INTRO:
Karina: Hello and welcome back to the Landscape Ontario Podcast. I’m your host, Karina Sinclair.
In today’s episode, we dive into the story of a landscaper who saw a problem in his everyday work and took a bold step to solve it — not just for himself, but for an entire sector. Our guest today is Brandon Comstock, a self-taught entrepreneur in Calgary, Alberta, and co-founder of not just one, but two very different landscape-related businesses. What began as a passion for solving puzzles on the job-site led him to build a software company that now helps other landscapers boost their profit margins. His journey from hands-on, physical labour to creating digital solutions might seem unexpected, but I think his experience will resonate with a lot of landscapers. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, a creative thinker or just someone navigating a career change, you’ll appreciate how one idea can take you down a whole new path.
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INTERVIEW:
Karina: Thank you so much for taking the time to join us today, Brandon. Tell the audience a little bit more about your background in landscaping.
Brandon: It’s great to be here, Karina. Thank you. So I’ve done landscaping all of my life. I’m here in Calgary, Alberta. The owner of Landscapers By Nature. And I’ve done landscaping right out of high school, so I didn’t actually make it through high school. I had trouble all through school and was diagnosed with A.D.D. and all of these challenges.
I left in early grade 12, pretty close, but didn’t quite make it. And I got straight into landscaping with my father’s company here in Calgary. You know, I didn’t really do any landscaping before that. He kind of just threw me to the wolves a little bit, with maintenance. He brought me out to a truck and a trailer that was loaded up and gave me a list of sites that needed spring cleanups.
I had barely driven a truck to that point, let alone pull a trailer. So, anyhow, I went on my way. Had a few staff with me that helped me learn the equipment and that type of thing. And that was sort of my introduction to landscaping. We grew the company together, mostly in condo maintenance, just different multifamily HOAs and so on, and also some municipal maintenance contracts.
So we grew the company together. We moved it out of his garage across the street to my garage because it was a little bigger and then eventually got our first shop. That took us four or five years, probably, before we got it to that size. I got to start managing the day-to-day and learning about business with my dad.
And it was a great experience, the best thing that he did for me was give me the opportunity to learn and make mistakes and grow the business. So it was really challenging, not having any business background or any education in it, but I’ve always kind of been the type of person to just learn by trying and failing over and over again.
So that’s how I started. I did that for about eight years and then transitioned away from that and started Landscapers by Nature about 10 and a half years ago. Today, we have 50 employees. We only service condos. And that’s what we’ve done from day one — just started doing lawn maintenance and snow removal for condo complexes.
Karina: We’ll dive into the launch of your own business in a moment, but I want to touch back on the idea of working with your father and what it was like to be in the family business, trying to make your own way in the industry.
Brandon: Certainly, when I started working with him, I didn’t know anything. And eventually, after probably five years, I really got interested in technology and adding different things to the business. And keep in mind, I’m in my early-mid 20s, and my dad would have been in his mid to late 50s, I guess, at that time.
He had something that was working well for him and had worked for 15 years prior to me joining him. I wanted to take all these chances, try all these new things, break stuff and grow the business. But his mindset was in a different place. So, yeah, we just weren’t really aligned on that vision.
Something else that always bugged me, more so in my 20s than it would now in my mid-30s, was always being “the owner’s son.” Every success the business would have or that I would have, there was always the feeling that “you didn’t earn this on your own,” right? Of course, it was never portrayed that way by my dad, but just by people around you…I was working really hard, was really stressed, trying to make this business as good as I could make it, and you still feel like, “Oh, he gets the manager job and the nice truck because he’s the owner’s son.”
I really didn’t like that feeling. And part of the reason I dropped out of high school and started working was that I just wanted to make my own way. I didn’t want to go to school or get further education. I just wanted to get to work and start my life.
There was just a conflicting feeling there. It wasn’t a fight or anything with my father. I just wanted to make my own way.
