Aug 17, 2008 - 04:30 AM
By Melissa Mancini
DURHAM -- When Mike Pennington wanted to start his own landscaping company he realized there was going to be a lot of competition.
“If you search ‘Durham landscaping’ you get over 12,000 responses,” he said. “We knew we had to find a niche market.”
So Mr. Pennington and his business partner, Kazim Mohammed, started Holman Landscape Restoration. Their business is based on making old patios, walkways and driveways new again. The company’s focus is taking old interlocking stones and re-laying them to make a new design.
That means customers get charged for minimal materials, just a few stones to replace broken ones or enough stones to make a new border around the perimeter of the old ones. Sometimes the old bricks were laid decades ago. In other situations, they will re-lay bricks when the previous contractor has not done the job the customer wanted.
Either way, they reuse the old materials to make something new.
“Sometimes the original job is a poor use of square footage,” he said. “Sometimes all we need to do is change the direction of the interlock to make it look completely different.”
Often customers can’t believe it’s the same material, he said.
The company has been promoting the interlock recycling program since 2004. They also do new installs, but when stones are not reused for the same project they go to the company’s recycled stone yard until they can be used for another job.
“We keep them and use them for someone else,” he said.
The idea came to him when he saw how many discarded patio stones end up at the dump, he said.
Any stones that are too old or broken to be used get hauled off to a concrete recycler, making as little waste as possible.
Not only does all this recycling keep costs down for the customer, it also means Mr. Pennington does not have to charge his customers anything up front.
“There is no deposit required,” he said. “Customers only pay us when they are satisfied with the work we have done.”
Since they have few initial material costs this business strategy works and helps to gain the customer’s trust, he said. And he adds, he has never had a customer that has not paid.
“I’ve never been burned,” he said. “I’d say that is a good sign.”
For more information about Holman Landscape Restoration visit www.holmanlandscaping.com.
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