Family Savors Fruits of Success : Commercial Landscaping Firm Cultivated the Right Instincts Into a Dominant Business
The Sperbers have a knack for knowing when to plant their seeds.
In 1949, Burton Sperber, then a young man with a chest thick as an oak, convinced his father, Lewis, to expand the family’s North Hollywood nursery into a residential landscaping business in order to exploit the post-war home construction boom in the San Fernando Valley.
Five years later, when the home construction wave was showing signs of ebbing, the family started to eliminate the backyard business and branched out into commercial landscaping.
They planted the sprawling lawns around new office buildings during an unprecedented wave of construction. By the 1960s, they were big enough to win contracts to landscape freeways including Interstate 5. And by the early 1970s, the Sperbers were in place to start gussying up glass-and-steel towers along such thoroughfares as Wilshire Boulevard with huge, plant-filled atriums.
Today, the business that sprouted from the East Valley nursery, Calabasas-based Environmental Industries, is one of the nation’s largest commercial landscapers, expecting sales of more than $100 million for its current fiscal year.
Biggest in California
The 1,100-member Associated Landscape Contractors of America, based in Falls Church, Va., says Environmental Industries is one of only 25 firms in the field having sales higher than $3 million a year. It is by all accounts the biggest in California.
More than half of the company’s business is in sunny, lawn-and-shrub-conscious Southern California. Rather than expand by moving eastward, the firm has gotten bigger by diversifying into separate landscape-construction, maintenance and tree planting subsidiaries.
Those in the business attribute the company’s steady growth in large measure to the leadership and prescience of Burton Sperber, now 57, who has served as president and chief executive of the family-owned business for 28 years.
“He’s really aggressive,” said Joe Heath, executive officer of the California Landscape Contractors Assn. in Sacramento. “Sperber keeps the kind of tight control you’d expect in a very small business, even though it’s a multimillion-dollar company.”
Said Robert L. Scofield, Environmental Industries’ vice president for corporate relations: “The company got moving because Burton wasn’t the kind of guy who would sell plants to little old ladies.”
Edge Conceded
Today, competitors lament that Environmental Industries has the edge on any project it wants--from a $208,000 job “beautifying” the Anheuser-Busch brewery in Van Nuys to the $5.9-million contract for the Industry Hills Golf Course, Resort & Recreational Center.
“They can beat us on manpower, equipment and discounting,” said Ray Verches, owner of the Greenskeeper Co. in Irvine, a major player in the Southern California market. “If I ever really had a beef with them, it’s that they make it hard to compete.”
Environmental Industries was the company that planted the palm trees around parking garages at Los Angeles International Airport, exotic plants and shrubs at the Denver Botanic Gardens and thick lawns for such notable golf courses as those at Industry Hills.
The company has adorned the towers of Century City and Southern California corporate offices for both Toyota and Nissan. In the past two years, it has landscaped 25 major hotels and is actively performing a dozen jobs on Wilshire Boulevard.
In the Valley area, Environmental Industries can claim credit for planting the grounds around Warner Center, the Sheraton hotels in Universal City and the Leisure Village, Knollwood and Balboa golf courses.
“I’d have an easier time listing which projects we haven’t done,” a black leather-jacketed and still-burly Burton Sperber boasted recently.
Work Outside State
Aside from California, the company has done jobs in Arizona, Colorado and Texas, and maintains offices in those states.
One reason that the business has stayed mostly regional is that plants and trees do not travel especially well, said Linda Kelly, a marketing specialist for Tropical Plant Rentals in Riverswood, Ill., a large firm that specializes in interior landscaping in the Midwest.
The company’s Calabasas headquarters, at the western end of Ventura Boulevard, is a showpiece in itself, filled with statues and Oriental tapestries. Its natural wood walls are bathed in sun from large skylights and of course, there’s a greenhouse in the back. Most desks have plants.
On a recent afternoon, there was no doubt that Burton Sperber was the one in charge. He read aloud from a local business magazine, quizzing some nervous executives on the rankings of top Los Angeles firms in various industries. He noted clients and friends from the list.
Spends on Heavy Equipment
Aside from its offices, the company spends a lot on heavy equipment. Its two construction units, Valley Crest Landscape and Western Landscape Construction, which account for more than 60% of sales, keep 275 tractors, 285 trenchers and 854 trucks scattered among the firm’s sites.
“They saw long ago that the key to development was in using equipment instead of people’s backs,” said Scofield. “It’s meant larger jobs with fewer people, faster and more reliably.”
The company employs 2,100 persons, most of whom get their hands dirty. Like most of its competitors, Environmental Industries does not do its own landscape design work, contracting instead with independent landscape architects.
Even if the designs are not its own, the company is consistently an award winner, nabbing the national trade association’s prize for quality work two years in a row, each time from a field of more than 100 entries.
In 1985, the award went to Environmental Care, the company’s landscape maintenance division. The unit accounts for about 30% of sales, with big jobs cutting lawns and pruning trees at prestigious condominium communities, commanding fees in the range of $5,000 to $10,000 a month. Environmental Care employs half of the firm’s total work force.
Tree Sales Recounted
The company’s tree division, the Valley Crest Tree Co., brings in less than 10% of total sales, but is considered the “most glamorous” division by the Sperbers. One reason is that a single mature palm tree can sell for up to $75,000.
“Everyone wants instant landscape,” Scofield said. “Nobody wants to wait.”
Most of the trees the company sells, however, go for hundreds of dollars, not thousands. They are grown mainly in wood boxes, on land the company leases along freeways and under electric power lines.
It’s not a unique idea, but the Sperbers were among the first to do it. Owning forests would be prohibitively expensive, company officials say, and growing trees in areas that would otherwise be barren is beneficial to everyone.
The idea came out of the freeway landscaping contracts in the early 1960s. Valley Crest Landscape was one of the first freeway landscapers in the nation.
Not all of Burton Sperber’s plantings have grown the way he wanted. In 1969, with annual sales just over $10 million, Environmental Industries went public to raise funds for expansion. Thirteen years later, the Sperbers took the company private again.
‘We Were Too Small’
“Every time earnings went up, the stock would go down,” Burton Sperber lamented. “We were too small a company in an industry that doesn’t lend itself to public companies.”
The company has not had to disclose profits since. For its fiscal year ended April 30, 1981, Environmental Industries reported net income of $2.5 million, or $4.83 per share, on sales of $59.7 million. Sales for the fiscal year ended last April 30 were $96.1 million, up 13% from the previous year, the company said.
The company remains a family affair. Stuart Sperber, 50, of Northridge, Burton’s brother, is president of the Valley Crest Tree Co. Richard Sperber, 24, Burton’s son, is operations manager for Valley Crest Landscape in Phoenix.
Lewis Sperber retired in 1964. Burton Sperber, known to his friends as a good amateur magician, lives by the beach in Malibu, and personally tends to a lush array of ficus, palms and orchids.
