Location: Arlington, Virginia
Services: Landscape maintenance, landscape design/build, snow, turf care
Team size: ~15 crew members, 13 office staff & crew leads
Products: LMN, Greenius

Avanza Landscaping & Maintenance is based in Arlington, Virginia, where they provide landscape maintenance, design/build, snow, and turf care with a team of roughly 15 crew members and 13 office staff and crew leads. They use LMN and Greenius to help run the business.

What makes Avanza worth paying attention to is not just that they are growing. It is that they are growing in one of the tightest, most logistically demanding markets a landscape company can operate in. As an Arlington-born company serving a dense urban market, they have had to build systems that help them stay organized, profitable, and accountable in conditions that can quickly eat away at margin.

Running a landscape company out of Arlington does not look like running one in the suburbs. Access is tighter. Parking is limited. Properties are smaller. Storage is expensive. Crews are working in the middle of traffic, pedestrians, delivery drivers, and live jobsite constraints every day.

For Noe Loarca, one of the clearest examples came on a design/build install at a residential property in Arlington.

“Most residential properties in Arlington aren’t even 1/4 of an acre in size,” Noe said. “Imagine staging equipment and material for a 500+ square foot patio, with seating walls and additional retaining walls on a property that size.”

That one job involved more than 20 pallets of material, over $20,000 in plants, and all the equipment needed to get the work done. The job could have become a logistical nightmare fast. Instead, Avanza treated planning as the real production work.

“The most important step for us was planning,” Noe said. “We had a meeting with our production manager, the salesperson, and our operations manager to go through everything. Expected dates, storage locations, work areas… everything was coordinated. From then on, it was just making sure that teams had everything they needed every day.”

That kind of coordination is exactly what urban landscape work demands. In a market like Arlington, there is very little room for improvisation. If trucks, trailers, materials, or crews are out of sync, the day gets expensive quickly.

For Avanza, one of the biggest ongoing challenges is not demand. It is space.

That challenge affects nearly every operational decision. In Arlington, some companies end up parking vehicles on side streets or working out informal deals with nearby businesses. But when the equipment includes loaders or skid steers, finding practical storage becomes even harder.

Material storage creates another margin decision. As Noe explained, Avanza can save about $15 per cubic yard of mulch by ordering a full truckload of 65 cubic yards. The problem is that many of the properties they service, even commercial ones, only need around 30 cubic yards at a time. Without storage, those bulk-buy savings are hard to capture. Avanza eventually worked out a deal with a facility where they could store mulch while handling that facility’s landscaping as well.

Avanza runs on a modern operating system built around LMN and Greenius. Instead of trying to hold the whole business together through spreadsheets, email, and memory, they use LMN as the backbone for:

That level of structure was not always there.

“Before LMN, I didn’t track anything,” Noe said. “I had a hard time understanding margins, or what my true cost was. I was literally trying to track money in, money out to determine if we were making money.”

Then came the shift.

When asked about hard numbers, Noe was candid: before LMN, Avanza was not tracking enough to make clean before-and-after comparisons.

“We weren’t tracking anything at all, to now tracking almost everything,” he said. “We weren’t even close to creating production rates.”

So for him, the biggest result is not a single metric. It is that the business can scale.

“The most sincere answer would be that it allows us to scale,” Noe said. “I’m not fully in sales anymore, and that would have been impossible without LMN. I’m not running production, that would have been impossible without LMN. Now, we do track things and it allows our leadership team to keep each other accountable.”

Today, Avanza is running against clearer financial and sales targets, including:

That is the difference between hoping the business is working and actually being able to manage it.

On the training side, Greenius helps Avanza create more consistency as the company grows.

But Noe pointed out something especially interesting: some of the biggest wins have not come from field crews alone.

“Looking back at our Greenius use, we’ve probably gotten a bigger advantage out of training overhead employees with Greenius than our field staff,” he said. “Field staff can learn more quickly by doing, whereas a business developer and an admin person won’t get that opportunity.”

That has opened the door for Avanza to onboard people from outside the industry faster and more confidently.

“Our business developer came from outside of the industry and was able to learn a lot of landscape jargon and processes without actually spending time out cutting grass,” Noe said. “Likewise with our virtual assistants in El Salvador. They’ve never seen a real snowflake in their lives, but because they went through all the snow training on Greenius, they sound like they know everything there is to know about snow.”

That kind of training leverage matters for a company trying to scale without bottlenecking everything through one owner or one department.

When Granum designed The Break Records Tour — a two‑day program that combines a classroom deep‑dive on systems with a live facility tour — we knew we needed host companies that were actually living this out day‑to‑day.

For the very first stop, we chose Avanza Landscaping & Maintenance in Arlington, VA on May 28-29, 2026.

Day One of the tour is a full classroom workshop led by Sam Gembel, built around the operating systems that help landscape companies break revenue and profit records — finance, pricing, sales, people, operations, and AI.

Day Two is where it gets real.

Attendees join Brian Fullerton for an exclusive, behind‑the‑scenes facility tour at Avanza Landscaping, walking the yard, seeing dispatch, estimating, crew training, and culture live, and asking the hard questions operators wish they could ask on a normal visit.

For Noe, the biggest takeaway for visitors is simple: urban operators need examples that actually look like their world.

“I really hope that folks that are in a central or urban location can get some takeaways from us,” he said. “As much as I love going to visit other companies, there is only so much that I can learn from them when they’re sitting on 5+ acres.”

Avanza is proof that a landscape company can run smoothly, grow people from within, and stay profitable even in the middle of a dense urban market. They have done it by facing the realities of city work head-on, investing in better systems, and building a business that does not depend on one person holding everything in their head.