered Lawn Doctor while researching lawn care franchises. He came across the brand in<a href="https://www.entrepreneur.com/franchises/lawndoctor/282520?utm_source=1851franchise.com&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=lawn-doctor-franchisee-chris-clark-sows-seeds-of-a-successful-2020-after-fall-training-program-2712251" target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> Entrepreneur where it ranks highly at No. 58 in the Franchise 500</a>, and quickly reached out about franchising. After serving in the Air Force and a nearly 30-year career in law enforcement, Clark was accustom to gathering details and making decisions. “Once I had located Lawn Doctor and received information from the development team, I was all in,” said Clark.By the first week of August 2019, Clark was attending Discovery Day. Shortly thereafter, Clark made the decision to get on board with the franchise in August 2019, giving him ample time before the busy Spring season to start sorting through necessarily licensing procedures. “I immediately began the process for my Lawn and Ornamental Pesticide state license,” said Clark. By mid-September, he was officially licensed. “It was my goal to be licensed before attending<a href="https://1851franchise.com/lawndoctor/fall-and-winter-openings-mean-lawn-doctor-franchisees-get-a-headstart-on-the-swing-of-spring-2711465#brand-latest-stories"> franchise training</a> in November so that I was ready to hit the ground running come January,” said Clark.“The program is very informative, but just brushes the surface of everything involved,” said Clark. “As a franchisee, I have to put in serious effort to really grasp the totality of all that is needed and involved in running a franchised Lawn Doctor.” Thankfully, Clark has a whole team of other franchisees in his corner and ready to help.Most of all the supportive network that Clark has found in Lawn Doctor has been invaluable in the onboarding process. “The most important thing I have learned is that I’m not alone,” Clark said. “Although franchisees live in different parts of the country, we encounter many of the same problems or share similar experiences.”From the leadership team to his fellow franchisees, Clark felt that the Lawn Doctor community as a whole was on his side. “Everyone from the top down has been encouraging and helpful,” said Clark. “There is no shortage of people I can reach out to when I am experiencing a problem or need guidance.”For prospective franchise owners just now beginning their research process, Lawn Doctor offers some unique startup options including a <a href="https://1851franchise.com/lawndoctor/fall-and-winter-openings-mean-lawn-doctor-franchisees-get-a-headstart-on-the-swing-of-spring-2711465#franchisee">Soft Roll Out strategy</a>. According to Vice President of Franchise Development, Eric Martin, a Soft Roll Out can be a great way to launch a business. “Chris is locked in and ready, but the sales power window in the Spring can be daunting, especially for those who are trying to rush the process. It’s much easier to learn everything and train just before the season hits,” said Martin.Martin has seen a number of franchise partners have success with the mid-season opening approach. “This time of year, some new franchisees choose to launch after the Spring rush, which is less hectic,” Martin said. "There is more business to acquire in the Spring, but along with that comes more stress. Everyone gets one full year and a peak period in their first year of business no matter when they start, it's just a matter of where it falls in the first-year life cycle.”To have already attended training and be licensed by November was huge however for Clark: the beginning of the year—just before the Spring season—he feels will be crucial for the growth of his business. “The first part of 2020 will be a big opportunity to gain customers for next year, and I didn’t want anything to interfere with that,” said Clark “I felt like being ready to open by January 1, especially in a Southern market, was essential to my first-year success.”The startup costs for a Lawn Doctor franchise range from $100,015 to $116,065. The franchise fee ranges from $88,950 to $102,000. To learn more about franchising with Lawn Doctor, visit<a href="https://lawndoctorfranchise.com/?utm_source=1851franchise.com&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=lawn-doctor-franchisee-chris-clark-sows-seeds-of-a-successful-2020-after-fall-training-program-2712251" target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> https://lawndoctorfranchise.com/</a>.

Lawn Doctor Franchisee Chris Clark Sows Seeds of a Successful 2020 After Fall Training Program

1851 Franchise

By starting the training process in the “off-season”, Lawn Doctor franchisees have ample time to prepare for a busy 2020.