Karina: I think a lot of people could probably relate to that. There does seem to be a lot of family-based companies in landscaping and horticulture, and the younger generations taking over from their parents are looking to make some changes. That could create a lot of friction.
Brandon: It probably took me three years from the day I started thinking about leaving my dad’s company to actually talk to him about it. It was tough. But I didn’t start my company right after. I left working with my dad’s company, then started working with a company that installs AV equipment. I’ve always been into electronics and tech stuff.
So, for about a year and a half, I became an employee for a great company in Calgary. We installed boardroom video conference systems and those types of things. It was fun, but it really solidified that I wanted to be a business owner after being an employee. I didn’t know that it would be a landscape company right away. I thought about it for a long time and discussed it a lot with my long-time girlfriend from high school, Michelle, who owns LBN with me today.
I started in landscaping only because I knew it already. I knew the trade, and I really like maintenance. I like that it’s a sell it once with recurring revenue type of thing. I still didn’t know much about business, but I knew I could sell one contract and it would be worth many than if I was to do just single-family homes. I also knew how the business worked, how to work with property managers, and how the contracts needed to look. So I had a bit of a shortcut there, I guess. That’s why we started in that.
Karina: What do you think your life would look like now if you hadn’t found your way into landscaping?
Brandon: I think I would have still started a business. I’m not terribly passionate about the service, like the product we deliver. I’m passionate about the business. I really like the business. What I mean by that is there are definitely people in our company who are better at the trade than I am. They mow straighter stripes, they know their plant ID better, and they know the snow removal equipment better. Those things are all fun, I like doing yard work, but I’m not as passionate about that as I am about the business itself.
I really like maintenance, recurring revenue, and the puzzle of trying to figure out how to do things more efficiently. So it’s really small business that I think I like. If I hadn’t been introduced to landscaping by my father, I think I still would have run a small business. It came down to, “if I don’t try this now, like at 26 or 27, I’ll regret it forever. Even if I fail. I want to try this, even if it puts me on the street. I’ll go all in on this for five years and just really try it,” because I was thinking about it every day. I’m listening to podcasts, reading books, and I’m just obsessed with trying it. So, I just felt I really had to.
Karina: Usually, when something is all-consuming like that, it’s a good sign that it’s worth pursuing.
A minute ago, you mentioned that you love the puzzle and solving problems. How was that instrumental when you were building out not only your landscaping business, but what you ended up doing next?
Brandon: With landscape maintenance, oftentimes landscape maintenance and snow removal in our company, anyway, you know, it’s flat-rate sales. The revenue is all flat-rate. The more that you can get done, the more you make, or the quicker you are, the more you make. And so, there’s just a really neat puzzle there. If you can do some research, collect the data, and make your drive times a little bit less, or mow the grass a bit quicker, you do better. I really enjoy tracking all the stats and all the data, and sitting down and brainstorming with the people I work with, trying to figure all those things out is really, really fun.
One of the problems that we always had doing condos is with enhancements or upsells, whatever you call them — it’s different in every province and state — but they’re basically outside of your flat-rate, monthly dues. There’s a shrub to replace or tree pruning to do that’s outside of the contract. In large townhome complexes, there are usually 100 of those things if you walk around and pay attention. So tracking them all and tracking all the requests from customers — there are emails and emails about them. When you do a walkaround with a customer, you see tons more that you’d like to recommend.
There was always a problem with keeping track of all of these things. We eventually developed IssueID to solve the problem. Originally, we had Google Maps with pins all over it and spreadsheets tracking all these things. The beauty of these services is that usually, when they’re turned down, it’s like “not for now.” It’s not just a no. Often, the customer’s not getting a bunch of bids to replace a shrub; they just don’t have it in the budget this year. They’ll get it done next year or the year after, which means you’re going to have to quote it again. You have to remember that you quoted it last year, and they wanted to talk to you about it next year. This is where all the problems lie, right?
