Customer: Urban Earth Landscaping

Featured: Steve Biernacki, Founder, Owner, and Principal Master Craftsman

Location: Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA

Business: Design-build and maintenance landscaping

Revenue: $6 million

Employees: 36 Crew, 4 Office Staff, 7 Designers/Sales

On LMN since: 2018 (8 years and counting)

Urban Earth Landscaping is a premier, family-owned, full-service landscaping company specializing in exceptional design-build projects in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Their thoughtful design in transforming residential properties into true outdoor living sanctuaries captures the beauty of the American Southwest and is fit for the pages of Architectural Digest.

With more than 34 years of experience, Steve Biernacki has grown the business by doing what exceptional landscapers have always done: showing up, delivering specialized, high-caliber work the right way, and treating every customer like family. His standing as a leader in the landscaping community comes from a long track record of experience and a desire to always improve. 

What makes Urban Earth Landscaping different is how seriously they take operations and discipline in learning and using the LMN platform as their operations hub. With the team typically managing design/build projects in the $35K–$150K range. This level of high-end, high-touch, and detail-intensive work is where a slow estimate or inconsistent bid can quickly translate into significant loss. 

While many landscaping companies run estimating on communal knowledge and a gut check, Steve has spent his career building and dialing in what operational excellence looks like. And in the last eight years, he’s built a real estimating and analytics discipline on LMN. 

That discipline is what empowers one of the company’s designers to deliver a detailed consultation, and then build a polished proposal in an hour instead of a week.

Eight years ago, the same project could be quoted at $25K one week and $35K the next, depending on the estimator who prepared the bid. This huge inconsistency made it difficult to predict income, train new designers and estimators, and justify the price difference to a customer. When choosing software, Steve intentionally selected LMN because it was built for landscapers to bring consistency to estimating design/build jobs. 

LMN gave Urban Earth Landscaping a single source of truth for pricing. Material costs and production rates all live in one place, and every estimator pulls from the same playbook. As a result, the price differences dropped, and the conversation with the customer got easier, while profit consistently increased. 

Before LMN, turning an idea into a proposal took 5–6 hours. Today, the team uses LMN to build proposals faster with budget-based pricing data, pre-set price lists, accurate jobsite measurements, and reusable estimate templates. Once the plan is drawn a designer can have a polished estimate in front of the customer in about 1  hour. That is roughly 4-5 hours back per proposal, multiplied by every estimator on the team, every week. 

The price of everything has gone up. Your business needs to adapt. Updating those line items used to mean a spreadsheet hunt and a cross-reference to QuickBooks. In LMN, prices live in one library and are easily templatized for scale. Teams simply update them once and every future estimate uses the right number. No stale costs sneaking into bids, no inconsistency among estimators, and all inflation adjusted. 

When Urban Earth brings on a new designer, the production rate calculator does what a senior estimator used to have to do. The tools give new hires a defensible labor assumption to work from. As Steve explained, new staff who may start out a little unsure with learning new tools, are confident in the systems in short order, “whipping around” the platform and producing estimates that hold up.

LMN’s training library and the LMN Help Center carry the rest. The owner does not have to be the trainer, that is what scaling actually looks like.

Production calculators take the complexity out of labor planning and make the math simple. Urban Earth now builds estimates inside a system that gives them a defensible starting point and a way to layer in their own hedge factors. The result is estimates that are tighter, faster, and easier to speak to in front of a customer.

Producing faster estimates doesn’t just save hours. Getting proposals in front of more clients results in faster deals closed. Now Steve’s design team is able to spend their time on the part of the job they love: meeting clients in person, presenting design-build projects, and answering questions while the customer is still in the room.

This is growth –  in systems, operations, and revenue.

That is the partnership Urban Earth Landscaping has made with LMN. The platform handles the operational rigor while the team handles the relationships. And the business has the runway to keep adding estimators, delivering beautiful projects, and not breaking what already works.

Eight years in, Steve is one of LMN’s most confident advocates. He has introduced the platform to his peers, fielded outreach from competitors, and remained committed to LMN as his operating platform of choice. That is the kind of trust that only gets built through a long partnership. And we’re committed to keeping it that way. 

As Urban Earth Landscaping grows, LMN grows with them. New estimators, new designers, new workflows, new pricing pressures. We build for the realities of running a landscaping business, because the people who run those businesses are the ones who help us build what’s next.