Twin engine takeoff

Having four leaders with equal ownership of the company may sound like an easy way to jam up the runway, but EarthScapes has effortlessly taken off since a merger that’s lifted the company to 115% growth over three years.

The Virginia Beach-based EarthScapes Lawn & Land Service is run by identical twins, Matt and Josh Eldredge, plus a pair of longtime best friends — Ben Hewlett and Trey White.

Hewlett and White used to own a local company, Lawn-Aid, before merging with EarthScapes in 2021.

EarthScapes went from doing about $1.5 million in revenue to over $7 million today under the ownership of all four men. Josh Eldredge serves as the company’s president, while Matt is vice president. Hewlett is COO and White is EarthScape’s CFO.

Shedding blood, sweat and tears

EarthScape’s origins date back to nearly three decades ago when Matt and Josh Eldredge were the company’s first employees.

“My dad started EarthScapes in 1996. He was a middle school teacher and football coach for 36 years in the area and started the business just for some extra money in the summertime. He was cutting some of his fellow teachers’ lawns,” Matt says. “Our summers were going out with dad and working for our dinner.”

The twins graduated high school in 2000 and immediately went to work full-time for EarthScapes while also pursuing landscape design and maintenance degrees from a local community college.

“We were working full-time and going to night classes six nights a week to pursue that horticulture degree,” Matt says.

Photo courtesy of EarthScapes

Matt says he and his wife jumped at the chance to return home after three years.

It was shortly after that when the company lost one of its other key employees to a new career path with the Marines — though the military’s influence on EarthScapes was far from over.

“We have an older brother, Ryan, who is five years older than us, and he worked with us as well when my dad started the business,” Matt explains. “Actually, I was working with him on Sept. 11, 2001, when the terrorist attack happened — and then he ended up joining the Marine Corp. and left the family business to go support this great nation of ours. He’s still active and is a sergeant major in the Marine Corp. Josh and I just kept fighting the good fight here.”

Matt then stepped away from EarthScapes in 2008 when his wife’s work relocated them to the Washington DC area.

“We were up there for three years. I ended up getting a job with a local company out there,” he says. “They were a maintenance company with 600 clients and one golf course community… For me, coming from a company that was fairly small, it was quite eye-opening. That’s when it clicked for me that you could really make some money in this business.”

“In July 2011, we moved back, and I joined back up with Josh who was pretty much running the business while I was gone,” he says. “That was the year we purchased the rest of the shares from my dad. He was retiring and looking to move up to the mountains in West Virginia. It was just time to pass the baton over to Josh and me officially.”

Once the twins started working together again, Josh says they knew they had to divide and conquer in order to be successful.

“Being twins, we find it easier to stay out of each other’s lanes,” he says. “I basically took on the maintenance side of things and Matt took on the install side of the business.”

Even with the two of them back at it, Josh and Matt admit it was a lot of hard work as EarthScapes was starting to gain momentum in terms of growth and revenue.

“Matt and I were looking at either partnering up with somebody or a possible sale,” Josh says. “It was super stressful trying to handle everything together and the growth we were seeing and the amount of volume that we were doing — it caused a lot of headaches. It was taxing, and we were just exploring our options, but we understood we needed some help.”

Enter Hewlett and White.

A Top Gun tale

Hewlett admits his and White’s foray into the green industry is rather uncommon.

“It’s not your usual story,” he says.

The two are retired Navy vets that met during flight school in the 90s and stayed close throughout their illustrative careers.

“I was a military brat and went to the Naval Academy for college — graduated and went to flight school for the Navy where I flew F/A-18s,” White says. “I was in the Navy for 26 years and retired in 2016. Ben and I have been best friends since we started flight school in 1993.”

Their careers took the duo all over the world but eventually they both wound up back in Virginia Beach where they first started.

“We were both taking on command responsibilities in the Navy that required us to get master’s degrees,” Hewlett says. “One afternoon over beers, we were talking about these MBAs we were getting, and how it seemed like our career in the Navy would be coming to an end soon, and we weren’t sure what our next step would be…we thought it’d be great to start a business.

“We started talking about what we wanted to do and deciding was the hard part. After a very long discussion we settled on starting a landscape company.”

In 2012, the friends started Lawn-Aid with nothing more than a pickup truck, a mower and a backpack blower.

“We operated that for about four or five years as absentee owners,” Hewlett says. “We had a couple guys who would run it for us while we were active duty in the Navy. We were deployed and I remember there were times I was onboard an aircraft carrier on the other side of the world, conducting operations in Afghanistan, and I’d get back from the flight and have to write tomorrow’s schedule for the mow crew.