Traditionally, we would send an estimate through LMN, which we love, but the estimates would just die in the inbox of the customer. And, you know, we’d kind of forget about them too. So, with IssueID, it helps us to manage our sites. We’re very good at managing our customers, our crews, and tracking time through LMN, but managing your sites and all of those little tasks — like the thing your maintenance crew missed, like weeding the bed in the back, or the customer asked for a quote on a mulch upgrade or whatever it may be — those are all things that LMN, Aspire, and others just never did well for us. So, it’s really, really helped with that. We started building it two and a half years ago, and it’s been pretty fun to go from landscaper to tech entrepreneur.
Karina: At this point, Landscapers by Nature has been running well for a number of years, and you’re developing this idea of creating a solution for tracking all those smaller side projects that get missed in a standard contract. What’s the next step? How do you build out that idea to become something more robust?
Brandon: With IssueID, it started with us having the problem and me mentioning it to a lot of my friends and peers through the coaching group that I’m in. Through that, we found there wasn’t really a solution — the spreadsheet and the map we had was as good as what was available out there, from our testing it out for a couple of years prior. Eventually, I met up with Jason Hoke, who owns A Cut Above Landscape down in Denver. I’m all the way up in Calgary, but they have these group events a couple of times a year through the organization where all the members meet up. That’s where I met Jason, and his business partner at ACAL, Jonathan, who has a tech background. We went out one day, had some beers, and were talking about this problem. We’re all entrepreneurs. Jonathan, with his tech background, and we just started thinking about it and thought, maybe this would be a lot of fun.
It’s funny as an entrepreneur — I had no idea what I was doing in tech at the time. It was just like, “How hard could it be?” Of course, it’s way more challenging than you’d expect, like any business. But that’s kind of how it got started. Like any good idea, a couple of beers at the pub, and us saying ‘let’s go for it.’ Yeah, we set off with myself, Jonathan, Jason, and Jonathan’s friend Craig to make it a reality two and a half years ago.
It was nice because we had already proven that there was a solution. We could guinea pig it in our two landscape companies. We had lived the problem deeply and kind of tested the idea through spreadsheets and so on. So, we knew it was a good solution already.
Karina: Yeah, you already had the solution — you just needed the right vehicle to make it easy to use and put into play.
Brandon: Yeah.
Karina: So, is this a software platform? Is it an app? How would other landscapers use it, and what difference would it make in their day?
Brandon: Yeah. If you have a maintenance division, like lawn care and maintenance, it can help in construction, too, but it’s really well-suited for maintenance. You can find it online: IssueID.io. It’s subscription-based software, and there’s an app for Android and Apple. It enables you to take a photo of an issue you find on a site, and it pins it on a satellite map for you and the customer to keep track of. You can add a template to that photo that gives it a price, a description and a note. It almost gives you an online store experience for your customer and yourself to plan out when to address these issues.
So, as I said earlier, a lot of these things are not “no’s,” they’re just “not for now.” It requires expertise and planning to know when to get them done. Customers ask to plant all new trees, but they need irrigation repairs, so you can plan it out over several phases or years, while you’re still their maintenance contractor. You could say, let’s get the irrigation repairs done this year. Next year, we’ll plan out tree removals, and then tree planting the following year, or re-sodding the yard, whatever it may be.
So yeah, if listeners are having problems keeping track of all those things and getting lots of email requests, especially for small things that often feel annoying, like quoting for one dead shrub that the customer is asking for, because you’re their maintenance contractor — but to send someone to replace just one shrub is sort of annoying.
It’s about being more proactive, turning them into projects, and having real discussions about improving your customer’s landscape over time, instead of doing one-off things. It really makes enhancements a great part of your maintenance company and makes it way more profitable. They’re a lot higher margin, typically.
Karina: That makes so much sense because going out to a site to fix something small might not feel worth it. But if you can knock at least two or three things off that list, then it starts to feel more significant. It probably adds up to a solid half-day or full-day’s work, and then that is worth the gas and effort of sending a crew out.
So I can see that really helping with the flow of your staff and equipment and materials needed to complete tasks and knock them off your to-do list.
Brandon: Yeah, exactly.
