A League of Her Own

What started as a way for Joan Schepis' sons to make extra cash has grown into a thriving landscaping business.

Joan Schepis remembers when her four sons used to look for ways to make some extra spending money. She would send them out to mow the neighbors’ lawns in their Chesterfield, Mo. neighborhood. She bought a lawnmower, passed out flyers and sent the boys out with the pickup truck.

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Joan Schepis, owner and operator of The Greenwood Group, works on site with a crew.

“They brought in under $20,000 to 25,000 at time,” she says. “But that was fine--it was for them.”

Word caught on about her family’s fledgling side business. Eight years later, Schepis finds herself running less of a side project and, instead, a lawn care business that is poised to bring in more than $1 million for the year.

The Greenwood Group became officially incorporated in 2003 as a woman-owned company.

“I didn’t have any employees in 2003,” she recalls. “I worked with family and some friends. We made maybe $50,000 that year. Basically, we decided there was a niche for this landscape maintenance we were performing.”

As the momentum was building up in 2004, her husband, Peter, who has been in the commercial side of landscaping for 30 years, found out he had a brain tumor. Three months later, he was fired from his job.

He recovered and began working for Joan in 2005. She also brought in H-2B workers that year and Pete, a son and others began their largest effort yet to gain as many customers as possible.

The Greenwood Group’s revenue went from $50,000 to 100,000 in 2004 to $500,000 in 2005. This year she’s expecting the company will make $1.5 million, and that’s mostly due to their seven main commercial accounts.

Through all of this, Schepis continued to be employed as an interior plant maintenance technician. It was only less than a year ago that Schepis finally quit that job.

“I was trying to keep both sides going,” she says. “They needed me more during the day. I was running all over the place. This is my main concern now. I’m here 24/7.”

The Greenwood Group is a full-service residential and commercial landscaping and maintenance company.

“We want to be a one-stop shop,” she says. “We want someone to pick up the phone and when they say, can you do X, Y and Z?  We say, yes ma’am, I can. We do Mowing, flower installation, and design. There’s not a job we won’t do. We do installation, irrigation, and we do snow removal. I’m not limiting myself as to what we can do.”

Her service area includes western St. Louis County, near where she lives and works.

“We do have a shop, but the office is still out of my home,” she says. “My whole lower level is an office area. I do a lot of work out of here.”

She’s especially proud the company landed the University of St. Louis-Missouri campus account. She hopes to expand further west, where she sees the most growth.

Schepis is confident now that the company’s name is out there. The uniqueness of being a female-owned landscaping business helps to get the company noticed. Schepis says that factor doesn’t matter to most customers, but some find it to be refreshing.

“Property managers like to speak with me a lot,” she says. “A lot of property managers feel the woman connection is favorable, so they want to give the business to me.  I’m basically at the desk, but I still get out there and monitor jobs.”

Schepis also has an 18-year-old daughter, Stephanie, who she hopes will take an interest in the company. “I want to get her behind the desk,” she says.

Besides Joan, there are two women working in the office and one female crew member out in the field.

But the main reason her company gains clients, she says, has more to do with the competency of her crew and the end product.

“I trust the crew leaders and account managers for each division of work,” she says. “I’ve got great skilled individuals I can trust to get the job done.”

In fact, it was her dependable staff that made her decision to quit her other job an easy choice to make. She realized they would help the company to thrive, eliminating her need for a backup job.

“Sometimes you don’t know if quitting is the right avenue to take,” she says. “I’m confident my decision was the right one. The people under me make me confident enough to do that.”

It helps that two of these crew members are family. Her oldest son, Pete Jr., 31, is a superintendent in charge of running operations and her youngest son, Nick, 23, is a superintendent of mowing operations.

She’s a member of the Professional Landcare Network and puts high importance on getting her crews certified.

“They’re really into the quality of work we produce,” she says. “That goes back to being certified. Those guys go through rigorous training. It’s quality control; we want to get out and provide the best work we can.”

If Schepis wasn’t trying to promote quality work within the green industry, she doesn’t know what she’d be doing.

“I want to beautify everything,” she says. “It’s been my whole life.”