Lawn Doctor Hosts Scaling Up Together Conference to Reenergize Ahead of 2024 Growth

At its 2023 Scaling Up Together conference, Lawn Doctor, the 640-unit lawn care franchise, brought hundreds of owners and team members together to reconnect, reenergize, celebrate the year’s wins and prepare for 2024. Although the Lawn Doctor franchise system has proven its stability and sustainability with decades of experience and a wide-reaching footprint, it continues to see opportunities for improvement and works to raise the bar each year.

“Lawn Doctor is a proud brand with many years of experience. We’re looking to propagate success, and the bar continues to rise every year,” explained Eric Martin, senior vice president of franchise development at Happinest Brands, Lawn Doctor’s parent franchisor. “We’ve created what we call the Ladders Program; everything is about climbing and growing toward what can be reached and achieved. That program was presented to our franchise owners during Scott [Frith], chairman of the board’s, keynote to set the tone for the conference. The theme here is that, no matter where you’re at in your business, there’s always an opportunity to get better.”

The brand emphasized the value of working together as franchise owners learn and grow. As the leadership team raises the bar for the system as a whole, Martin said he also wants individual owners to recognize how owners can rise up with the system and reap the benefits of the brand’s continued success. 

At the 2023 conference, Lawn Doctor held an extended awards banquet to recognize owners who have continued to raise the bar in their own businesses to recreate the kind of success the franchisor models.

2023 Mentor Award

Lawn Doctor recognized 24 franchise owners with the 2023 Mentor Award, celebrating those who have happily stepped in as valuable mentors to provide support, guidance and encouragement to fellow owners and help them succeed.

Million Dollar Club

The Million Dollar Club gained 33 members this year, recognizing those who achieved a new level of annual revenue (ranging from $1 million to $10 million) in 2023.

Best of the Best

Segmenting the franchise system by annual revenue ranges, Lawn Doctor recognized six total franchises, all at different stages of business growth, that operated within the highest standards of excellence in 2023. Franchisees were nominated by their regional business coaches, and the final winners were selected based on a thorough assessment of the business’s growth, consistency, sales, customer retention, employee development, culture, planning, customer service, image and engagement.

Fireball Award

The Fireball Award was given to franchisees who started strong, achieving $150,000 in annual sales after their first full year of operation. This year, Lawn Doctor celebrated both Jake Minor and John Perry for achieving this milestone.

Phoenix Award

Lawn Doctor works to ensure that existing owners have long-term strategies in place so they’ll be able to smoothly transition out of the company when the time comes while ensuring the successful continuation of the business. To this end, the Phoenix Award was given to Todd and Caron Voss and Brad and Emilee Smith for acquiring a resale unit and successfully growing their business by $100,000 or more after their first full year of operations.

Lawn Doctor Ambassador Award

Lawn Doctor encourages franchise owners to step beyond their businesses, get involved in the community and otherwise connect with their neighbors. The Lawn Doctor Ambassador Award went to Shelton Culpepper for an outstanding job of representing Lawn Doctor in a positive light and contributing to the brand’s growth and positive reputation through community outreach. 

Highest Revenue Award

The Lawn Doctor team has worked diligently to ensure it is offering a scalable business model and ample support for ambitious franchise owners looking to achieve meaningful growth. To highlight this goal, the team likes to recognize the franchise owner with the highest dollar volume in cash flow over a 12-month period. This year, the Highest Revenue Award went to Tom and James Norton, who also joined the 10 Million Dollar Club.

In addition to encouraging celebration and connection among franchise owners, Lawn Doctor presented multiple breakout sessions to provide even more resources for owners working to scale. These sessions included information on managed media, optimizing the office team, in-house sales center resources, customer retention and vendor relationships.

Alongside the celebration of powerful franchise owners who made meaningful progress in 2023, Lawn Doctor also announced initiatives that will roll out this year to further strengthen the brand and its business model. Most notably, the Lawn Doctor system will see the launch of holiday lighting services in 2024 after a successful pilot program last year, allowing owners to extend the seasonality of the business and leverage multiple streams of revenue. The team has also added new technologies to improve customer communication and allow for streamlined KPI reporting.

“We see so much value in encouraging our franchise owners to both take advantage of the systems we have behind us as well as the connection to other owners in the system. With that ‘scaling together’ mentality, we have so much opportunity,” said Martin. “We’ve worked incredibly hard as a franchisor to bring more value to the business model, and collaboration between our franchise owners will amplify that and help it to pay off in an even bigger way in 2024.”

To find out more information on costs to buy this franchise, please visit https://1851franchise.com/lawndoctor/info.