Karina: So now, what do your day-to-day operations look like? How hands-on are you with both the software company and the landscaping company?
Brandon: With the software company, I’m certainly not the tech guy. I’m the guy that knows the trades. If there are tradespeople thinking about starting software, that’s an important marriage to get right, is finding the product people who can build it for you and understand what you’re saying from a trades perspective. They need to know what will work and what’s simple enough for crews to use.
My day-to-day is speaking with other landscapers about the problems that I know they’re likely having, similar to mine. We go through that together. It’s a few meetings a week. Some weeks, there’s podcasts and conferences and things like that, that I get to do as well.
We’re all very remote, working from our garages and homes. That’s about it for IssueID.
For Landscapers By Nature, in the last couple of years especially, our managers are fantastic. We’ve got an operations manager, people and culture manager. We’ve got account managers (we call them zone managers) who manage different territories of Calgary.
And then, a tremendous team under that as well, with a lot of long-term staff and solid retention. It’s a lot about teaching those managers what I knew over time, and now a lot of them have surpassed me in skill sets. I meet with them a couple times a week, helping with more challenging contract sales or particularly large contracts where one of the zone managers wants assistance. I’ll step in for those meetings.
So, I’m like a subject matter expert who can help where needed.
With LBN, we have some pretty grand plans. We’ve always been extremely strict about the customer type we work with, and it’s always been that way for us. I really like to focus on doing one thing really well. We’ve never gotten into design, build, construction, or arbor work like many companies our size often open other divisions in.
With our team’s support, we’ll stay in that realm. We’ve built a scalable model, and I think we’ll continue scaling up around Calgary and move into some surrounding cities. There are so many condos being built in Calgary — it’s crazy. There’s a big demand for the work, and we happen to be really good at it because it’s all we’ve ever done.
So we’ll keep growing in the space that we’re in.
Karina: Running a company with friends can be complicated, but even more so when your spouse or life partner is involved. You’re actually running two companies with Michelle, your partner of 21 years. How do you maintain that healthy life-work balance so that it enhances your relationship instead of disrupting it?
Brandon: I worked with my dad before, so from age 18 to 37, I’ve always worked with family or friends, and then made good friends with people I worked with after they joined the company too. So it’s always been something I’ve had to balance.
I think it really comes down to who you surround yourself with, whether they’re friends, family, or otherwise.
Working with Michelle is a pretty easy example to give. She’s a chartered accountant, and I’m the furthest thing from that. We just knew our strengths and weaknesses and what parts of the business we run. I wouldn’t say we’ve had zero problems with that over the years, but both of us are pretty logical people. We’ll sit down and study something together. For example, if I want to buy new equipment, she’ll run the numbers, and we’ll make the decision together. That’s where, at work, our worlds collide.
One of the nice things about working with your spouse or partner is that your lives are kind of on the same path. So, you know, if your partner has a traditional career that they’re trying to move up in, like working downtown in a more conventional setting, and you’re an entrepreneur trying to build an empire, traveling, attending peer groups, conferences, and doing all these different things, you might have a different dream than your partner. Working with them full-time has the advantage of achieving goals at the same time with your business.
That’s certainly evident for us when we’re speaking with other couples or traveling with other people. Michelle and I often find ourselves working in the hotel room all day because we have to catch up on work. That can be a tough balance to find for people who don’t work together. So yeah, there are a lot of advantages.
Karina: That’s a great insight. It could be assumed that too much time together might be a bad thing for some couples, but it sounds like it unites you in your goals, values, hopes, and dreams.
Brandon: It’s not about work-life balance; it’s work-life harmony. We talk about work at dinner, and talk about work at breakfast, and it’s fun because it’s a project we work on together, right?
Karina: Work-life harmony? I love that.
Tell me about your strategy for finding and hiring people for your company. You mentioned earlier you have long-time staff and low turnover, with about 50 employees year-round at Landscapers by Nature. How did you build such a collection of people?
