Brad:
I just love seeing people grow and finding their full potential. My
goal is to change 100,000 lives — I'm at 116 right now on my phone. But the
goal isn't the number. The goal is just to be a giver. A lot of times we run
our lives as takers, out to take everything. When you switch your mindset and
you're just giving, trying to help people — be careful, a lot of people don't
like unsolicited coaching — but if you're always trying to impact somebody,
change somebody, help somebody, the more you give, the more you receive.

Karen:
Today's guest is a friend and fellow CEO whose story of overcoming
setbacks is inspiring. He's built a thriving business and a culture people love
being a part of. Brad Stephenson is the co-owner and CEO of New Castle Lawn and
Landscape, a 30-year-old landscaping company in Birdsboro, Pennsylvania. He's
built his leadership philosophy around growing the person, not just the bottom
line, and he now coaches business owners nationwide through Brad Stephenson LLC
— Dream Higher. Brad, I'm so glad you're here.

I'm Karen Norheim, and this is
Always Lifting.

Brad:
Thank you, Karen. I appreciate the invite. I'm super excited —
hopefully I don't move my hands around too much.

Karen:
You'll be all good. I'm excited to share your story with everybody,
and I'd like to start with your journey into landscaping.

Brad:
Fourteen years old — that's where my landscape journey starts. I
just wanted a summer job. I wasn't getting much allowance, and I wanted to make
some real money — I think I was making four bucks an hour. A local tree farm
started me off basically pruning Christmas trees, and it was an awful job —
hot, bees everywhere, and we'd run out of the fields figuring if you duck while
you run, the bees fly over you. Never worked for me. We also had these “patch
matches” at lunch, where they'd pick two people to wrestle — I ended up having
to wrestle my ex-girlfriend's new boyfriend, who was two years older than me. I
held my own, but I didn't love the job. I knew I liked being outside, and I
knew I didn't like trimming Christmas trees, running from bees, and fighting
people.

I didn't know how to quit a
job, so I told the owner I was moving to California and just left. Then I
worked for other landscape companies — one in Denver when I was 15, driving
their vehicles to job sites without a license. My parents didn't know half of
what was happening. That was my first real experience with landscaping —
planting, patios — and I actually enjoyed it, even though I was running crews
of people 45 and 50 years old while I was only 15.

Karen:
You were 15, leading and organizing people significantly older than
you. That must have been a learning opportunity.

Brad:
It was, though I don't know if I did it well. It helped me realize I
liked what I did, even if I didn't always love the people I worked with — they
just weren't at the level I wanted to be around. I kept moving through
landscape companies, and about 20 years ago I started at New Castle as a
laborer. They told me I was a supervisor, but I had nobody to supervise — it
was just me.

Karen:
How many employees at that time?

Brad:
About seven, and we were around $600,000 in revenue. We've grown the
company over the years, but it's always been about people — bringing really
good people in, building them up, stepping back, bringing more people in. We
have 85 great people now, not just employees — people. Following our core
values — care, improve, attitude — is how we hire, how we fire, how we promote.
Getting the right mix of people around you is tremendous.

Brad:
It wasn't an easy journey — a lot of mentorship, people coming in
and seeing something in me that maybe I didn't see in myself. New Castle's CFO
is the one who hired me, and I knew there was discussion about future
ownership. Before I made the jump, I wanted to know there was a real path to
ownership.

Here's a fun detail: in ninth
grade, my class did a project where we wrote letters to ourselves that would
get mailed back when we turned 40. I'd forgotten all about it, but mine arrived
right after I became a partner at New Castle. In that letter, I'd written that
I wanted to own my own business by 40. So however you want to think about
manifesting, it was written down — and my 40th birthday is right around when we
signed the partnership.

Karen:
That's incredible. Do you still write letters to yourself like that?

Brad:
I do a lot of journaling now, especially on my phone, because I can
look back at what I was thinking, what my fears were, and there's a date
attached to it. It gives you confidence — looking back and realizing, I was
worried about that, and it wasn't that big a deal. It's like a confidence
protector.

Karen:
In your business — and I share this philosophy — people are the most
important part. They're the superheroes of whatever you're building. Do you
have any insights from your years of “gardening” at New Castle?

Brad:
A lot of this goes back to when I was younger, with my mom. She's
bipolar, manic depressive, and I remember moments with police at our house, her
running around totally out of her mind. I was the only one who could really
talk her out of those manic episodes, through humor and empathy — I learned
those skills very early. I thank her for that now. We found out years later
she'd been holding onto a secret, afraid that if we knew, we'd disown her. Once
she told us, the manic episodes stopped. No more depression — she'd just been
carrying something for so long.

That experience shaped how I
think about growing people. With my mom, I saw who she really was underneath,
and I needed her to be my mom again — so how do I help her get there? It's the
same with people in a company: find their gifts, because everybody has one, and
put them in a position where they can excel. It's not about catering to
everything — it's challenging people to want more for themselves than they
thought they were capable of. I think that's my gift: seeing people for what
they could be, not what they are. Sometimes they're not the right fit, and you
have to let them go — there's a great book called Necessary Endings about this.
But keeping someone in a role where they can't succeed isn't kindness. It
delays their life. Sometimes you have to let people go, and that's okay, if you
do it the right way.

