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In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, there is a two-mile-long parkway outside a casino where Brandt Martin, the current COO of Maintenance for Rotolo Consulting Incorporated (RCI), conducted an experiment. In 2012, Martin was still a relatively new employee brought on to help the Rotolo family expand the maintenance arm of their design and construction company. Martin’s priority was to align RCI with a vehicle manufacturer, allowing the company to standardize their fleet, equipment, and vendors.
After building a successful partnership with John Deere, RCI’s corporate representative asked Martin if he had ever considered propane mowers. Propane sounded promising on paper. Lower price points, less emissions, and Martin could see it fitting into his vision for the division. But Martin, the only non-Rotolo in a leadership position, wasn’t going to ask the company to take a leap of faith without a solid idea of where they’d land.
RCI had built a parkway outside a casino in Baton Rouge and were contracted to maintain it. They built the parkway to mirror itself on both sides, kept its berms and undulations near identical. For the whole summer of 2012, RCI ran two gasoline 60-inch mowers on one side of the parkway and two propane-powered 60-inch mowers on the other. All four mowers were the same make, model, and had similar hours of usage. At the end of the trial, Martin tabulated the results, comparing black box readings against his own observations and measurements of their performance. While the cost savings from propane was obvious (RCI spends about a dollar less per gallon on propane than gasoline) Martin didn’t anticipate the performance disparity between the two.
“The propane mower was just more state-of-the-art,” he said. “If it had been close, I wouldn’t have pushed for propane.” Martin shared his results with the CFO, Brian Rotolo, and asked him to take that leap of faith.
RCI purchased 22 propane mowers in 2012, a significant number of mowers at that time for its burgeoning fleet. While RCI started as a small family-owned irrigation company in the late 70s, it now offered a full suite of design, build, and maintenance services. Its clientele included properties from boutique high-end resorts to municipal facilities, housing, and hospitals. A diverse client list comes with diverse expectations. RCI’s new propane mowers would be expected to cut a variety of landscapes to differing specifications and cutting frequencies while saving the company money and time as promised. In 2024, RCI’s results speak for themselves.
“Today, our mower fleet is 500 plus,” said Martin. “North of 95% of our mowers are on propane.”
From its humble beginnings in Slidell, Louisiana, RCI has grown to an organization of around 1,200 employees (approximately 600 within maintenance) across seven states with no signs of slowing down. Landscape maintenance accounts for 65% of RCI’s total business, and over the last half decade, has grown 15% year-over-year, even during the COVID-19 pandemic. From coastal Louisiana, they’ve expanded their maintenance operations to major metropolitan areas, including Nashville, Orlando, and Birmingham.
“Propane has been tremendous,” Martin said. “Over the 12 years we’ve been using it, we’ve become so large and diverse in the different services we offer and the environments we mow in. It meets our needs and our needs have expanded.”