Brandon: Through a lot of failures and lessons learned, I would say. The company is ten and a half years old. Our longest staff member, Parker, has been with us for over eight years, soo, from running it out of my garage to our current size. It really comes down to knowing the vision of your company and what you’re trying to build, even from a fairly small size.
Not to worry anyone listening who’s only a year in and doesn’t know exactly what they’re doing — that’s fine. But you need to cast a vision for people in an interview, and say, “This is what we’re building, this is who we are, and this is where we hope to be in a year or two.” You’re trying to figure out if this person understands that and is interested in helping you get there. And, importantly, are they going to get along with the team?
We use what we call the “beer and barbecue test,” which we picked up from someone in BTA. It’s an important part of the interview. Is this someone I’d want to have over to my house for a barbecue or share a beer with at the pub? That helps you add like-minded people to your company, and you need to be relentless about it.
You’ll make mistakes, of course. We have 50 staff now, but we’ve had hundreds of staff that we’ve worked through over the years to find this team. Getting rid of people quickly when it’s clear they’re not the best fit, even if they’re super good producers and might make the company a lot of money. If they’re jerks, they gotta go. Eventually, you’ll just have a critical mass of great people in your company, and they edit out the bad people very, very quickly.
It’s really neat once you get there. But the opposite will happen too, which I’ve been in as well, where you have a critical mass of the wrong people, and it’s hard to attract and keep the good people because they don’t want to work with those people. So, being meticulous about who you bring on is key.
Karina: Do you think the size of your company makes a difference? Is it a different dynamic when you have 50 people versus five? And are there advantages to growing the team to find more quality people?
Brandon: Yes, it’s much different operating a company of this size than when we were small. There are obvious advantages when you’re larger— if a staff member calls in sick, it’s not a third of your workforce. You also have more levels of management, and a lot more people that can pick up the slack if someone’s on vacation. You can generally afford better staff and really focus on making your company the go-to company in your market to work for.
So is reputation is important, of course. Traditionally people think of that with their customers. But with your competitors and with your staff, it is important as well, because in your market, if you’re the go-to landscape company to work for, recruiting is a lot less difficult. So working on those things is one advantage and it’s a little bit easier as you get larger.
You just start to build up a great team to help you make decisions. As I said earlier, it’s a lot about people and surrounding yourself with more and more amazing people to help you grow this business. At our size, I can still be involved in the major decisions, but I don’t have to do all the work. I also have people around me to tell me when it’s a bad idea or when we should wait and do that later. We build annual plans and goals together; it’s not just me and Michelle like when we were smaller. So we’ll build our annual goals, sales goals and so on, and visit those things as a leadership team, which is fantastic.
You know how difficult it is when you’re a small business owner with 10 or 15 employees, there’s never been more pressure than that. In some ways, it gets easier as you get bigger which was very surprising to me from when I was smaller.
Karina: You also mentioned earlier that offering better training programs and upskilling opportunities for your staff became easier as your company got bigger.
Brandon: Yes. When we were smaller, we were less sophisticated. When you’re running a smaller business, the owner is on their own journey too, learning along the way, and learning how to run a company with five employees, and then 15, and 25. It takes a completely different person to be able to run a 50-person company well than a five-person company. It’s the same person; you just have to learn along the way.
With staffing and development, when we were smaller, we were always just trying to find landscapers — thoroughbred landscapers, right—that just know the trade really well. You know, I’ve got to move snow next week or I’ve got to do spring cleanups, and I don’t have a big bench strength of people just waiting to move up into crew leader roles when I was small. So, we were always trying to just hire somebody who’s ready to go. Over time, you start to build bench strength, and we started to really learn how to develop people, from someone who’s never used a line trimmer before to being supervisors in our company over a couple of years and moving them up really quickly.