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For&nbsp;<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/dominick-pennella-9918a448/">Dominick Pennella</a>, the journey to becoming a franchise owner with&nbsp;<a href="http://lawndoctorfranchise.com">Lawn Doctor</a>, the 700-plus-unit national lawn care franchise, has unique ties back to his childhood and family. Growing up in Brooklyn in a traditional Italian family, Pennella was involved in the family landscaping business from a young age. He also saw just how important family was. As he approached adulthood, he wanted to explore other paths, which led him to the Navy“I was the baby of three kids. The family culture was already set; landscaping was the thing, and we were Italians who lived in Brooklyn,” Pennella said. “I just felt like there was so much more world to see. I’m appreciating all of these things now, in hindsight, but as an 18-year-old, I just wanted to get going. So I joined the military, and it was the scariest thing I ever did.”<h2>The Military to Corporate Transition</h2>For Pennella, the military was a way to fast-track personal growth, in a way, allowing him to explore what it would mean to go out on his own. It meant leaving his hometown and taking on the adventure without familial backing.He spent about four years in the Navy, working on submarines and doing things like monitoring nuclear reactors through a keyhole. In addition to meeting new people and seeing new places, his time in the Navy set Pennella up with a technical foundation that would define his corporate journey.This military background and technical proficiency opened doors for Pennella as he transitioned to civilian life. He was hired as a field service engineer for a biomedical company before even completing a college degree, but he was already looking toward the “next rung” of the ladder.“I was looking up at the next rung. I thought, ‘I can do that, and to do that, I would need an education directly in management,’” he said. “I decided to sign up for distance learning and see if I could work full-time and go to school at the same time. I did that for about five years. My master’s was in business management.”As he continued to climb the corporate ladder, Pennella returned to lessons he learned in his early landscaping years.“Whether you're showing up to someone's home to take care of a lawn or whether you're showing up to a hospital mid-surgery to take care of a blood gas instrument, the end result is still the same,” he said. “You still have to deal with people who are discontent. They don’t like the current situation, and they need to believe in you. You need to convey a plan, communicate throughout that process and close the loop at the end.”“Regardless of the perceived severity of what you’re fixing, any type of field service is similar,” he continued. “When I worked for my father as a landscaper, it was the exact same thing. A different product, but the exact same customer-facing experience. They want to know what you can do for them. ‘I’m in this situation. How can you help me? And can I contact you if I need anything?’ If you answer all those questions, they're happy. It was the same thing in medical device field service. So, I did well by literally copying the same tenets my father taught me.”Throughout his corporate career, Pennella’s approach earned him and his teams multiple awards and widespread recognition. But as he advanced, it also began to demand more from Pennella in terms of travel. When these requirements began to overshadow his family time, he knew it was time for a change.“I was successful, but my family is so important to me, and they were not more than 20% of my week in any given week in that life,” he said. “I knew it was time for a change.”Today, Pennella says that decision was fueled by the people who matter most — his wife of 14 years, Maria, who is also his partner in running the business, and their two daughters, Dora (11) and Gigi (7). He describes them as his daily inspiration and the driving force behind his decision to build something that would allow him to be present, ambitious and rooted at home all at once.“I didn’t even think of landscaping again, because that was what my dad did,” he continued. “I did electronics in the Navy, and that was my thing. But my father and I, one thing we have in common is the love of family. He couldn’t wait to get home and spend time with us when I was young, and I share that same view.”So, when he first began searching for his next opportunity, Pennella was looking for other roles in the same industry. He wanted to stick with “his thing,” just in a capacity that would require less travel and allow for more family time. After realizing that, at his level of seniority, any new role would be more of the same, he went to step two: franchises.