Scott Frith, Lawn Doctor

everyone is suffering from Alzheimer’s. You might be doing mini tech talks and genius bar activities in one facility. In another, you may be providing things to aid in therapy—the Frank Sinatra music a patient loves, or sounds from Cape Cod. Our support for delivery of care is driven by the facility’s needs.

Never “Talk Down”

So many people who’ve tried to build technology for an aging population did it in an insulting way. Their content offerings were all about care. Our brand is about living, not dying.

We try to design things in a way that’s universally appealing. My kids should want to get on what we’re building as much as my grandmother does. For example, we’ve incorporated picture-based e-mail. If you want to send someone a message, you don’t necessarily have to type in the e-mail address—you can touch the person’s face in a photo and an addressed message will automatically pop up.

We do pay attention to things like contrast, color, and icons, because we understand there may be a significant amount of macular degeneration among our users—but we aim for a presentation that is simple, uncluttered, and beautiful.

Next: In-home Apps

There is so much coming up for our company in the next 12 months. We believe in the mobile revolution completely. Our platform is on every mobile device you can imagine, but we are also rapidly building new apps. We’ve been doing really exciting work with Apple’s health division and other groups.

As far as isolation and aging, many more people are at home than are within the walls of a facility. We will be releasing HomeConnect programs to help people who are aging at home to reach a virtual community.

We will be lining up with an insurance company to see how Connected Living plays out with in-home health care. There’s so much research that shows that a connected life is a healthier life, with fewer hospitalizations. Why wouldn’t insurance companies want to make sure this kind of technology is a piece of their delivery, knowing they’ll save money on the back end?

From the federal government standpoint, access to technology is going to be a huge issue. Increasingly, seniors need access to the Internet to get government services they need— but most seniors aging in public housing don’t have it. We are already in public housing in Atlanta and Washington, D.C., and expect that part of our business to expand.

I’m convinced there isn’t anything society can’t do for seniors, if there’s a willingness to pull together from a technology standpoint.

SCOTT FRITH, LAWN DOCTOR:

INNOVATING FROM THE GROUND UP

The suburban sprawl of the 1960s created generations of new homeowners, with new problems: how to keep the lawn looking green and lush? That opportunity was the genesis of Holmdel, New Jersey–based Lawn Doctor, a lawn care company that now has 500 franchisees nationwide. The business, which had $98.6 million in revenue in 2013, has proved to be virtually recession-proof as consumers move from a “do it yourself” to a “do it for me” model, explains CEO Scott Frith, who took over the top spot from his father, Russell, in 2011. Frith intends to continue to fuel growth through investment in technology related to customer relations, business operations, and equipment. He explains how. >>

Inclusion Is Key

There’s a natural resistance in human beings when it comes to change. That’s why we really involve our franchisees in the innovation process. If you design, build, and put out a new technology without that input, you’re going to have missed some fundamental things— feature sets, functionality—that should have been incorporated.

We do this by having three functional groups: one for marketing, one for sales, and one for service. When we’re considering a new technology, the chair of each group surveys the group via regular conference calls, as well as face-toface meetings. In terms of innovation, forming these groups is one of the best things we ever did.

Branding Begins Online

Some people see lawn care as a very hands-on, blue-collar type of business, but in reality we are extremely sophisticated in terms of technology.

This starts with the way the customer engages with the brand. It used to be a much longer process. Years ago, you sent a direct mail piece, someone would walk to the mailbox and get it, contact you, then the sales process would begin. We still do direct mail, but a lot of our budget has moved to the Internet.

Today customers want to solve a problem right away, because they’re living busy and complicated lives. The consumer wants a beautiful environment around his or her home, but doesn’t have time to do it him- or herself, so they go online and type in keywords.

Lawn care service is in our keyword portfolio, and that will serve up our paid advertisement. If you click on it, you go right to our home page and you can get our 60-second quote. You type in your address and zip code, and our data sets can calculate the size of your lawn, the agronomics of the zone you’re in, and what the pricing would be, based on the franchise that serves your area.

It’s been a real focus for our company to acquire this data from a variety of sources and build it over time so that we can engage with the customer at the moment he or she wants a solution.

We’re also reprogramming our site with responsive design so that it is sized correctly for whatever device is used—which is important since a third of visits to our site are from mobile devices, and the number is growing. That interaction with our site could be the customer’s fi rst introduction to us, so we have to educate them.

Today customers want to solve a problem right away because they are living complicated lives.

—SCOTT FRITH

Let Data Help Decide

If you’re an innovator, you’re passionate about moving your organization forward, but that means you get pulled in a lot of different directions. I’ve had to learn that strategy is as much about what you won’t do as what you will do.

We’re still going to be innovating, but we are becoming very disciplined in our approach. We defi ne a particular metric that we’re going after—for example, increasing the average transaction per customer. There are many different ways to do that, but let’s not try to do three things at once. Let’s pick the one we think is going to get us closest to our goal, then do ideas number two and three.

We also now rigorously manage and analyze our data through a business intelligence tool we’ve developed. Our data used to live locally with our franchisees; now we can roll it all into one hosted environment with a reportwriting engine that can give us specifi c information we request.

Look Both Ways

As a CEO, you have people whose livelihoods depend on the decisions you make and on your strategy for the company. When you take over as the leader of a well-established company, the safe thing to do is to continue to do what we’ve done before, but maybe a little better, so you see incremental change.

But you can’t be too focused on the past. If you’re looking in the rear-view mirror, you’re going to hit something in front of you. For us, the right thing to do was move into a completely different direction in terms of digitization, customer management, even the type of franchisees we’ll recruit.

At the same time, as a leader, I need to be very respectful of the company’s past, its culture and relationships, the things that got it to where it is now. I’ve had to really cultivate my listening skills and listen to people throughout the organization. To take a step forward sometimes means taking a step back.

I always say that I need to have one foot in the past, one foot in the future. A lot of business really comes down to balance.