Green Acres was the place to be

By SIMON HENDERY

Back in 1990, Adrian Kenny would begin work at 5am, dropping flyers for his fledgling lawnmowing business in letterboxes around Auckland.

Those were long, tiring days, Kenny says.

After his pamphlet run, he would head back to his rented Mt Albert home to mind the children while wife Sharon went off to work.

In the afternoons he mowed lawns and in the evenings he gave quotes to prospective customers.

"It's quite easy to forget those times, but I never have," says Kenny, who has come a long way in the past 13 years.

Last month he sold his stake in Green Acres, the business he started in 1991 and which became the country's largest franchise network (it overtook Lotto as the system with the most franchisees last year).

Kenny says that early grind was part of the Green Acres group's success. It was an experience which, down the track, helped him to motivate his franchisees.

"Back in those days it was a little bit harder to start up a business. The country was coming out of that post-crash [slump of the late 1980s] and money was expensive."

Mowing lawns wasn't the Kennys' first business venture.

They ran two shops in Newmarket during the 1980s before moving into manufacturing men's knitwear.

But they lost a lot of stock when customers went under in the late 1980s slump. The couple cashed up what they had - "which was very little" - and headed to Britain, where Sharon's parents lived.

Returning to Auckland with a $20,000 credit card bill, Kenny borrowed a further $5000 to set himself up in the lawnmowing business, working punishing hours.

"I had to do that to survive. I knew it was working and I could see light at the end of the tunnel."

With a focus on high-quality service - which he says was rare in the lawnmowing game at the time - Kenny was able to build a client list and then sell runs to other operators.

A year later, envisaging the benefits to the business of having a recognised brand, he established Green Acres.

At the time the fledgling franchised lawnmowing market was beginning to roar into life: Green Acres was competing with Crewcut and Australian imports Jim's Mowing and VIP Home Services.

Kenny says he marketed the Green Acres name "aggressively" in the early days through brand-focused advertising because he knew he needed to build up a sizeable network to compete.

Within a year the company had 20 franchisees and had made what he calls Green Acres' big innovation: dividing Auckland into five master franchise areas.

"I could see how powerful that was going to be because instead of just me creating the numbers out there, I had five master territory owners doing what I was doing. That created a lot of numbers [of franchisees] after that."

At that stage it was back to the early morning pamphlet runs as Kenny trained the territory owners, including walking the streets with one of them.

"I really got these guys up and running. It wasn't like 'here you go, all the instructions are in the manual'. I got involved in their businesses. I showed them how I did it. Anyone who purchases a business needs that support at the start and I'd been through it."

When Kenny says the business worked because he is a good salesman who had a good system to sell, it is easy to believe him.

His manner is warm, open and down to earth. When he talks about his business skills, the claims come across as honest admissions rather than arrogance or a sales pitch.

Green Acres continued to grow through the 1990s, expanding out of Auckland and then moving into other services.

Keen to diversify the business by offering new services, Kenny bought a trailer and car valet equipment in about 1993. He "played around with it for a few months" and then began selling car valet franchises using the same principles as the lawnmowing business.

Next came home cleaning. "I went out once again. I learned how to clean a house from top to bottom. We had this franchise model, just a different service."

"The aim was networking the lawnmowing clients into this new service of ours. That was obviously quite a cheap way of starting up a new service as well as networking our clients within the other services."

He says one of the scarier moments in the business was when he first signed franchisees into contracts which guaranteed them minimum amounts of work. But the concept, which Kenny says was part of a company philosophy of fairness for all, proved to be a "huge winner".

"Part of that fairness was giving these franchisees an income from day one so they weren't having to create their business. It was set up for them, all they had to do was manage it. That made the phones ring, that's for sure."

Kenny, who sits on the board of the Franchise Association, says he does not see the need for stricter franchising laws as there are in Australia.

"People are quite wise. There is good advice out there that you can get before you purchase a franchise."

He says prospective franchisees should look only at Franchise Association member systems, which must meet the association's rules.

Since selling out to partners Logan Sears and Andrew Chisholm, who joined him in the business in the late 1990s, Kenny has been relaxing and considering his options.

"It's exciting. I know that whatever I'll head into will probably be smaller, but it will be all mine. I want to do something that I'm going to feel good about."

Business proposals have flooded in, but Kenny says he will take his time.

All he knows is he would like to start a business from scratch with his wife, probably a franchising operation.

"What Sharon is very good at is the detail side of it. Whatever we do we'll work as a team."

For the moment Kenny relaxes happily at his Mt Eden home: there is only a tiny lawn to mow.