By Kim Lux, Senior Editor, Lawn & Landscape |  Listen to article

Editor's Note: This article originally appeared in the July 2026 print edition of Lawn & Landscape under the headline “When it’s time to have the talk.”

The wrong customer can be bad for business. And the longer you keep catering to them the worse it can be. Learning how to identify your ideal client, acquiring those customers, strategizing your services to them and how to ultimately part ways if the relationship isn’t working out were all topics of discussion during the “Every Customer Isn’t a Win” panel at Lawn & Landscape’s third-annual Business Builders Summit.

Weighing in on all things related to good, and bad, customers were panelists Ted Glaser, CEO of Summit Lawns; Ben Hewlett, partner and COO of Earthscapes Lawn and Land Service; Chase Mullin, founder and CEO of Mullin; and Terell Weg, president and CEO of MSNW Group.

Identify the ideal client

In today’s day and age, new customers already know enough about you to usually make the decision to do business with you before you even hear from them.

“Managing expectations from a customer is crucial right from the beginning,” Hewlett says. “Customer acquisition starts long before the phone call comes in. They’ve already made up their mind that you’re a good company before they called you, so there’s already some expectations built in there.”

In fact, Hewlett says the success of Earthscapes isn’t on how many lawns they service — but how clients respond to them and appreciate the relationship.

“I always say we’re a customer service business that happens to do landscaping,” Hewlett says.

But how do you find those perfect customers to work with and build those relationships? Weg says it starts by having a vision on who that ideal client is from the get go and sticking to it.

“One thing that’s helped us focus on who our ideal customer is, is having a customer profile and we revisit that often,” Weg says.

Weg adds this process started years ago when her company brought in outside council to help them target that ideal client.

“We had a strategic planning meeting and brought in a facilitator to align us all,” she explains. “Now we revisit it on an annual basis. It’s important to bring in that person to show you what you might not be seeing the first time, but once you have that skill you can revisit it.”

Glaser says Summit Lawns also has an ideal client profile that they don’t veer from.

“It’s very explicit on demographics, pain points — all of that,” he says.

Glaser also suggests leaders can utilize generative AI, like ChatGPT or Claude, to help them analyze their existing client base and build their ideal client profile.

“You can do it in an hour,” he says.

Mullin, who says his company quit doing residential work in 2025 to focus solely on commercial landscaping, says the change has greatly impacted the company’s customer acquisition.

“The residential client acquisition process was totally different. 80% of them came to us, now we’re 100% commercial and we’re trying to find them,” Mullin says. “We need to make sure our sales team is aligned in who they’re hunting.”

Glaser explains how he made the difficult decision to entirely revamp his business and focus solely on residential lawn care.

Sometimes you have to say no

Glaser says he learned this lesson the hard way — but it ultimately led to him turning his business around.

“Our client acquisition is extremely heavy on in-bound marketing,” he says. “We’re very clear on what we do and what we do not do.”

Glaser admits that when he started out, he was guilty of a common bad practice — saying yes to every job no matter what.

“I said yes to anyone, anywhere and built this Frankenstein monster of a business,” he recalls. “Whatever anyone else was doing I was doing… we had our branding set right from the beginning so on the outside it looked great, but on the inside it was a disaster.”

Taking on all these jobs meant Glaser was desperate for labor.

“If you had a heartbeat, you had a job at Summit Lawns,” he says. “We had terrible culture… and I had 50% of my staff quit in about 30 days.”

Eventually, after numerous heartbreaks and downfalls, Glaser says he learned the error of his ways and downsized the company so it could focus solely on lawn care.

“I realized the only part of my business that wasn’t a complete disaster was residential because the guy training the new guy was 30 feet away,” he explains. “We completely reinvented the business model. We finished out the season, but I effectively canceled two thirds of my company... I canceled $600,000 of contracts and started the whole thing all over again.”

Glaser says examples like himself are important because it shows young landscape business owners what happens when their eyes may be bigger than their stomachs.

That’s why sticking to your service offerings, and ideal client profiles, is so crucial.

“Most businesses don’t die of starvation — they die of indigestion when there are too many things going on,” Glaser says. “One of the biggest dangers in business is apathy. You lose the desire to put your foot on the gas and really push forward. You have to have a focus.”

Rather than rejecting a whole category of customers like Mullin and Glaser did, Weg says several times MSNW Group had to part ways with specific customers for various reasons.

She recalls a time when a commercial customer was alienating and being disrespectful toward field-level crew members.

As this was unacceptable to her and her senior leadership team they opted to not do business with that customer moving forward — even though this customer made up a large portion of their revenue.

And that’s something Weg warns against. Adding it’s better to have a broad mix of customers than relying solely on a few big fish.

“Today we’re a lot more balanced and that’s the important thing because when you have that monster of a client, it makes it that much more problematic to walk away from,” Weg says.

Breaking up is hard to do

So, when things don’t work out with a problem client, panelists say it’s best to end things swiftly and professionally.

“Never once have we ever regretted it in hindsight,” Mullin says of parting ways with a customer.

And it usually doesn’t happen overnight, Glaser adds.

“Typically, it’s not out of the blue — there’s been friction for a while,” he says. “It’s the whole ‘It’s me not you’ breakup.”

Hewlett agrees, saying the first step in the customer conflict is to take a look in the mirror to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

“I don’t want to chase customers. But we always want to look internally to see what we’re doing wrong and how to fix it, so we don’t have that problem,” Hewlett says. “It takes a lot of ego to step back, swallow your pride and realize what you need to do. It’s like a marriage; you need to learn how to say you’re sorry.”

Hewlett and the other panelists always suggest incorporating a referral to another company into the conversation.

“It might be a phone call, or it might be an email but it’s always solution oriented,” Glaser says.

“We always give a written letter of termination, though we don’t call it that,” Weg adds. “We always give 60 days’ notice but if they want to discontinue services sooner, we’ll work with them.”

While these conversations are always difficult, they’re needed for growth.

That’s why Hewlett says Earthscapes parts ways with its lowest performing customers annually.

“We go through that ‘dirty dozen’ every year,” Hewlett says. ‘Whether they’re problematic or not profitable we get rid of those bottom 12 every year.”

The author is senior editor of Lawn & Landscape.