A lot of that came down to putting it on them, giving them self-directed options to improve themselves, and just showing them the path. Our compensation programs are set up so we can lay them out in an interview. We can say, “Here’s what you’ll make at each level in the company, and here’s how you get there.” You might need to get a certification, like external education through Landscape Alberta or SIMA. You might need to take some training from our other managers on a weekend or after-work session. Once you start checking these boxes, you start moving up. When you can lay out a plan, it really makes the cream rise to the top, because the people who are eager now see exactly how they’re going to accomplish their goals, and they can somewhat go out and just do it themselves.
Karina: It sounds like by opening your talent pool to include people who might not have a landscaping background but who have the right attitude towards learning and enthusiasm for customer service, that’s been crucial in building a strong team.
Brandon: Yeah, of course. That’s the key to freedom from your business — building up the people around you and sharing the journey with them.
Karina: There’s a phrase, “A rising tide lifts all boats.” I love that. I see it often with landscapers. There’s a real commitment to training and growing — not just growing plants and landscapes, but growing potential in people. That’s an exciting thing to see repeated in all the different kinds of landscaping companies I encounter.
Brandon: Yeah, definitely.
Karina: You mentioned that school wasn’t really for you. You left just before the end of grade 12. How does one learn the entrepreneurial and leadership skills necessary to run a business, maintain a team of 50, and feel confident in building a second company in a totally different discipline without formal training?
Brandon: I only know what’s worked for me. There are many people who go to school, get MBAs, and start great businesses (and many of them who don’t). But for me, it was trial by fire — just go try it, just go start. Getting out of high school, for all the parents listening, was great for me. It might not be great for your kids, but getting out of an environment where I felt like I was wasting my time, I felt smart enough to just get started. I was ready to bet on myself. I didn’t want to go and get an education.
It wasn’t a situation where I got kicked out of school; I left school to go start my life. My job through high school was a mattress salesman, a commission furniture salesman. Full-on commission sales is an eat-what-you-kill type of environment. You’re writing your own paycheck, and that was a great introduction to that type of lifestyle. I saw my dad be an entrepreneur and a business owner my whole life, so it didn’t seem abnormal. He was working his tail off, missed birthdays and family events, and although it’s disappointing at the time, as you grow up, you understand. Especially if you start a business, then you really understand what it takes and how hard those sacrifices are on the individual doing it.
For me, it was betting on myself. I committed to doing it. I told myself I was going to do it whether I failed or not. I considered that I would be employable. The worst-case scenario is I put a bunch of money into this landscaping company and it totally failed, I would have lost some time, which is a bummer, but I would still be able to get a job and start over. That sounded a lot better than never trying it. So, I had to give it a go.
Karina: I think it’s important for people considering a career in the green trades to know that there is no one defined path here. Entry can mean coming in from a formal degree in horticulture or design, or climbing up the ladder from an entry-level crew member right out of high school to lead hand, to eventually owner. There’s no one path that’s right and sure to be successful, but it has to feel right for that individual to bet on themselves and make things happen. So I think it’s good to show that there are still opportunities for people who have self-discipline and drive, even without formal education.
Brandon: Yeah. There’s no boss there to tell you to get to work. As long as you know you’re not going to sleep in every day and procrastinate, and you’re going to do what you’ve told yourself you’re going to do, I don’t see any bigger challenge than that. It’s a you versus you situation.
Karina: So, Brandon, I have one last question for you, and it’s something I’m going to start asking all of my guests on the podcast. Knowing what you know now, what advice would you give yourself at the start of your career? What wisdom would you share with 20-year-old Brandon?
Brandon: Probably to invest in Amazon. I mean, looking back over the last ten years, just talking about LBN specifically, the journey has been more difficult than I expected. I didn’t know anything back then, and it’s also been more rewarding in almost every sense.
I didn’t realize I would have to evolve so much, like I’d have to learn so much. I would have to evolve, make new friendships, meet new people, and evolve as a business person. Because I just didn’t know what I didn’t know. So although it’s been a lot harder than I expected, and I don’t know if I would have proceeded if I knew how difficult it was going to be, it’s been a lot more rewarding.
