Customer: Local Roots Landscaping

Location: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Service Focus: High‑end residential hardscape design and build and landscape maintenance, with select commercial projects

Company Size: 65 employees

Annual Revenue: ~$8M, tracking toward $10M

LMN by Granum Products Used: Estimating, Budgeting, Job Costing, Scheduling, Timesheets.

Local Roots Landscaping is a Pittsburgh‑based design and build and maintenance company co‑founded by Kenneth (Ken) Deemer and Patrick Murray. What started over a decade ago as “extra cash on the weekends” — running work out of the back of a Honda Civic — has grown into a multi‑million‑dollar operation.

Today, Local Roots runs two distinct lines of business:

Half of the company’s revenue is driven by hardscape and design/build projects, typically in the $100,000 to $1 million range, with one or two large commercial projects each year. The other half comes from recurring maintenance work.

Ken describes hardscaping as “heavy construction” — closer to home building than to mowing or basic maintenance. That difference is exactly what attracted Local Roots to the work: the opportunity to create permanent, meaningful spaces that become part of a family’s sanctuary.

For the first several years, growth at Local Roots was driven almost entirely by hustle:

Ken calls those early years “blunt force trauma” growth. Every new crew, truck, or job simply meant more stress running through the same two people.

Any spending — whether on equipment, people, or software — felt risky. Without visibility into their numbers, growth looked like a bigger, scarier version of what they were already experiencing. That pressure built to a breaking point where they knew they needed a hard reset: if they were going to keep the business, it needed to run on clarity and strategy, not just effort.

In a short span of time, Local Roots made three pivotal moves:

Those decisions became the inflection point in Local Roots’ story. For Ken and Patrick, it felt like someone had “unlocked a set of keys” — especially on the mental side of running the company.

Instead of guessing, they could finally see:

For Local Roots, LMN’s budgeting module quickly became the backbone of their leadership system.

Inside the company, budgets aren’t a finance side project — they are the gatekeeper for every major decision:

Leaders are expected to bring ideas through the budget first:

This shift turned Local Roots from a company reacting to work into one where every leader understands how their decisions hit the P&L.

Just as importantly, it brought something Ken and Patrick care deeply about: clarity for the team.

With LMN budgets and dashboards, crew leaders and managers now see:

That clarity makes growth feel responsible, not reckless.

Before LMN, their estimating routine looked like this:

LMN changed that in three key ways and Local Roots was able to reduce estimating time by up to 90% using work area templates and verified production rates to ensure accuracy:

The impact was dramatic:

Instead of marathon estimating sessions, Ken and Patrick can now:

For a business where half the revenue comes from high‑ticket hardscape projects, that speed and precision are essential.

Ken and Patrick describe LMN’s operational modules as “the iterative middle” of the business — the place where the work of hardscapes and maintenance actually gets done, refined, and improved.

The operations leaders at Local Roots live in:

The result is a closed loop:

This continuous feedback has been especially important as Local Roots blended heavy construction hardscaping with recurring maintenance services — two lines of business with very different rhythms, cost structures, and risks.

Since making LMN part of their operating system, Local Roots has:

Perhaps most importantly, Ken no longer sees the business as something he’s trapped in. Instead, it’s a tool to architect the life and impact he and Patrick want — for themselves, their families, their team, and the broader community.

Like many growing contractors, Local Roots experimented with other software along the way. At one point, they even signed with a competing platform and invested significantly in onboarding.

The experience was painful:

Local Roots ultimately returned to LMN — and the contrast was stark. Without a big onboarding fee or long‑term contract, LMN:

Today, they see LMN as part of the leadership infrastructure of Local Roots — not just a tool they rent.

Ken and Patrick aren’t just running Local Roots — they’re sharing what they’ve learned with other hardscapers.

In the Hardscaper Pro Weekly Product Tour, a live, conversational‑style webinar hosted by Granum, they:

The Hardscaper Pro Weekly Product Tour runs every Wednesday at 1pm ET, starting January 14, and is designed specifically for hardscape pros who want to tighten their numbers, protect margins, and build a business that doesn’t burn them out.