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Writer's pictureEric Nies

UDF and the Landscaping Industry

For those of us who live in Cincinnati, the parallel to UDF might be clear. For those who don’t, you need to know that UDF is a convenient story found on just about every corner of the city; and, here's the skinny… But, please know, this has FAR MORE than UDF simply being a place that can cost you a lot of money if your crews spend time there – on the clock!


Anyway, what Carl Linder did by creating UDF just a few decades ago (making the Linders the 129th richest family in the USA, and owners of FC Cincinnati too) was to provide a distribution outlet for dairy farmers – one that did not require delivery. He went around and talked to independent dairy farmers and "united" them.




While this led to the very unfortunate introduction of pasteurization and hormones in cows, it also put the milk delivery guy out of business, kind of like the Maytag man. But these changes happened within the forces of the industry, and what he did happened in other cities too, all over the nation; and this WILL happen to landscaping too, as it matures.


It will either be the forces of advances in operations and expectations for better service from customers, or the advent of electric. It may be one of those things, or it may be all of them combined, or something else… But just as the independent farmer has a hard time existing anymore – unless they’re Amish – so too will the expectations in landscape services put pressure on the fragmented, bottom end of the landscaping market. You’re just not going to be able to make a living wage independently.


In hardware, people may have loved operating their store – but eventually had to partner with Do-It center or True-Value to compete. In landscaping, that has not happened… yet!

That's where Blade Partners comes in…


Given the pending reality that landscaping is a competitive, low-margin, and geographically bound industry, what we’re doing is giving our partners (those who want to work with us and collaborate with us) a chance to share in a piece of ownership of a virtual "UDF".


We call it Blade Partners, and you can learn more about it on the site. It has the chance to help you improve the scale of your business (such that it can independently remain YOUR business) while you also have a share of ownership of a national thing.


You may turn your nose up at this and not return calls or run from what is being said and provided. You can run… but you cannot hide from the macro forces of tectonic changes in the industry. So, you either go alone, as the Amish do, or you give us a call and collaborate to get a share of "UDF".

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