Karen:
We live in such a hustle-culture society, everything grabbing for
our attention. What is it about the car wash specifically that gives you that
space to think?

Brad:
A lot of it is the time at the vacuum. You're dirty, you go through
the wash, and you come out clean — it's a mental reset. Wash away the troubles,
come out fresh. And this is funny, but if you look at someone's car and it's
trashed, that's often a reflection of what's going on in their head. If I'm
working with somebody, how do I help them if their life looks like that? I have
to keep my own car clean — that's just a big thing for me.

Karen:
It's like your own decluttering practice. There's research that
shows cleaning your physical space does something to your mental clutter too.

Brad:
And doing something quick, start to finish, is a great reset for any
leader — especially when you feel like you have no control over anything, which
we all feel sometimes. Even a small home project gives you something to point
to and say, I did that. I have to do that more now, honestly, because my
leadership team runs the company — I don't get the dopamine hit of fixing
things myself anymore. If I go in and try to fix something, I usually just
cause more problems. So I have to find other things that give me that same
feeling — and coaching other people gives me that too.

Karen:
Let's go back to your mission — changing 100,000 lives. Where did
that number come from, since I know it started lower?

Brad:
It's funny — I'm the visionary for my company, and we were trying to
come up with a vision statement as a leadership team, and it wasn't working. We
brought in a consultant, who finally said, everybody be quiet, who's the
visionary in the room? They pointed to me, and he gave me half an hour just to
talk, since I process out loud. With his help, it came out to 20,000 lives —
about making an impact, which is what I want for the company and for my own
life.

That became 100,000 lives, but
it's really about impact. You get to a point in your life where you ask, is
this it? I'd been on a couple other podcasts talking about the “second
mountain” and the meaning of life, and leaning into that end-of-life perspective
changes everything — instead of chasing dollars, you're chasing impact. It's
changed my whole life, my relationship with my kids and my wife, across the
board. And it creates a ripple effect. Honestly, I think we're probably past
100,000 already, but I only count it when someone tells me directly, “Brad, you
changed my life” — then I add them to the list. It's not really about hitting
the number. It's about being a giver.

Brad:
I ask myself, who do I want to be the hero to? Where am I gifted,
and how can I use that to help someone else? I don't try to help everybody —
people have to have a growth mindset and be willing to change, or it's just not
going to work, and I'm wasting my time with somebody who isn't open to it. For
me, it's a lot of landscape and small-service-business founders who feel stuck.
A common pattern is these companies get bought out, given a big number up
front, and then at the very end the deal gets restructured and they get far
less than promised — and by then they're already mentally onto the next
chapter, so they end up working somewhere else for a fraction of what they used
to make. My goal, and part of the advisory work I do, is helping build
companies that don't have to sell — that the founders who put in all the sweat
equity can build something that thrives on its own.

Karen:
That's wonderful — helping small businesses like that is the
backbone of this country. We've been through some interesting times together
since I've known you, including COVID. One thing that's stuck with me is the
idea of turning failure into fuel. What's a moment where you had to overcome a
real crisis and turn it into something positive?

Brad:
2018 stands out. We used the H-2B migrant workforce program — legal,
through the government, but it's a lottery, so you only have about a 25% chance
of getting your workers each year. At that point, our entire mowing division
ran on H-2B employees. Two weeks before mowing season, we found out we weren't
getting our guys — 25 people short, with contracts we had to fulfill. It was
awful; I probably cried every other day. We launched a massive hiring campaign
— I hired about 80 people that year. I had a photo of the whole training-day
group above my desk, and as people quit or got let go, I'd black out their
faces, like one of those witness-protection photos. By the end of the season,
we were down to two people out of that original 80.

But those two people ended up
helping rebuild almost our entire mowing department with great people. And that
same year, we decided if we were going to go through that kind of pain, we
might as well fix everything else too — so we implemented the EOS system and
built a real leadership team. If we hadn't gone through that crisis, we
wouldn't have realized we couldn't keep running on a 25% chance of having a
workforce. We still use the H-2B program today, just with eight or nine people,
and we help them get green cards so they can stay. We lost $350,000 that year —
our worst year. It was also one of our best, because of what came out of it.

Karen:
Those moments really suck in the middle of them, but they can lead
to the biggest transformations — a chance to redirect things in a much better
direction.

Brad:
It's step up or step out. I'm actually good in a crisis — the
adrenaline kicks in, and you start making decisions and guiding the ship. It's
almost fun, in a strange way, even though it's a lot. The industry average
turnover is around 35%. We've been at 3 to 5% for the last seven years —
because we bring the right people in, train them up, and genuinely care about
where they land, even when that's somewhere else.

Karen:
Thank you so much, Brad, for coming on today — your story of
building a business, and all of your advice for leadership and life. I have no
doubt this revised goal of 100,000 lives is going to happen. I really
appreciate you being here.

Brad:
I appreciate you having me — this was awesome, and I'm honored to be
the first guest in this studio.

Karen:
Brad shows us that real leadership means being authentically
yourself, growing your people right alongside your business, owning the good
and the bad, and staying honest enough to lift others by lifting yourself
first. For more information about Brad, see the show notes below. If you
haven't already, give us a subscribe, and don't forget to always lift.