ABOUT TURNING MILL
I’ve been on this side of the table.
Turning Mill came from decades of being on the operating side of business.
THE EXPERIENCE
For 30 years, I owned and operated a commercial landscape design, construction and maintenance company. It grew into a substantial operation, with customers, employees, projects, equipment, sales, cash flow, scheduling and all of the decisions that come with keeping a business moving.
Over those years, I also started a commercial wholesale nursery and took it from startup to approximately one million in sales in two years. I purchased and operated a struggling industrial equipment repair and dealership business and took that operation to nearly one million in sales over roughly the same period. I acquired five landscape companies and integrated them into my own operation, eventually selling two businesses to people who had worked with me.
Those experiences gave me exposure to growth, startups, acquisitions, integration, turnaround situations and the everyday reality of running a business.
But one of the things I’m proudest of isn’t a revenue number.
About 15 people who worked with me stayed for more than 15 years.
In the trades, that is unusual. Very unusual.
I watched some of their kids grow from little children into high school and beyond. A couple of those kids eventually came to work for me when they were old enough.
After enough years, the business becomes more than customers, employees, projects and numbers. You watch people build their lives around the work. You see what happens when people trust you, when they don’t, when you make good decisions, and when your decisions affect more than just the bottom line.
That experience stayed with me.
I’ve made good decisions.
I’ve made bad ones.
I’ve built things that worked, and I’ve built things that didn’t.
I’ve fixed problems I should have seen sooner.
And I’ve learned that some of the most expensive problems in a business aren’t necessarily the ones that are easiest to see.
That’s the experience behind Turning Mill.
THE REAL PROBLEM
The business is rarely the problem you first see.
Over time, I became less interested in any particular industry and more interested in what was happening underneath the business.
Landscape, construction, nursery, equipment and dealership businesses are very different on the surface. But many of the operational problems are remarkably similar.
Information gets lost. A lead doesn’t get followed up. Responsibility becomes unclear. People create workarounds because a process no longer fits the way the business actually works. Technology gets added without fixing the process underneath it.
Good employees spend time solving problems that a better system could have prevented.
And eventually, the owner becomes the connection point for everything.
The business can still be successful. It can still have good people, good customers and plenty of opportunity.
But the owner is carrying more of the operation in their head and on their shoulders than the business can comfortably support.
I’ve lived that.
I know what it feels like to have a business that is working, but not working the way it should.
WHEN GROWTH CHANGES THINGS
Growth changes the problem.
One of the things experience teaches you is that growth doesn’t automatically make a business better.
Sometimes growth simply makes existing weaknesses more expensive.
More customers can create more communication problems. More employees can create more management and accountability problems. More revenue can create more complexity.
A process that worked when there were five people may become a problem when there are twenty-five.
What worked last year may no longer work this year.
And what worked because the owner personally knew everything, remembered everything and touched everything eventually becomes the very thing that prevents the business from growing beyond them.
That’s the part of business I’m interested in.
Not simply whether a company is making money, but whether the way it operates is helping it do more of what it is capable of doing.
SEEING THE PATTERN
Seeing the pattern.
That perspective eventually became the foundation for Turning Mill.
I began looking at businesses less as collections of departments, software, employees and procedures, and more as systems through which work, information, responsibility and decisions move.
- Where does a customer first enter?
- Who receives the information?
- What happens next?
- Who owns the responsibility?
- Where does something slow down?
- Where does information disappear?
- What does the owner still have to personally remember, decide or fix?
And perhaps most importantly:
What is the business asking its people to compensate for because the system itself isn’t working well enough?
Those questions are at the heart of what I call Operational Architecture.
It isn’t a complicated methodology or a piece of software.
It is a way of looking at how a business actually works, finding where things are getting stuck, and figuring out what can be made more useful, more efficient and more manageable.
Sometimes that means changing a process.
Sometimes it means introducing a system or automation.
Sometimes it means improving measurement.
And sometimes it means having someone work directly with the owner long enough to actually make the changes happen.
WHY IT EXISTS
Why Turning Mill exists.
I didn’t create Turning Mill because I wanted to build another consulting firm.
I created it because I know how difficult it can be for an owner to get enough distance from the business to see what is really happening inside it.
When you’re running the business, you’re usually too close to everything and too responsible for too much.
You don’t necessarily need someone to come in and tell you how to run your company.
You may need someone who understands what it is like to carry the responsibility, who can look at the operation without being trapped inside it, ask the questions that are difficult to ask yourself, and work with you to determine what actually needs to change.
That’s the role I want Turning Mill to play.
A resource.
An experienced second set of eyes.
A practical operator.
Someone who can help an owner think through the problem, build the solution and, when the situation calls for it, stay involved long enough to help put it into practice.
A FOUNDATION TO BUILD ON
The business already has something worth building on.
I don’t approach a business assuming everything needs to change.
Most businesses already have a great deal working in their favor.
There are experienced people. There are customers. There is knowledge that has been built over years. There are relationships, systems and processes that may not be perfect but exist for good reasons.
The objective isn’t to come in and replace all of that with somebody else’s idea of how a business should operate.
It is to understand what is already there.
Keep what works.
Fix what doesn’t.
Remove what has become unnecessary.
Build what is missing.
And make the business more capable of doing what it is supposed to do.
That is the idea behind Turning Mill.
A mill takes something with potential and works it into something more useful. That’s what I want to do with the businesses I work with.
INTENTIONALLY SMALL
I don’t want to build a big consulting firm.
I keep Turning Mill intentionally small.
That may sound like an odd thing to put on an About page, but it is important to how I want the business to work.
I don’t want to build a large consulting organization where an owner becomes a client number, gets passed from person to person, and receives a polished report from people who never really understood the business.
I want to work with a limited number of owners where my experience, attention and judgment can actually be useful.
That means I won’t be the right resource for every business.
I’m comfortable with that.
The goal is still to help as many owners as I can. But I believe the best way to do that is to make the work practical, repeatable and useful, while keeping the human involvement where it matters most.
WHERE THE CONVERSATION BEGINS
If your business is working — but not working the way it should.
Maybe you’re growing and the operation hasn’t caught up.
Maybe the owner is still the answer to too many questions.
Maybe leads are being missed, people are working around the system, communication is breaking down, or good opportunities are getting lost simply because there isn’t enough time or structure to deal with them.
Or maybe nothing is obviously broken.
You just know the business could work better.
You don’t have to arrive with the answer.
That’s often where the conversation should begin.