Building a Marketing Juggernaut

Vander Kooi's talk struck a chord with Wittstock. He kicked the idea around with other people in the company, and eventually they came up with their own approach to breakeven analysis, one simple enough to be easily grasped by the pond-building crew. Among other things, the system allowed the employees to figure out how many ponds they needed to build each week to hit their breakeven point by a given date. After breakeven a portion of every sales dollar goes to net profit, and Wittstock agreed to split that portion between the company and the crew members, meaning that each employee stood to benefit financially by reaching breakeven as soon as possible.

Overnight, the psychology of the crew was transformed. Employees began taking better care of the equipment, and they made sure they had everything they needed when they showed up at a job site. Meanwhile, morale soared. Brian Helfrich, a foreman, admits that he'd been thinking about leaving Aquascape to start his own pond-building business until he got the financial message. "This is the one thing that completely changed the way I look at Aquascape and every other company," he says.

Yet, as effective as the breakeven formula was, Wittstock and Beaulieu did not think about including it in the seminar curriculum until last year, after Aquascape's largest customer got into trouble paying its bills. Beaulieu had tried to help the customer straighten out its finances and quickly realized that it was barely breaking even on the sale of ponds, despite having an overall gross margin of more than 40%. Evidently the owner, though a good salesman, had no idea how to make sure his company earned a profit.

That discovery was a wake-up call for Wittstock, Beaulieu, and the other people involved in customer training and education. If their best customer--a company they'd held up as a role model--didn't know how to make money, what about the rest of their market? They decided to expand the seminar from one day to two and to include basic business training, but the trainers' first attempt at teaching the financials was a bust, mainly because they tried to do too much. Afterward, they agreed that they had to simplify the financial information and focus on the breakeven formula. The simplified program, introduced at the next seminar, was an instant success. Asked to name his favorite part of the program, one contractor wrote on a comment card: "Financials. The breakeven concept. Wow! My eyes are open." And his least favorite? "Financials. Thinking about the amount of lost time and money."

Wittstock likes to explain Aquascape's success by saying, "We're pond guys, not engineers." The comment is a not-so-subtle swipe at his father, an engineer, but it contains more than a kernel of truth. To Wittstock, the products are secondary, a means to an end. The pond's the thing, and Aquascape's hallmark has been its ability to simplify every aspect of the business--from financial management to construction. The simpler Wittstock can make the process, the easier it will be for people to follow the instructions, meaning more ponds will get built.

Wittstock had already done a lot of simplifying by the time he rolled out his pond-building system in the mid-1990s. With his approach, he claimed, a contractor could build in one day a pond that others took three weeks to install. At the heart of his system--which hasn't changed much since then--is what he calls the 20/20 rule. Any pond of any size, he says, can be constructed with the same 20 components assembled in the same 20 steps. The components include everything from the stones around the waterfall to the glue for attaching the flexible plastic pipe to the filter. The steps run from "Mark pond area" to "Get paid." It's all there, and always the same. To be sure, the size of the components will vary from pond to pond; different ponds will have different designs, based on the geography of the space and the desires of the pond owner; and complex ponds will take more time to build than simple ones. But the process doesn't change, Wittstock says, nor do the types of products needed.

The 20/20 rule was one of the most radical of Aquascape's innovations. Critics charged that Wittstock was cheapening the art of pond-building, turning it into an assembly-line, cookie-cutter process, and sacrificing quality for profits. He strenuously denied that his system compromised quality. On the contrary, he said, ponds built professionally, according to Aquascape's principles, using high-quality materials, were superior to others--more natural-looking, more aesthetically pleasing, more durable, easier to maintain, better for the environment.

He didn't disagree, however, that his approach was more profitable, or that it was assembly-line. In effect, he'd done for ponds what Ray Kroc had done for hamburgers and Henry Ford for cars. But Wittstock insisted that, by systematizing pond construction, Aquascape allowed the pond-builder both to make more money and to be more creative. The artistry had to do with the pond's design and the quality of its execution, not with the steps involved in carrying it out.

For water-gardening veterans, it was a lot to swallow, especially coming from a brash 25-year-old, but Wittstock knew ponds. He'd been making them since he was 12. The first one had been a hole in the ground behind his family's home in Wheaton, Ill., west of Chicago. That pond was soon replaced by a more elaborate concrete one that he built with his father. As the years went by, the two of them continued to work on the pond, redoing it every summer, experimenting with filtration, pumps, and construction techniques until finally, in 1990, they got it just about right.

 PREV  1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7  NEXT