The Edge July/August 2025

finding those right people who can mature enough. It takes about five years for a person to really mature, to go to that next level. We have got to raise the wages in five year by $20,000 per person. One of the things that happens when you keep pushing wages up is you keep attracting better people. I think five years from now, the oppor tunity for us to be better is incredible. I also think, though, if we don’t really keep it front and foremost on our objectives, we will slide backward. I think success is so temporary that to keep it, you never stop earning it. All it takes is a couple of days of quitting to get out of the habit. It’s much easier to lose a good habit than it is to gain one. WHAT CHANGES WOULD YOU LIKE TO SEE IN THE INDUSTRY? More professionalism and pay their people more. I’d start with those two. We need a lot more training. We need full time people in this industry. When you have people from year to year, and you don’t have seasonal workers every year, some magical things happen. TE

transitioning to do on that. Our industry could be at the apex of a transformation if people would see what was possible, and if you would commit to getting the right people and growing people. Our biggest challenge will always be finding that next great person, but because we’re committed to it, we’ve al ways been able to find that person. I will tell you, we’ve picked up some duds, but you don’t keep them. But that doesn’t mean it’s bad because it’s hard. In the early days building cars, they didn’t know where they were going. They didn’t know what a carburetor was. They didn’t know what electronic igni tion was. They’ve learned all those things because they were hard. They solved things. Greatness will always, always, always be hard, and yet we cannot back away from a commitment to excellence and to greatness. WHERE DO YOU SEE RYAN LAWN & TREE IN THE NEXT FIVE YEARS? 15% growth. We double every five years. We could grow faster, but we can’t grow faster because to we have to keep

majority of them are there for a reason, or they develop the reason. In the pre-cell phone, pre-internet days, I just started knocking on college doors and started out with Kansas State because I’d gone there for two years before I transferred to Montana. That’s our closest land grant horticulture school, and we landed a gem for our first full-time employee. He helped attract the others. I think out of 500 people, probably about half have a college degree. But you can’t walk in and tell who doesn’t have a degree because they will share that knowledge so thoroughly with each other over a period of time. I’m convinced that you don’t have to have a college degree to be good at this, but you do have to be a learner. You do have to care about customers. You do have to really want to know how to do things right. WHAT HAS BEEN YOUR BIGGEST CHALLENGE LEADING RYAN LAWN & TREE? It’s always finding the right person for the next job, and we still have some

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