The Press of Atlantic City
Business Section
Friday, November 30, 2001

Holiday Lighting Worth a Bundle as a New Service
You needn’t look far to see a shining example of the burgeoning service economy, especially if you look at night.

Holiday displays get brighter every year.

Sell the lights and you’re trying to make money on a commodity that I’ve seen advertised for as little as $2 per string of lights.

But sell the whole package – design, supplies, installation, removal and storage of holiday lighting – and you’re providing a service worth thousands of dollars per home.

“I’m amazed myself” at the money involved, said John Ferrie, looking at a typical holiday lighting contract for $1,750. “And the guy’s got to get an electrician to put circuits in to handle the lights.”

One customer’s little girl wanted a 30-foot spruce tree completely lighted. When Ferrie told him it would cost more than $500 just for that tree, and require installation of an outlet, he ordered the work without hesitation.

Ferrie’s business is Fresh Cut^® & Landscaping, primarily landscaping, lawn maintenance, and leaf and snow removal.

But in 1998, he bought the Atlantic County holiday lighting franchise from Christmas Décor of Lubbock, Texas. He was the company’s 60th franchisee; now there are more than 300.

He jumped on the new business wave just as it was starting to build momentum.

Fresh Cut’s holiday lighting business has doubled each year, and now it’s fourth year it’s doing more than $100,000 worth of decoration for homes and businesses.

“We’ve done Consumer Square, English Creek Shopping Center, Heathercroft Shopping Center, Ventura’s Restaurant…we’ve done a lot of commercial stuff,” Ferrie said. “A lot of residential too – probably 100 residences this year.”

Residential customers have spent from $200 to $4,000 their first year, when they buy materials, he said. Subsequent years, when paying only for installation, the cost for that $4,000 job drops to $1,500 to $2,500 a year.

And then come January, there’s an additional charge to remove the decorations. Fresh Cut starts around Jan. 6 and tries to finish the removals by the end of the month.

The service clearly appeals to people who have more money than time to spare.
Ferrie said that his customers often have weighed the effort and expense involved in getting equipment and materials, and the risks of electrical and ladder work, and determined they’re better off contracting it out.

What they get from Fresh Cut is a professional operation that Christmas Décor has perfected for its installers.

The materials are high quality, the pricing structure is explicit and detailed, and the methods are consistent, safe and non-destructive.

Ferrie’s two lighting crews have been to four training sessions, traveling as far as Florida, to learn the fine points of electrical loads, proper attachments and the like.

“It’s a noninvasive installation. We don’t go putting nails and hooks in unless the customer wants, say, a wreath on a high brick surface and they approve a nail there,” he said.

When the season’s over, customers’ decorations are tagged and boxed, and stored by neighborhood for efficient installation next year.

Don’t bother calling Fresh Cut now and asking for installation this year. It’s too late; they’re booked full. Ferrie said most jobs are lined up by September.

As his crew finished up the decorations Tuesday on Assemblyman-elect and Linwood Mayor Paul D’Amato’s home in the Fisher Woods section of Linwood, Ferrie said, “This week we paid out 260 hours of overtime.”

He credited his staff – the best he’s had in 18 years of landscaping – for being able to handle the big increase in work. Mostly they’ve done it by working 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., six days a week.

“The reason I didn’t hire extra crews this year is that after Sept. 11, I wondered how much people were going to do this year,” Ferrie said. “Like every business, our phones stopped ringing for almost a month.”

“But you know how people are. They are going to do what they can to make things better, and lights I think are a part of making people feel better,” he said.

The challenge for Ferrie is keeping up with his leaf removal and landscape work in the midst of the lighting frenzy.

“The last thing I want is for one of my customers to say, ‘My yard’s a mess and you’re putting up holiday lights for other people?’”

The mild fall weather has made it easier to keep all his crews working and his customers satisfied.

Ferrie said he’s aware of a couple of other guys doing holiday light installation, but nothing on the scale of Fresh Cut and Christmas Décor.

He expects that the next few years will see more competitors.

I think holiday decoration is a service that’s in its infancy, that in five years we’ll see three or more competitors in each market and installations for Halloween as well as the year-end holidays.

I’d be greatly surprised if, by next year, Christmas Décor doesn’t have franchisees in Cape May, Cumberland and Ocean counties too.

Perhaps even today, after reading this, there are seasonal businesses like landscapers, nurseries, painters and such on the phone to Lubbock, looking to provide this lucrative service in their slow time of year.

At the very least, guys are telling their wives, “Hey, honey, look how much my work on our Christmas lights is worth!”

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