Podcast: How Zebra Trucks and Bold Branding Built a Landscaping Business
Picture two people pushing strollers on opposite sides of a street, knocking on doors, asking neighbors if they need any yard work. Three young children. A minivan and a trailer. Dinner most nights was rice and beans. “People were so kind,” Denise Steidinger recalled on the Everyday Excellence podcast. “They’d say, I don’t have any yard work for you, but your kids are so cute. And I would be like, I need to feed them tonight.”
That was ZebraScapes in 2009. Not a bold launch strategy. Not a calculated pivot. Just a family from Illinois that had moved to Arizona for opportunity, watched the economy collapse, and decided to build something rather than wait for the situation to change. Denise and her husband Rodney had grown up on farms, knew how to grind, and had the one ingredient that a lot of business plans are missing: no other option.
Today, ZebraScapes is a 75-employee, 15-crew full-service landscaping and outdoor living company serving the greater Prescott, Arizona area, known as much for the zebra stripe trucks you cannot miss as for the outdoor kitchens, patios, and desert landscapes they build. Getting there required more than hard work. It required a $30,000 branding bet, a hard lesson about marketing agencies, and the willingness to build accountability systems in a company that had grown faster than its own structure could handle.
THE REAL IMPACT
In 2015, ZebraScapes was not struggling. It had been growing steadily since 2009, adding clients, buying equipment one piece at a time, and building a reputation in Prescott through relationships and referrals. But something was missing. The trucks had a basic oval logo. Nothing memorable. Nothing that made someone stop and say, who is that?
Rodney had always dreamed of wrapping their trucks in zebra stripes. Bold, unmistakable, impossible to forget. In 2015, ZebraScapes adopted a new name (the business had originally been called TK Haley Yard Care, named after their daughters), a new brand, and new truck wraps that covered the entire fleet in zebra print. The cost was around $30,000. The decision felt risky.
“This is like a $30,000 investment, so it could either take off or it could go south.”
It took off. Almost immediately, the phone started ringing with a different kind of call. Not just referrals from existing clients but new people saying they had seen the trucks in their neighborhood. “I see your truck everywhere.” The trucks had become moving billboards in the truest sense, building brand recognition in every neighborhood they drove through on the way to a job. Denise describes 2015 as the company’s turning point, the year ZebraScapes went from growing to exploding.
That growth created its own complications. More crews meant more people, more people meant more complexity, and more complexity exposed gaps in how the company was managing accountability. “We grew so fast we didn’t have the structure to support it,” Denise told Todd Baldwin. Building KPI accountability across every division of the company has been the work of the past year and a half, and she credits it as one of the biggest game changers ZebraScapes has had since the rebrand.
3. WHAT THEY TRIED
As ZebraScapes grew, Denise and Rodney knew they needed more than truck visibility to keep the pipeline full. They needed a consistent digital marketing strategy. Like many business owners, they turned to outside agencies.
The experience was not good. Across multiple agencies, the pattern repeated itself. Big promises in the sales conversation. Expensive monthly retainers. Vague reporting. And at the end of it, very little they could point to as a return on their investment.
“They were very good at billing, not great at delivering. They promise you the sun, moon and stars, but I just didn’t see the delivery of it.”
This is a pain point Denise shares with a lot of landscape and home service business owners. The digital marketing agency space has a low barrier to entry, and there are agencies collecting retainers on promises they are not built to fulfill. Todd Baldwin, who runs Everyday Media Group and works with landscape and home service companies across the country, acknowledged the problem directly: “It’s given the agency world a bad name. We’re already fighting this negative reception before we even get started.”
After cycling through multiple agencies and getting the same results, Denise stopped outsourcing. She found an in-house marketing professional who has now been with ZebraScapes for about five months. The difference has been significant from day one.
WHAT’S WORKING NOW
ZebraScapes’s current marketing approach is layered, consistent, and rooted in authentic content. Their in-house marketing person goes out to job sites and captures real footage: short reels, progress clips, and finished-project reveals. That content runs across Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok as both organic posts and paid ads.
One of the most effective content categories has been the employee appreciation events. ZebraScapes holds four of these each year, bringing all 75 employees together for lunch and team building, intentionally mixing install, tree, maintenance, and office staff who do not normally work side by side. The event footage consistently outperforms job posting content in views and comments. “People love that,” Denise said.
