Podcast: How Kevin Runyon Built a 26-Year Landscaping Business on Quality Over Scale
When Kevin Runyon borrowed his brother’s push mower in the year 2000, he figured landscaping would be a stopgap. Something to get him through college. Twenty-six years later, he runs Custom Creations Landscaping and Lawn out of Southwest Missouri’s Ozarks with a crew that consistently stays six months booked out and clients who have been on the roster since day one.
Kevin recently sat down with Todd Baldwin on the Everyday Excellence podcast to walk through what it actually takes to build a landscaping business that lasts. What came out of that conversation was a candid look at the business philosophy, marketing decisions, and hard-earned lessons behind a company that has stayed intentionally small and quietly become one of the most respected names in its market.
From Borrowed Mower to Boutique Landscape Company
Kevin was a senior in high school looking for well-paying work to put himself through college. After striking out with commercial construction companies that were not hiring, a friend mentioned mowing yards on the side. In a town of about 3,000 people, the client base was small but real: elderly homeowners who could no longer manage their own yards, and a handful of business owners who paid to have it done.
He made flyers, pinned them in local hair salons, placed a small newspaper ad, and had more accounts than he could handle faster than he expected. He borrowed his brother’s push mower to start, trading free mowing of his brother’s lawn for the use of it. A family member offered a credit card so he could buy a riding mower and make the payments. About a year in, he bought out a small mowing company in Springfield, the larger city nearby, picking up two additional mowers, an old Chevy pickup, a trailer, and a growing route.
What shifted the direction was a habit Kevin developed on every job. He would mow a lawn and find himself mentally redesigning the landscape around it. A planting island here. A different entry treatment there. He started pitching those ideas to clients. Some said yes. That is how a mowing business became a landscape design-build company.
The Boutique Model: Intentionally Small, Six Months Booked Out
Today, Custom Creations runs one design-build crew, a full office staff, and a landscape supply store and garden center on a shared facility. The full team is about ten people. Kevin has had every reason to add more crews and grow the footprint. He has chosen not to.
“I made a decision that we’re just going to keep doing what we’re doing,” he told Todd Baldwin on the podcast. “All my guys are making a good living wage, everybody’s happy, we have nice equipment, and the company is healthy. There’s no reason to blow this thing up.”
That is not reluctance. It is a deliberate calculation. Kevin is the designer, the estimator, and physically on-site nearly every day. When a homeowner has struggled with a drainage problem for ten years, he is expected to walk the property and identify a solution within the first few minutes on-site. That level of expertise does not transfer easily, and he has found it is nearly impossible to hire a true replacement in his rural market. Keeping the business boutique means keeping the quality consistent.
He has also found that the bottom-line math favors restraint. Smaller jobs often generate a better net profit per week than sitting on one large project for months. “I price them all the same,” he said, “but at the end of the day, your daily take home is better on the small ones.” Todd echoed that point from his own experience running Everyday Media Group: chasing top-line revenue without watching the bottom line is one of the most common and painful mistakes younger entrepreneurs make.
Quality Control as a Business Strategy, Not a Personality Quirk
Kevin is Type A by his own description, and it shows up in how every part of the operation runs. The shop is clean and spotless. Materials are labeled and stored in fixed locations. Every crew member knows where every tool is at all times. He acknowledges that this takes some adjustment for new hires, but he stops apologizing for the standard once people see what it produces.
“We’re saving a ton of time just by not looking for things,” he explained. Organized systems and clean processes mean the crew is not wasting minutes or hours tracking down equipment or sourcing materials mid-job. That efficiency compounds over time. Combined with a philosophy of being light on labor and heavy on equipment, Kevin’s four or five person crew can keep pace with or outperform a competing crew of eight to ten people.
His quality threshold for a finished job is simple: if it looks great to him, it will exceed what the client expected. He is personally on-site for about 95 percent of all jobs. When he brings a client out to see the finished work, the goal is a genuine reaction, not a polite one. “Sometimes the wife will have tears in her eyes. ‘This is so much more beautiful than I expected.'” That kind of outcome does not happen by accident. It is the result of a standards-first culture built from the top down.
The Real Cost of Landscaping: Closing the Expectation Gap
One of the most revealing moments in Kevin’s conversation with Todd came from a consult he had completed earlier that same day. He had walked a property at a small local zoo in Southwest Missouri. The staff wanted to completely transform their entrance, something that would genuinely catch the eye and draw visitors in. When Kevin asked about the budget, they told him three to four thousand dollars. His estimate for the full scope of what they described was around $200,000.
This kind of gap is not unusual. Kevin does not blame homeowners or property managers for it. “It’s not their industry and they don’t understand. You don’t know what you don’t know.” But he does point to what he calls the HGTV effect as a contributing factor. Home improvement programs regularly show complete landscape renovations with material cost figures that simply do not reflect reality. Quality plant material is expensive. Stone alone ranges from around $45 per ton on the low end to well over $600 per ton for premium varieties. When television glosses over those numbers, it shapes expectations in ways that follow contractors into every client meeting.
Kevin’s approach when a budget does not match the scope is to find what can be done within the available range and use it as an entry point. A smaller completed project builds trust and often opens the door to a bigger conversation about future phases. “Sometimes you can turn them around,” he said. “Sometimes it just needs education.”