“That’s the way we functioned for years — and we struggled,” he adds. “It was a hard thing to get our hands around. Sometimes I was there, or Trey was there — but we’d tag team and make sure it was running.”

White adds it was during this time they really got a firsthand look at what it takes to run a business successfully.

“We learned a lot that an MBA doesn’t teach you,” White says. “We learned the hands-on stuff like dealing with employees, their issues and all that HR stuff.”

Though despite the tough times, Lawn-Aid got to the point where they were doing just under $300,000 in revenue.

“We were really starting to see the business come around,” he says. “No longer were we taking money out of our saving accounts to pay salaries. Things were starting to look up.”

After both men were retired from the Navy, instead of jumping all into their landscaping company, both took jobs as commercial airline pilots — something they call a natural progression after their years of flying for the military.

White says running Lawn-Aid and being a pilot was also quite the balancing act. The pair considered getting rid of one career to make their lives easier.

“We were just about to probably shut it down when I got a random phone call from a guy named Dave Stephens,” White recalls, adding that Stephens is on EarthScapes board of directors. “He’d been working with Matt and Josh for a few years as a financial advisor and mentor. He told us he had two brothers with a landscaping company who were interested in selling and wanted to know if we were interested in buying. My thoughts have always been, ‘I’ll take every meeting.’”

Merging of the minds

The foursome met over lunch where they all shared their struggles and successes.

“We sat down with Josh and Matt and spent a lot of time looking at their books,” Hewlett says. “Their whole operation was much larger than ours. They were doing really well, but they were tired and exhausted. The company was getting big enough for them that they needed someone working on the business rather than in it.”

Matt echoes that sentiment, saying he and Josh knew they weren’t able to take EarthScapes to the next level on their own.

“The ultimate driver was that Josh and I have always been field guys,” Matt says. “We needed some help getting the business to the next level… we saw it as a way to really expand on what we’d already started. We wanted to become one of the top-producing and elite companies in this area because it’s a great market to work in.”

White says he remembers turning the tables during that lunch and pitching Matt and Josh the idea of a partnership rather than a true sale.

“I suggested, ‘How about you buy our company, and we’ll help you run it,’” White recalls. “That’s where it all started. We joined forces and have not looked back since. It’s been a great partnership thus far.

“Matt and Josh are very capable landscapers,” he adds. “They know the business of doing landscaping — both maintenance and installation. They’re very knowledgeable in the technical areas where Ben and I were not. Ben and I have a lot of knowledge about business and organization.”

Josh adds all of this has led to the four becoming equal partners in EarthScapes.

“We made an asset purchase of all (Lawn-Aid’s) customers and their equipment, and they bought in to EarthScapes for the next three years,” he explains. “So now, after last year, we all became 25/25/25/25 (percent)partners.”

A delightful dynamic

While it may have its difficulties at times having so many leaders, all four say they strive to stay out of each other’s jet streams.

“Everybody focuses on their own, individual responsibilities,” Josh says. “I feel like the bigger the team, the better the odds will be. Their industry knowledge may not have been as extensive as Matt’s and mine, but their business knowledge was invaluable.”

White acknowledges that he and Hewlett are less involved in the daily operations at EarthScapes and more focused on growth and scalability.

“We’re very well-rounded in what we bring to the table,” White says. “We complement each other, and I think that’s why it works. Ben and I try to concentrate a little more on the strategic vision. The two of us don’t deal a lot with the day-to-day. We do still participate when needed and will help out with something that might need an owner’s touch — but the day-to-day stuff, Matt is in the trenches.

“He is out there helping the guys. I see him on the machines all the time teaching the guys and helping them out. And Josh is very much customer facing and business development on the maintenance side and with the agronomics.”

White adds the reason it works so well is because all four men come to a united front before making any major decisions.

“The other thing that helps too is the four of us are just good guys — nobody’s a jerk,” he says. “We are all very driven. We get a vision about something, we discuss it, we all nod our heads and we move forward. Occasionally, somebody might have a difference of opinion — and that’s fine. We all feel very comfortable with each other and speaking our minds to voice what we think and then moving together, with one voice, as the owners.”

Matt says working as a collective can happen because they all share the same vision for the company’s future.

“It’s definitely had its moments where it can be a little challenging, but I think where it eases it all is that everybody really stays in their own lane and we all have each other there if we need someone for support,” he says.

“We all have our own role to play. The end goal in mind is the same across the board. We want to get to $15-, $25-, even $50 million a year. We’re just trying to climb that Lawn & Landscape Top 100 list.”

And with everyone focusing on their own roles, it makes Hewlett and White’s challenge of working as pilots and running EarthScapes easier.