As for advice, like a shortcut, I would say the biggest impacts that I’ve had have been from the people that I’ve surrounded myself with. I didn’t have all those connections or relationships when I started, and so, things like joining peer groups or coaching groups, there’s some fantastic ones out there. There’s probably some scams out there, so, you know, do your research, ask for some references. But there’s some incredible ones out there. And just surrounding yourself with other business owners that are going through the same thing or are a bit further ahead than you is a game changer.
I realize those things can be expensive. And there’s a lot of free ways to do that as well, right? Like, you know, in every city, there are little get-togethers for entrepreneurs. There are conferences like the GISC conference in Red Deer. There are low-cost options to get great education and surround yourself with people, make new friends. Those are the biggest things. There’s great podcasts and YouTube channels, like podcasts like this one. If I can name-drop a couple, I highly recommend one of the greatest of all time, Jonathan Pototschnik. He’s out of Dallas, built an incredible landscape company that he still owns, built and sold a software company called Service Autopilot. He just started a podcast on YouTube, so I’d highly recommend checking him out.
Mark Bradley tours around and does these great two-day sessions from LMN. Even if you’re not an LMN user, they are some of the most motivating and impactful days that you’ll go through as a business owner. Contractor Revolution is an awesome one. And of course, my own podcast is Beer Garden with me and Jason. So, that’s a good one, of course, too. It’s all about people. That’s what I would recommend: surround yourself with good people, and that’ll help you with everything else.
Karina: I love that. That’s very sage advice because we can accomplish a lot of great things when we’re with people who share that journey with us. And your suggestions for finding ways of networking outside of your inner circle and expanding your learning opportunities through conferences, podcasts, YouTube videos — there are all kinds of resources out there. The answer to just about everything is available if you just go looking for it at the time you need it. So I encourage people to keep on learning.
If anyone wants to learn more about you, Landscapers By Nature, IssueID or the Beer Garden Podcast, how can they find you?
Brandon: The Beer Garden you can find on YouTube quite easily. Issue ID is IssueID.io. You can find me on LinkedIn, feel free to add me on there, on Facebook, and send me a message. I’m always happy to connect with people, and Landscapers by Nature — if you’re someone who’s interested in working with a great company or hiring a great company — condos only — you can reach us at LandscapersByNature.com.
Karina: That’s fantastic. I’ll be sure to include all those links in the show notes and in the downloadable transcription. I hope people will seek you out and try to learn more from your journey, because you’ve had a lot of experiences that I think will relate to many people, especially as they’re exploring different career paths in their landscaping careers and thinking about what else they could be doing next.
There are so many options, and you just helped show that almost anything is possible when you have that curiosity and the drive to see a problem and find a solution. So thank you so much, Brandon, for sharing your story on the podcast today.
Brandon: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.
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EXTRO:
Karina: I wonder how many listeners are now thinking about the problems that THEY can solve, and how they can turn that into a new business idea. If this gets your creative wheels turning, definitely connect with Brandon if you’d like to learn more about his journey. And don’t forget to turn to the CNLA or your provincial landscape trades association to see what resources they offer for business and skills development. You might even be lucky enough to find a group of fellow entrepreneurs to bounce ideas off of, like in the Peer to Peer Network at Landscape Ontario. Like Brandon said, surrounding yourself with good people is the key.
No matter what field you’re in, innovation can come from anywhere — and sometimes, the biggest opportunities come from the challenges we face in our day-to-day work. Whether you’re looking to pivot careers, solve a problem in your industry or just take that first step toward entrepreneurship, I hope today’s interview inspires you to think outside the toolbox.
If you’d like a transcription of today’s episode, I’ve posted it and other relevant links on this episode’s webpage at landscapeontario.com/podcast. As always, I’d love to hear from you, so reach out with story ideas, suggestions for guests and other feedback. You can email me at podcast@landscapeontario.com.
Thanks again for listening and don’t forget to tune in next month. I’ve got some great interviews lined up that you won’t want to miss. Until next time, I’m Karina Sinclair for the Landscape Ontario Podcast.
