The Young Turks of Landscaping
Joel Furfari
March 5, 2010 8:52:44 am
The Gwinnett Business Journal
23 Year Old Has Company On the Fast Track
At Innovative Outdoors, a Duluth-based landscaping company, Thomas Boyce is the oldest person at the firm.
He's the founder and owner. And he's all of 23 years old.
Armed with the sense that there's room for growth in the Gwinnett landscaping market, Boyce has gone from mowing lawns in his Dacula neighborhood to running a company with almost 30 employees and $3 million in annual revenues.
Boyce got his start when he was in high school, cutting grass and picking up a few tricks of the landscaping trade.
"I figured I could make more money doing that than by just going to the mall to get a job," he says. "People kept asking me to do a little bit more and a little bit more, and then we started doing landscaping projects for a few thousand bucks here and there."
One day Boyce was shopping in a Pike Nurseries store when a man pulled his Mercedes up to the front door and went inside.
"I ran into a guy at Pike's who walked right in and asked if they knew of a landscaper, so I started talking to him," Boyce says. "He said he wanted someone to come over and take on a $5,000 job to fix his yard up, so I stared spitting out ideas for things we could do and he just said ‘sure.'"
Boyce spent that whole summer working to transfer the man's entire yard. He also began studying industry trends and saw an opening for a local company that could take on major residential projects around fast-growing Gwinnett. He convinced his brother, John Boyce, and various friends to work for him and made his first foray into big-time landscaping.
After graduating from Dacula High School, Boyce took a scholarship to play football for the University of Louisville. He later transferred to the University of Georgia and began taking business seriously.
With his brother running the business while he was in college, Thomas Boyce came to a turning point – he could either stick with the landscaping business or move into some other industry.
"I kind of looked at it my junior year of college, and I was making good money doing it," he says. "So I said I could either sell the business and move on and do something else, or I can turn this into something that's really neat."
That's when Innovative Outdoors began its growth from a company with $500,000 in annual revenues to one that expects to bring in $3 million this year.
"We're trying to go beyond even that and sustain more growth," Boyce says.
The company estimates that 80 percent of its customers find out about Innovative Outdoors via word-of-mouth and referrals, though it does depend on a small amount of direct mail and a website full of high-quality artwork showing off various projects.
Boyce says he's proud of the fact that the company's employees are so young, but that care must be taken to protect Innovative Outdoors' reputation as a serious company.
"I'm 23, and I'm the oldest person in the company, so we have to make sure that we're very professional," Boyce says. "We're very good at big projects, so we let our customers know that we're going to have a project manager on each job site who will e-mail you with progress reports every week, and we'll give you a timetable ahead of time."
In fact, Boyce admits that he had to learn how to successfully maintaining high employee morale and productivity when many of those working for him are friends and family.
"That's one of the toughest parts of running this business," he says. "One of my employees is my roommate. Plus, my brother works for me. There have been some times when they probably walked over me a bit, but you have to draw a line somewhere and make sure that you have objective measures in place."
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At A Glance
Company Name: Innovative Outdoors, LLC
Headquarters: Duluth
Employees: 10 full-time and 20 seasonal/part-time
Revenue: $2.5 million projected in 2008
The team: Thomas Boyce is the founder and president. The rest of the management team consists mostly of young people and recent college grads.
There are five major parts of the company's business:
Landscaping: This involves improving a property's appeal by selecting and arranging various plants.
Design: The company can provide clients with landscape designers who provide detailed plans for improving a home's landscaping.
Outdoor Lighting: This is more important than many people realize. Innovative Outdoors can help you optimize how your property looks at night.
Hardscaping: This encompasses any areas of landscaping that don't involve planting. That means installing retaining walls, decks, stonework and other "outdoor living" installations.
Maintenance: Innovative Out-doors provides full maintenance services to ensure that clients' investments are protected.
The projects: The major trend now is toward more outdoor amenities that go far beyond just a garden. "Our average project is in the $50,000 to $100,00 range," says Boyce. "A couple projects are now in the $200,000 to $300,000 range, which are high-end projects including oudoor kitchens and things like that."