Marketing a Landscape Business: What Kevin Gets Right
Kevin has been navigating marketing decisions for long enough to remember when yellow pages ads and newspaper buys were the only real options, and television spots were a stretch investment. He watched the shift to digital change everything about how landscape companies reach new clients, and he has built a mix that reflects both where attention lives now and what still works in his specific market.
The Multi-Channel Mix That Still Works
Custom Creations now runs marketing through an in-house manager who works with other office staff to cover a fairly wide range of channels. Social media is active. Google paid ads are part of the strategy. But alongside the digital work, Kevin still runs billboards and radio spots, and he continues doing targeted direct mail campaigns.
Direct mail surprises some people. But Kevin has tracked the results and the response is real. He attributes it partly to the character of his market, where a segment of the audience is more likely to respond to something physical than to a digital ad. The lesson here is not that every landscape company should run mailers. It is that channel selection should follow what actually converts in a given market rather than what is trending in marketing circles.
Kevin also made a point that Todd flagged as important for any trade business doing visual work: drone photography. Custom Creations has started capturing aerial footage of completed projects, and the before-and-after documentation it produces is a significant content asset. Todd was direct about it: authentic photography of real work outperforms stock imagery in conversion rate optimization. When someone lands on a website and sees actual finished projects from the company they’re considering hiring, that is a fundamentally different trust signal than a generic stock image of a manicured lawn.
The Agency Pain Points Kevin Experienced Firsthand
Before building an in-house marketing function, Kevin worked with multiple outside agencies over the years. His experience reflects a pattern that Todd Baldwin and the team at Everyday Media Group hear consistently from trade business owners across the country.
The first problem was accountability. Agencies promised results and delivered reports that were vague enough to make performance difficult to evaluate. “Nothing really changed. It felt like we were throwing money down a hole,” Kevin said. The second problem was contractual lock-in. When performance fell short and Kevin wanted a direct conversation about it, he was told the contract still had months left. That cycle repeated across multiple agencies before he decided to bring the function in-house.
Todd acknowledged that this reputation problem in the digital marketing agency space is real. “There were a lot of bad apples. They over-promised and under-delivered and charged too much.” The answer at Everyday Media Group has been to build the work around transparency: tracking every lead back to its source channel, whether that is Google paid search, organic rankings, social platforms, or increasingly, AI-driven referral traffic from tools like ChatGPT.
Why Lead Tracking Changes the Entire Marketing Conversation
For landscape and trade businesses, lead tracking can sound like a technical detail. In practice, it is what separates marketing that builds confidence from marketing that generates anxiety about the spend.
Todd was candid about the challenge on both sides. “Our biggest challenge is getting someone on the client side to log into the same portal and actually tell us what came out on the other end. Was that lead a $5,000 job or a $50,000 job? It’s a big difference.” Without that data, even accurate attribution of where a lead came from cannot tell the full return-on-investment story. With it, the conversation shifts from “is this working” to “how much more should we put toward what’s working.”
Kevin’s in-house marketing manager sits inside the business rather than reporting in from outside. That proximity makes it easier to close the loop between marketing activity and actual revenue outcomes, which is exactly the kind of visibility that makes good marketing decisions possible.
What Kevin Would Tell Someone Starting a Landscaping Business Today
When Todd asked Kevin what advice he would offer to someone just starting out, a few consistent principles came through.
Start before you feel ready. Kevin began with no mower of his own and a market he was not sure would support him. He borrowed what he needed, charged what the work was worth, and learned by doing. Preparation is valuable, but it does not substitute for the clarity that comes from actual experience in the field.
Do not outgrow your checkbook. Kevin used that phrase directly, and it applies to landscaping businesses at every stage. Strong top-line revenue can mask serious cash flow problems, especially when growth requires equipment purchases, payroll expansion, and project financing ahead of client payments. Managing margins and liquidity carefully is what keeps a business standing through growth phases.
Invest in advertising with discipline. Kevin is direct with younger operators who ask him about this: “Don’t be irresponsible with it, but don’t be afraid to spend some advertising dollars. You definitely need to allocate some money or you’re just going to stay stagnant.” Word of mouth is not a growth strategy on its own. It sustains what is already built. It does not build what is not there yet.
Share what you know. Kevin remains accessible to other landscapers, including those early in their careers, and treats the landscape industry’s knowledge base as something that should be shared rather than guarded. Todd reflected the same posture: there is enough business for everyone, and the more you give, the more tends to come back.
The Long Game in the Landscaping Business
Kevin Runyon’s story is not a rapid-scale story. It is a compounding one. Twenty-six years of showing up personally, training crews to a high standard, investing in equipment that makes the work more efficient, building a reputation one completed project at a time, and making clear-eyed decisions about how large to grow and why.
The marketing conversation he had with Todd on Everyday Excellence is worth listening to for any trade business owner thinking through their own approach. The agency frustrations he described are common. The lead tracking gap he touched on is one of the most persistent friction points in the relationship between marketing teams and the businesses they serve. And the value of owning and producing original photography of finished work is something Kevin is actively building into his own content strategy, to real effect.
If you are running a trade business and thinking seriously about your digital marketing, reach out to the team at Everyday Media Group. Whether you are trying to get a clearer picture of what is actually driving leads or building a strategy from scratch, the conversation starts with understanding your market and your goals, not a one-size-fits-all package.
Listen to the full episode of Everyday Excellence wherever you get your podcasts, and visit everydaymediagroup.com to learn how Everyday Media Group helps home service and trade businesses grow their digital presence.
