On the Cutting Edge: Hort Major Ahead of the Game with Thriving Landscape Company

By: Jamie Creamer

Like all students who have earned degrees in horticulture from Auburn University for the past two decades, Jamie Brady will have a job when he graduates in August.

Unlike the vast majority of others, though, Brady will be his own boss, running Cutting Edge Lawn Service LLC, the well-established Auburn-based lawn and landscape business that he launched four years ago while trying to figure out what he wanted to do with his life.

Throughout his years growing up in Auburn, Brady earned money in the summers mowing, edging and weed-whacking neighbors' lawns. When, fresh out of high school in 1999, he enrolled for classes at Southern Union State Community College in Opelika, he decided he might as well form a limited liability company and expand his yard-working efforts to help pay his way through school.

At Southern Union, he was "just taking the basic courses, because I had absolutely no clue what I wanted to do," Brady says.

Soon it hit him, though, that what he wanted to do was right there under his nose.

"I realized that I loved working outside and that I enjoyed lawn work and, most of all, that there was a demand for the kinds of services I was offering," Brady says. "That's when I decided to transfer to Auburn and major in horticulture."

In its early days, Cutting Edge was Brady and a couple of other guys doing lawn maintenance only. But the business steadily grew.

Today, Brady has six employees who are divided into two crews: one that handles maintenance, and one that focuses on landscape design and installation. Brady's business is split about 50-50 between the two areas. Cutting Edge has about 60 clients on lawn maintenance contracts, the majority of them year-round agreements. On the design and installation side, Brady primarily works with home-building contractors in landscaping new-home construction.

Even though he had the advantage of growing up in Auburn and, consequently, of knowing many area residents willing to give his company a shot, Brady says his age initially was a negative in the business world.

"It was a problem for some people because they think students aren't responsible, and they just have a hard time trusting students," Brady says. "But you do a good job, and word spreads."

It hasn't been particularly easy, juggling a budding business and school the past four years, but Brady never considered giving either of them up.

"Some people have asked me, why go to college when I've already got a business that's going good," Brady says. "But it was important to me and my parents for me to get a degree, and an even bigger thing is that in all my horticulture classes, I learned things that are going to help me in the long run."

Especially beneficial: his plant identification and his landscape bidding classes.

That he already has a successful business going has given him the chance time and again to contribute to his class sessions.

"My professors a lot of times have referred to me and my situation or asked me to tell about things I've already experienced or how I've handled certain situations," Brady says. "And other students who are wanting to do the same kind of thing-start their own companies-will ask questions about what all's involved and what it's really like."

If there's a negative to the business, it's the long hours required to make it successful.

"This isn't a 40-hour-a-week kind of job," Brady says. "Most weeks are more like 70 and 80 hours, and sometimes seven days a week. But that's the nature of the business."

His first priority after graduating in August will be to evaluate his company and determine where he wants to take it.

"To take on new clients, I know I'm at least going to have to add one more crew next season," Brady says. "Then I've just got to decide how big I want it to get. That's up to me."

The more his business does grow, the more his role changes, he says.

"I spend a large part of my days now meeting with clients and prospective clients," Brady says. "For me, the best part of this business is when they (clients) ask me, 'What can you do for me?' and they want me to sketch something out for them. That, and getting everything installed and then looking at it and saying, 'Hey, we did that.'"

<< TOP