After a nearly 20-year run in the hotel industry that took Jeff Angus from Seattle to Atlantic City and nearly a dozen locations in between, he was ready to settle down and open his own business.
Now, 12 years after reaching that goal, Angus, a New Canaan resident, unexpectedly finds himself at the helm of ten Lawn Doctor franchises in Westchester and Fairfield counties, making him the company”™s largest franchisee.
It all started when a series of hotel mergers in the mid-1990s left Angus with a choice: Relocate from Westport to Seattle ”“ where he had been immediately before moving to Connecticut ”“ or find a new employer.
“Having spent every Monday in the corporate boardroom with a suit and tie on, I thought about going back to the hotel field but … I didn”™t really want to do that, so we said, ”˜Let”™s buy a small business,”™” said Angus, who worked in sales and marketing for Red Lion Hotels Corp. for 15 years before the chain was acquired by Doubletree by Hilton. That was followed by a short stint with HEI Hotels & Resorts in Westport until it was bought by Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc.
In 1997, Angus responded to a classified advertisement in The New York Times, in which the owner of three Fairfield County Lawn Doctor franchises said he was looking to sell.
“I met with him one Monday afternoon, and as I drive into the parking lot, here”™s this guy in a Jeep Wrangler with a cutoff shirt and jeans,” Angus said.
The deal was finalized in February 1998, with Angus acquiring the Stamford-Darien-New Canaan-Westport-Weston franchises as well as the Fairfield-Southport outlets.
Since then, Angus has added franchises covering Norwalk and Wilton, Greenwich, and central and northern Westchester. Just this year, Angus acquired the southeastern and southwestern Westchester franchises, giving him the entire county and ten franchises total, which are all run from the central Stamford location.
“On Feb. 15, 1998, we had eight trucks, two employees and 1,500 customers to service over those next few weeks,” Angus said. “This year we”™ll finish with close to 5,000 customers. When we first started we had a year-round staff of two and a seasonal staff of maybe seven. Now we have a year-round staff of five and, depending on the season, we”™re employing 20 to 25.”
Angus attributes his franchises”™ success to his experiences in the hotel industry, where he helped to develop a centralized electronic reservation database for Red Lion Hotels.
There, as vice president of sales and marketing, Angus was responsible for the entire sales department and the reservations system for the 60-hotel chain, which at the time had $450 million in annual sales.
By applying the same electronic reservation system to his Lawn Doctor franchises, Angus has created a fluid system.
“We run about 5,000 customers. We only need two people in the office to do that,” he said. “The guys all travel with laptops in their trucks. Their routes are downloaded by Wi-Fi into the truck each day.”
And, as Angus said, “The proof is in the pudding.” Today, Lawn Doctor franchises nationwide are adopting the methods of electronic monitoring that Angus first incorporated.
“The nice thing about Jeff is he comes from a larger background and he takes his experience and turns a lawn care company into a company run with a corporate mindset,” said Paul Mumm, vice president of marketing for Lawn Doctor Inc., which has 460 franchises in 40 states and is headquartered in Holmdel, N.J. “When you have a background like that it generates some pretty positive best practices for everybody.”
Lawn Doctor was acquired in January by the Los Angeles-based private equity firm Levine Leichtman Capital Partners.
