Company: Conestoga Contracting Group Inc.

Service Location: Waterloo Region and beyond

Services: Design/Build, Excavation, Facility Maintenance, Winter Maintenance

Annual Revenue: $10–15M

Team Size: 50–75, depending on the season

Established: 2013

Conestoga Contracting Group has been building since 2013: design/build, excavation, facility maintenance, and winter maintenance. They’ve reached the place in their business where they are intentional about who they serve. 

“We focus on clients who value time and uptime in production over cost,” says Chaise Ireland, President & CEO.

That one sentence changes what a business has to be good at. When a client is paying for uptime, the lowest bid isn’t the point, consistent delivery is. And consistent delivery comes down to whether the right people show up knowing the standard.

Ask Chaise to name one operational challenge the team deals with regularly and the answer is people: training the talent, and keeping the talent who keep the standards. It’s an issue that many operations face in the landscaping industry. 

“It is a constant effort that we have had to build systems and positions around keeping pressure on the people side of our business to ensure consistent delivery to our clients.”

Being Canadian, winter was where it showed up hardest. “In the winter time, it used to be very often where there were no-show people in key positions because of the long, strenuous hours.”

In winter maintenance, an empty seat in a key position makes it hard to keep your promise to your clients.

Conestoga Contracting’s response wasn’t a hiring push or a better job ad. It was a foundational change, captured in two acronyms: ABH — Always Be Hiring. ABT — Always Be Training.

The pipeline is never closed. Training is never finished. And when a problem shows up on the people side, it gets addressed on the spot. “When we see an issue we nip it in the bud immediately,” Chaise says. “The longer we avoid these challenges the more pain and strain it puts us under.”

He’s clear-eyed about what that costs. “Do not get me wrong, it’s not perfect and it requires constant effort and mindset adjustments. But the effort it requires today is a lot less than it was five years ago.”

That’s the honest version of a people system working. Not a problem that got solved, but a problem that got cheaper to manage every year they stayed on it.

Chaise is direct about his company’s values: “people are the number 1 asset in any business.” The tools exist to serve that. Conestoga Contracting runs on four: Greenius, LMN, Leanscaper, and LEAN production systems.

Greenius carries the training load. “Greenius allows us to pivot and up-train team members quickly,” Chaise says. And the team is now building it into how people get rewarded, incorporating a reward system that feeds each person’s balanced scorecard for team bonuses. It’s a new method they’re currently employing. Training stops being something that happens to people and starts being something they’re recognized for.

We built LMN so operators know their real numbers, and that’s the job it does here. “LMN helps us know our numbers, centralize information and communication.” Conestoga Contracting originally ran LMN from 2013 to 2022, and came back to it in November 2025.

Leanscaper and LEAN production systems round it out. They represent a community of operators, and an operating framework for delivering consistently, day after day.

Since implementing LMN, Conestoga is quoting 5% higher gross margin.

They’re also catching problems earlier. When a project isn’t bid properly, it gets caught on the job costing review. This is now early enough to pivot while there’s still something to protect.

But the result Chaise names first isn’t a percentage. It’s who’s paying attention.

“We have seen a better understanding of the numbers by our team and how it translates to the field,” he says. Implementation meant finding things that weren’t set up properly and adjusting, and giving the team the power to see those things themselves. “It takes a village to achieve higher gross margin and it builds ownership into every role.”