About

I’m Chris Penny.

My work is revenue operations for owner-operated lawn and landscape companies — generating the demand, then taking responsibility for what happens to it all the way through to the profit that actually lands. Most marketing stops at the lead. That’s never been the interesting part to me.

This site is deliberately personal. Companies are useful, but people trust people, and I’d rather be reachable as myself than as a logo. So what shows up here is mine: what I’m working on, what I’m getting wrong, what I’m reading, and occasionally something with nothing to do with work at all.

Everything I publish starts here first.

How I got here

I started out running a lawn mowing business, and I was sure I knew which clients were worth it. I gave some of them a hard time and bent over backwards for others. Then I learned to job cost properly and found out that in some cases I’d been totally wrong. That was the first time measurement proved my own experience wrong, and it’s the reason I ended up doing this work at all.

It wasn’t the last time. The ten years since have mostly been the same lesson again, on other people’s businesses, with more expensive consequences: On Our End.

What came out of it is Lucrative Landscaping: the company I run, and the book I wrote about the same work. If you own a green-industry business, the free tools there are yours to use.

Where I’ve been

It keeps updating itself, which is the nicest thing about it. The longest single stretch on there started in January 2017 — ninety days out of Ontario in a Ford Focus. Krista wrote most of it down while it was happening: the road trip, in order.