Meet a Design/Build Revolutionary: Paul St. Pierre

Meet a Design/Build Revolutionary:
Paul St. Pierre

Profile: Owner, Landscape Effects Group, Belle River, Ontario, Canada (near Windsor)

Year in Landscape Business: Since 1987

Focus: Primary focus is Landscape Design/Build. Also provides landscape maintenance, irrigation, and commercial snow management services. Landscape Effects also owns a nursery of five acres and does specialty plant storage for palm trees.

Design/Build Revolutionary since: Since the first seminar, about 10 years ago

Distinctions: Honored as Windsor District Chamber of Commerce’s Young Entrepreneur of the Year, winner of seven national and international landscape awards.

Earns His Design Fees via a top-of-the-line “Design Center”: “We built this incredible 5,000-square-foot space full of landscape structures, water features, plasma screens, designers’ areas. We tell prospective clients, ‘We can’t bring this to you — you have to see it.’ Once they walk in, we’ve captured their interest and I can say that 95% of them don’t leave without paying us a design fee, allowing us to turn almost 100% of those into construction projects.”

2009 Destinations: Italy, Florida, Las Vegas, Cayman Islands, Florida

Changes in Business since attending Kinman Institute:

“We used to employ up to 50 or 60 employees each year and had revenues approaching $9 million. We had retail, Christmas, storage, design/build, irrigation, and multiple other divisions, and worked on as many as 90 projects each year.”
“After attending the Kinman Institute seminars several times and working with Gary as a consultant, I’ve gradually made dramatic changes to my business. For instance, I used to carry monthly payrolls as high as $150,000/month. Now, it’s closer to $60,000/month in peak season. We focus mostly on landscape design/build, with other services to balance. We have only 3 full-time people in the business plus a business manager, and I do 100% of the selling. We now have only about 30 projects, and actually, we only need to have about 10 to make the same kind of money. Our revenues are lower — close to $4 million — but we’re now so profitable.

Kinman Institute Experiences:

“Over the years, working with the Kinmans, I’ve gradually made big changes in my business. From the time I returned after the first class, I started developing every tool necessary to make money and help us sell landscape design/build projects.”
“In the first class, Gary & Cynthia showed me how I could use just a pencil and a paper to sell incredible things, without carrying a heavy overhead.”
“I changed everything to do with landscaping. For instance, having to make clients come to me was a stumbling block at first, until I developed my design studio.”

Best Advice on the Kinman Institute:

“I’ve attended several of their seminars, and I think the key is that you need to go to the class, and leave with the 10 top ideas they offer, and adapt those to fit into your own life and business.