In commemoration of this year's Veterans Day, Lawn & Landscape is highlighting two Navy veterans who also ended up landing on our issue's cover this month — Ben Hewlett and Trey White.
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.
Despite the tough times, Lawn-Aid got to the point where they were doing just under $300,000 in revenue. But 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 (Eldredge) and Josh (Eldredge) 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.’”
What happened next is how EarthScapes became a $7 million company led by the Eldredge twins, Hewlett and White. Read all about it in our November cover story, Twin Engine Takeoff, that's live now.
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