Jeff Ronhaar has run Jeff’s Outdoor for more than 30 years, and his email signature doesn’t say President or CEO. It says Head Coach. It represents the whole operating theory of the business.

Jeff’s Outdoor at a Glance

Jeff started cutting grass for his newspaper customers at 14. He was headed to school to be a cabinet maker until he realized he’d rather be outside. A horticulture degree and a few friends with mowers later, he had a company. The name wasn’t his idea of a brand: he was Jeff, he’d do your lawn, so it was Jeff’s Lawn Care.

The shop culture had always leaned football, so when he finally needed something on a business card, Head Coach picked itself. 

He’d have taken his own name off the building too, if his team had let him. When the company rebranded to Jeff’s Outdoor Inc., he asked to drop the “Jeff’s.” He was outvoted: everyone in the industry already knew who they were. Then the new shop sign went up.

The coaching part, though, he means literally.

We asked Jeff for advice on building this kind of culture and he went straight back to the metaphor.

That, he says, is the step most owners skip. You can’t coach a game you’ve never learned.

Thirteen years on LMN taught him the game: how to build a budget, price materials properly, build a real proposal, track a timesheet, read the numbers that come back.

Once the coach knows the game, the players need to see the score.

Every seat at Jeff’s Outdoor has a number on it:

And the grading is honest:

Some jobs land at 90, some at 60. The goal is to hit 75 and graduate with honors. When a 100-hour job comes in at 110, the number starts a conversation instead of ending one: was it the estimate? A client we didn’t manage well? Or did we hit a stump, lose two days to rain, and break a machine?

Jeff will tell you plainly that he doesn’t like conflict. So he engineered it out of the one conversation most owners dread.

Every season, each person leaves their review with a list. Do these five things in the next six months and you get an hourly raise. Then the season runs, LMN keeps score, and the report gets pulled.

If someone did three of the five, that’s not Jeff’s opinion, it’s a number they can both see.

His team has learned to walk in ready.

The alternative, he points out, is what happens at companies with no metrics at all: people who don’t even know what performing well looks like, asking for raises nobody can justify.

Snow crews and subcontractors alike punch into LMN through the same system: their own logins, assigned sites, GPS-tagged clock-ins, site photos, and a flag for anything critical.

It earns its keep constantly. A client calls at eight in the morning to say the drive-through never got cleared, and the office pulls up a 3 a.m. photo of the black pickup parked across it. 

Jeff tells his staff the same thing every winter: if you see something, document it.

A client had rerouted their eavestrough to drain onto the front driveway. The crew spotted it, photographed it on the spot, and marked it critical, and the operations team emailed the client that week: this is going to ice up, and it’s a liability issue. The client thanked them and said they’d look after it.

A year later, someone slipped in that driveway. The photo and the email were already on file.

The part Jeff likes best is that nobody has to remember anything at the end of a long shift. The crew member is standing there at two in the morning. They take the picture, tag it to the timesheet, mark it critical, and move on.

Old-school subcontractors sometimes push back — I’ll just write it down and hand it to you.

Eventually they conform, because it’s a requirement. And Jeff figures it shows up somewhere concrete, too — he credits the documentation with helping lower their insurance premiums.

None of the metrics work without people who care about them, which is why Jeff has been just as deliberate about company culture.

There’s a sign in the staff room: If you can’t laugh, you can’t work here. There are monthly barbecues. This summer there was a dunk tank, with two secret votes per employee to decide who went in first. Jeff came third. (“My wife said, ‘You’re a lock.’ I was pretty impressed two guys got more votes than me.”)

Nine years ago they built a new shop, with a beautiful landscape across the whole front yard. They built it for themselves after years without one of their own, they wanted a place that looked like the professional company they’d become. It turned into their best recruiting tool.

And when the day’s done, the scoreboard is what tells them it was a good one.

A few people have left Jeff’s Outdoor to start their own landscape companies. They are thriving, and Jeff helped them get their own LMN accounts set up. He’s now in a landscape peer group, and coaching smaller businesses takes up about half his week.

People ask him why he’d possibly do that.

He does the math out loud. Say his 32-year-old company quotes a job at $10,000. Someone else says $4,000. The client then thinks that Jeff’s been gouging them for years. The low bidder goes bankrupt, but the damage to how customers see the whole trade is already done. If that same person learns to budget properly and quotes $9,000, that’s a fair fight and a real conversation about warranty and quality.

It all comes back around. Their competitors’ crews turn up at Jeff’s staff events and get heckled (“You can’t be here, man, you’re the B team”). Last winter Jeff’s mechanic fixed one of their trucks. The winter before, they plowed two of Jeff’s parking lots when a truck went down.

That same instinct is why Jeff said yes when we asked to film Greenius training courses at his shop.

The leadership team at Jeff’s Outdoor is all in their 50s, which means the next question is already on the board. Running on EOS, each of them is bringing a 10-year plan to next quarter’s meeting: five days a week to zero, or five to four to three to two to one? And who on the team gets leveled up to take it forward?

He describes the goal the way a parent describes watching a kid move out, get their license, buy a house.