“It’s definitely a lot of work,” White says of balancing both jobs. “Ben and I probably spend 12 to 14 days a month flying. Technology is fantastic — when I’m in Rome or Madrid or somewhere, I can still be in my hotel room conducting business the way it needs to be done to get us everything that we need. Technology has really allowed us to do this and not have it affect the company.”

Growing pains and performance motivators

Collectively, the four have helped EarthScapes achieve more than 115% growth in three years, which is no small feat. The owners say that while this growth was achieved through a few changes and improvements, there’s been a few moments of turbulence along the way.

“Cashflow is always a tough one when you grow that fast,” White says of problems. “As CFO, I’m thinking how much can we leverage ourselves or how much can I borrow to buy more trucks and how does our budget look — are we spending too much on overhead or can we do something with 10 guys as opposed to 12?”

But investing in new vehicles and equipment have made for happier employees and improved efficiency.

“Cycling out the old vehicles and trying to get new ones, without trailers, for our maintenance side all comes with higher payments — but it’s out with the old and in with the new,” Josh says. “We were at a point where the old vehicles were costing too much, and they just weren’t reliable.”

Like most businesses, Josh says finding qualified employees has been a challenge. The company has been using the H-2B program the last few years to make up for it, though they still have a few longtime domestic workers that’ve been with the company nearly a decade.

“It’s important to be that premier landscaping company that offers benefits to its employees,” White says. “We’ve worked really hard to try and provide a really good culture for those around us and those who work with us. We want to provide them with the financial benefits as well as the career support they need. We do that through training, offering healthcare plans for our managers that are paid 100% by the company, a company vehicle, company phone and a 401K with a 5% contribution — it’s not a match — its directly from us. Those are all benefits we expect to expand on.

“We want to offer them a home where they will be willing to stay for a long time,” he adds.

Going along with making the employees happier is training them to work smarter, not harder.

Hewlett says standard operating procedures, or SOPS, are something all small businesses have to focus on once they reach a certain size and revenue number.

“Every company that starts as a ma-and-pop operation has its way of doing things,” he says. “Everybody just knows how to do them. People come to work and they get things done.

“But what you find out as you get bigger, and get new people onboard, they won’t just know how to do things. Or they aren’t all doing the same things the same way. That’s probably the biggest part of it.

“We started looking at our daily processes and putting down in writing how you mix the gas, who is taking care of the maintenance, who is sharpening the blades — and we formalized all that. Those kinds of things really made a difference,” Hewlett adds.

These processes can be formalized with technology and without, Hewlett notes. He adds since he and White have come on board EarthScapes has started using GPS, digital timecards and other technologies. But sometimes fancy new software isn’t needed.

“Something as simple as a massive whiteboard that has all the crews’ names with magnets so if somebody needs to switch, they can move the magnets around and the guys can come in in the morning and quickly see what crew they’re on and what truck they’re on can be helpful,” Hewlett says. “It’s not rocket science. They are simple things for organization. It made a huge difference in people knowing what they’re doing the next morning.”

The owners say EarthScape’s significant growth has also allowed them to move headquarters back to the beach and build a brand-new facility.

“Currently, we are renting a space in Norfolk, which we pay a good bit of money for every month, and we’ve outgrown it pretty significantly,” White says.

“We thought, ‘Why are we paying someone else’s mortgage? Let’s buy our own building, get our own site and develop that.’ So, we bought a piece of land and are getting ready to develop that.”

Determining their next destination

Matt adds this new facility can’t come soon enough.

“We’ve been busting at the seams over there for the last three or four years,” he says. “We plan on breaking ground at the end of the year. It’ll be a two-acre facility. It’s going to allow us to grow up from $5-10 million to that $15 million benchmark easy.

“Our goal is to start bringing in some hardscape or bulk material distribution once we get over there,” Matt adds. “We can capture more revenue and continue to grow organically.”

With a new headquarters in Virginia Beach, Hewlett says the owners see some acquisitions into new markets on the horizon as well.

“It’s coming soon,” he says. “When we merged, we laid out some goals. Financially, we set a goal of $10 million in five years. We’re on track for that. And then we want to be at $30 million in 10 years. We also want to make the Lawn & Landscape Top 100 list and become a recognizable brand in order to expand into other markets in Virginia and maybe even North Carolina.”

Hewlett adds they are all optimistic this dream can take flight because of the hard work their entire team is doing.

“We’ve had several people who’ve been here quite a while and I think that makes us an employer of choice,” he says. “For the most part, guys are happy. And that is a big part of our growth strategy moving forward — to establish an employee base that is first-class.”

The author is associate editor with Lawn & Landscape.