The brand extends into the physical world in a way few companies manage. Beyond the zebra trucks, ZebraScapes has placed metal zebra sculptures around Prescott. Denise and Rodney also live on a 10-acre ranch with live zebras, which have become part of the brand story and draw attention on their own. “It’s kind of a thing in Prescott,” Denise said. “People are like, why are there so many zebras around here? And then people talk about it and about our business.”
On the digital side, the company runs Google Local Service Ads and generates organic leads through their website daily. Print has also been part of the mix: ZebraScapes was recently featured on the cover of Green Living Magazine in a story about women in leadership, and a local publication is running a story tied to foster care awareness month featuring the Steidinger family. These placements reinforce ZebraScapes as a known and trusted community business, not just a vendor.
Looking ahead, Rodney is leading an AI initiative inside the company. They are already using AI tools with their sales team and are working to integrate AI across other business functions. Todd pointed out the specific angle that matters for service businesses right now: authoritative website content, FAQs, and consistent reviews position a company to show up when potential clients type questions into AI tools like ChatGPT, not just traditional search engines.
THE LESSON (WHERE EMG SERVICES APPLY)
The ZebraScapes story illustrates something that Everyday Media Group sees often in the landscape and outdoor living space. A strong brand creates visibility, and visibility builds trust over time. But converting that trust into a consistent lead pipeline requires digital marketing that is transparent, measurable, and actually accountable to results.
The frustration Denise described with outside agencies is not unique to her. Most landscape companies that have tried to outsource marketing have had at least one experience where the promise was large and the return was small. The root of the problem is a mismatch between what agencies sell and what they actually deliver, compounded by a lack of real reporting on what is working.
Everyday Media Group works with landscape, outdoor living, and home service companies specifically to close that gap. That means tracking every lead back to its source channel, making it visible whether that is Google paid search, organic SEO, or increasingly AI-driven referral traffic, and connecting marketing spend to actual revenue outcomes. The goal is never to just break even on marketing. The goal is a measurable return. As Todd said on the episode: “You don’t want to break even. We want to make money. I’m paying X, it’s bringing in Y. The return is positive.”
KEY TAKEAWAYS
1. Bold brand decisions create compound visibility.
The zebra truck wraps were a $30,000 investment that made every truck a moving billboard in every neighborhood ZebraScapes served. Brand recognition followed quickly and has sustained for over a decade. Distinctive branding is not a vanity spend. It is a visibility multiplier.
“The brand recognition really taught us that just being in people’s area, referrals from clients, the phone was ringing off the hook.”
2. Agency red flags are consistent: billing over delivering, no real ROI.
Denise worked with multiple agencies before finding a solution that worked. The pattern across all of them was the same. Expensive, poor return, and promises that were not backed up by performance. Businesses looking for a marketing partner should expect clear reporting and real results, not just dashboards with impressive-looking numbers.
“I felt like they were very good at billing, not great at delivering.”
3. Accountability structures are what make growth sustainable.
ZebraScapes grew fast. Too fast for the operational structure they had in place. Building KPI accountability across all 15 crews and every division took deliberate effort, but Denise says it has been as important to the business as any marketing initiative. Growth without accountability creates chaos. Accountability turns growth into a foundation.
“We grew so fast we didn’t have the structure to support it. Accountability has been a game changer for us this past year and a half.”
ABOUT THE GUEST
Denise Steidinger is the owner of ZebraScapes, a full-service landscaping and outdoor living company based in Prescott, Arizona. She and her husband Rodney started the business in 2009 with a minivan, a trailer, and three daughters in strollers. Sixteen years later, ZebraScapes operates 75 employees across 15 crews, offering design-build installation, maintenance, tree service, irrigation, and outdoor living projects including patios, pergolas, outdoor kitchens, and turf. Denise and Rodney are also licensed foster parents who adopted their fourth daughter in 2014, and the family’s story is woven into the ZebraScapes brand and community presence.
Their oldest daughter Trinity and husband Rodney also co-founded Father Daughter Construction in 2024, which handles remodels, additions, and new construction projects in the same service area.
Visit ZebraScapes: https://zebrascapes.com/
If your landscaping or outdoor living company is dealing with the same marketing frustrations Denise described, whether that is agency over-promises, unclear ROI, or just not knowing which channels are actually driving leads, Everyday Media Group helps landscape and home service businesses build marketing programs that produce real, trackable results. Schedule a free consultation at everydaymediagroup.com.