<h2>Identifying Lawn Doctor: The Return to the Lawn Care Business</h2>“There are about a billion franchises for anything you could possibly think of, so how do you choose one?” he said. “I ended up finding some really great people — some franchise brokers. I took the Zorakle Assessment, and two days later, they called and said, ‘Hey, have you ever heard of&nbsp;<a href="https://1851franchise.com/lawndoctor/info">Lawn Doctor</a>?’”At this point, Pennella had not mentioned Lawn Doctor to the brokers, but he remembered it from childhood. He saw the green thumb logo and vehicles in the community and, as a child, asked his father how the business model worked since he never saw them cutting anyone’s lawn. At the time, his father explained that fertilization was one of the more profitable services in the lawn care space, but the conversation stopped there.So, when Pennella was presented with the Lawn Doctor franchise opportunity decades later, it almost felt meant to be.“When I started doing some research, I realized it might be the perfect fit. It tied in with my nostalgia, my culture, my history, my skill sets — everything,” he said. “And again, it’s field service. It wasn’t a straight line, and I don’t know where I would be if it wasn’t for the folks who guided me in the selection process. But when they said ‘Lawn Doctor,’ I thought, ‘Are you kidding me? I used to joke about comparing Lawn Doctor to the type of work I did in my father’s business.’ And here I am, the owner of a Lawn Doctor franchise! And I couldn’t be happier with the choice.”<h2>Building Momentum Through a Culture of Collaboration</h2>As Pennella launched&nbsp;<a href="https://www.lawndoctor.com/naples-fl/">Lawn Doctor of Naples-LaBelle-Marco Island</a>, he applied a sophisticated management lens to a local service model. This approach has already yielded impressive results, driving Pennella to blow his first-year projections out of the water within a couple of months. By focusing on communication and personal outreach, including knocking on clients’ doors himself, he was able to build trust and set the business up for an amazing first year.“It’s a simple, scalable model, and it sets you up to make your money back in a fairly short time frame,” he said. “It’s a great choice for a calculated risk-taker.”In addition to his own analytical lens, Pennella’s success has been driven by the support of the entire franchise system. Previously accustomed to a “dog-eat-dog” atmosphere in corporate America, Pennella was pleasantly surprised by the collaborative nature of the Lawn Doctor system. While he has worked diligently to educate himself on all facets of the business, he realized that, with the franchise system behind him, he didn’t have to absorb all of the information immediately and completely.“In the corporate world, everyone is looking for their own win. Here, a rising tide floats all ships,” he said. “I have at least five other owners and a dedicated mentor that I can call any time for any reason, and they’ll have an answer. I’m not scared to take on things I might not be an expert on yet because I have the backup to help me find those answers if needed.”&nbsp;Pennella is quick to credit those who have walked beside him during this first year. He highlights&nbsp;<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottspitz/">Scott Spitz</a> of&nbsp;<a href="https://www.lawndoctor.com/lakeworth-fl/lawn-care-in-west-palm-beach/">West Palm Beach</a>, who has served as a dedicated mentor, providing the institutional knowledge that only a veteran owner can offer. He also expresses deep gratitude for the ongoing support from&nbsp;<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/rafael-valle-a92584103/">Ralph Valle</a> in&nbsp;<a href="https://www.lawndoctor.com/jacksonville-fl/lawn-care-in-jacksonville/">Jacksonville</a> and the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.lawndoctor.com/fortmyers-fl/home/">Duffy family in Fort Myers</a>, whose insights helped him navigate the nuances of the Florida market, illustrating just how valuable it is to be a part of the Lawn Doctor system, which functions as a true team.As he prepares for continued growth, Pennella recognizes that there will be additional learning and growth opportunities as a Lawn Doctor owner, but he’s ready for them, and he encourages others in a similar position to consider taking the leap, as well.“If you are willing to learn agronomy and work closely with the franchisor, this can change your life,” he said. “It gave me the one thing I couldn’t find in the corporate world: the ability to put my family first without sacrificing my ambition. It’s the best decision I’ve ever made.”To find out more information on costs to buy this franchise, please visit&nbsp;<a href="https://1851franchise.com/lawndoctor">https://1851franchise.com/lawndoctor.</a>&nbsp;

Photo of Lawn Doctor franchisee Dominick Pennella and family

After making the switch to franchising for better work-life balance and to prioritize his family, Dominick Pennella exceeded his first-year projections by 50% in his first few months of operations.

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Design with photo of John Perry and Lawn Doctor logo

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Lawn Doctor Franchisee Chris Clark Sows Seeds of a Successful 2020 After Fall Training Program

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