At the facility in Parkland in Palm Beach County, FL, the Serco 8500 is moving vegetation from the ground into the truck.

Boris G. Katz may be a man of few words but he is long on vision. When he immigrated into the United States from the former Soviet Union, via Israel, he saw a way to make a living in the Southwestern part of Florida. Katz began with a lawn maintenance company in Boca Raton. It has since grown over the last 20 years into BG Katz Nurseries, a huge multifaceted operation that boasts an impressive fleet of material handling equipment including loaders, grapple trucks, excavators, bulldozers, tractor trailers and straight trucks. BG Katz is under contract with 180 owner-operated tri-axle dump trucks for handling and disposing of debris has a skilled services maintenance department and carries a full parts inventory.

Vladimir Foursa, general manager of BG Katz, is Boris Katz’s right hand man. He started to work for Katz a week after he came to the states from the former Soviet Union, where he was a diesel mechanic working on marine engines. “Today my job is working with people, not equipment,” Foursa said. “I manage over 100 employees. It helps to know what is going on with the engines and how the repairs should go but I am not too much involved physically with the fixing of things. Actually, sometimes I think people are harder to fix than machines. Machines don’t have problems and they are never late to work.” 

When asked about the smallest job Katz would tackle Foursa said, “There is no job too small.  BG Katz Nurseries is a company within a company. We have a trucking division, vegetation-recycling division, which produces mulch, and topsoil. We do demolition and land clearing. We have excavators, dozers and a fleet of loaders. Most of all we are diversified and versatile. Our own vegetation doesn't go to waste. We make mulch or topsoil and we recycle everything.”

Each new facet of business seemingly evolved out of the previous one. Katz started the company more than 20 years ago as lawn maintenance operation. As the company grew, they accumulated so many trucks and trailers Katz needed a place to park all of them close to the jobs they were doing. It became more economically sound to buy a place to park them than to drive an hour with a full crew to each job and back. 

“If you hauled 10 guys that kind of distance, all of a sudden you have spent $1,500,” said Foursa. “So we began to look for a good piece of land.” So about 12 years ago, BG Katz bought its first piece of property, which was 4-5 acres in Boynton Beach. That was more land than they needed to park trucks, so they started a nursery in order to make good use of the land began to grow the plants that they needed in their lawn maintenance business. Next, they bought another piece of land where they also grow container plants, primarily shrubs and trees that are used in landscaping. This property contains 20 acres in West Palm Beach County, far west. From there, came the mulch and compost industries, and a disposal yard. A trucking company collects solid wood-waste from and delivers products to big or small job sites. 

“Instead of paying for disposing of our landscape debris at the land field we decided to make compost out of it. We got permit for vegetation recycling facility and started receiving yard waste from other landscape companies,” said Foursa. “As that took off we said 'let's go get some more yard waste' so we went out and purchase the grapple trucks.  We began to pick up wood and started making mulch.

“People want mulch, but not everybody who wants it is able to pick it up, so we then bought some semi-trailers in order to be able to deliver the material to our customers. Some people want 5-600 yards of mulch a week and they can’t come to get it,” Foursa continued. “So we began to deliver it to their sites.”

Katz delivers primarily to large commercial companies that blow mulch. “We haul in 20-50, and 100 yard semi trucks and bring mulch to the job site for many of our customers,” according to Foursa. “For example, we might provide mulch for the entire Home Owner's Association, which would consist of 200 houses to be mulched at a time.” They also do commercial plazas. “We do a few houses but are more likely to do restaurants and other types of small commercial buildings.”

As mentioned, one of BG Katz’s strong points is in the versatility of its services. People can come to the nursery and buy a yard or a couple of hundred yards of compost material. People can pick it up or have it delivered. The result is a customer base that contains many landscapers both small and large.

“Compost or topsoil is especially crucial to the soil in south Florida because it is so sandy. In order to grow most plants it needs compost materials to boost it,” said Foursa. “But soil is not BG Katz’s main business. We provide plants as well as mulch, we trim, pick up the trimmings, maintain the yard and create the mulch from the scrap. We do land clearing on small or large scale. We already had all the equipment (tractors, loaders, dozers and excavators) so we thought we would put them to use.

“We went to Scaffidi Commercial Trucks out of Wisconsin to buy equipment, particularly the Serco 8500, because it was a better product that offered excellent installation and a superior maintenance program,” said Foursa. “Scaffidi is a good company. They not only have a great product but they are quick on the follow-up with excellent tech support and they work well with us to solve any issue that may arise.” 

In 2003, Katz bought several Serco 8500s from Scaffidi. They found the need for some equipment modifications. Using a team approach, Scaffidi involved experienced engineers, equipment operators and their own nursery management team, as well as engineers and installers from Scaffidi and engineers from Serco, to solve the issue. They looked at lift capacity, load capacity, equipment speed, operating in warm climates, return on equipment investment. The modifications were specifically done for BG Katz.  

“We have been buying Serco Loaders for the past six or seven years and we a very satisfied with the equipment,” explained Foursa. “As I said earlier, Scaffidi is reliable and backed by great support system. As we were using the Serco loader grapple trucks we noticed that the loads we had to pick up were not heavy in comparison to the loads the trucks were designed to process, namely in forestry for the logging industry. By comparison we were able to pick up much more volume per pound. So we redesigned the grapple. We enlarged it to hold more loose branches, and asked Scaffidi to take their time and work with us to build it for us. It took a couple of years to make the adjustments. With the help of a whole team, including Brian Stanley from Scaffidi brothers, who came down here to our site and in turn translated our needs, Scaffidi was able to do what we needed to operate more efficiently.

“We changed the design on dumping body after we located what seemed to be a flaw in how material flowed through the body. We brought in an engineer and suggested he change the dimensions of the truck bed. The back of the body kept jamming into a bottleneck because the front of the truck was wider and all the weight pushed the material in,” Foursa said. “By changing the front opening to narrower than the back, and putting reinforcements inside, it kept the material from sticking, or spreading sides of the body apart. Those are just couple examples there were other: like changing sizes of hydraulic tanks, replacing hydraulic pumps with different style pumps, etc.”

According to Foursa, “What I like best it that this business is not boring. There are always new things to learn. Everyday there is something new The company itself is never static. It is always changing, always looking for new ways to do things. It is not a job, it is an adventure.”

Lawn mowing is still a mainstay of the business; Katz sends out crews of people who mow everyday. They do all types of lawn maintenance from major corporations to individual yards and municipalities. How many workers get sent to a job depends on the size. One of the best things about Katz is its flexibility; the geographic scope of the operation is on the East Coast of Florida, from Jupiter to Miami

“We are set up to send one crew or three depending on the need at the site. One of the other main strengths of the company is that most employees, even though this is not exactly a family owned company, are here for the long haul,” said Foursa. “There is stability. Many employees are here 15 years or longer. We don’t normally have to fire anyone.”

Boris Katz is usually on the job everyday with Vladimir Foursa. Boris has three children 16, 20 and 24. Vladimir has two girls, ages 16 and 8. Vladimir teaches the art of creating Bonsai trees at the Japanese Cultural Museum.

“What makes BG Katz Nurseries different is the organization itself. And the open approach to they way we do things. We try for out of the box approaches to problem solving. We tend not to be traditional. We are pioneers. We find new and better ways to do new things it helps the company keep going and growing.”

Sounds like synergy to me.