As an operations manager at Level Green Landscaping, Jose Aguilar is in charge of 150 commercial properties, oversees five different crews and juggles a mind-boggling list of tasks.
“Today is a different kind of day for me,” he says cheerfully on a recent morning. “I’m jumping on a water truck and I’ll water flowers all day.”
A member of his watering crew called in sick. Jose does whatever it takes to get the job done.
Plus, he really loves flowers.
Ryan Graham grew up helping her dad in his thriving garden, tending hydrangeas, azaleas, tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers.
She’s worked at a vineyard, done research on plant growth regulators at a university greenhouse and worked in a public garden.
See a common green thread?
She did.
Todd Mayberry was a golf pro for seven years before he started his career in landscaping. He made a lot of people happy.
“That little ball isn’t real easy to hit, even though it isn’t moving,” Todd says. “Once you do, whether you’re a 50-year-old man, a 25-year-old woman or an 8-year-old kid, the smile is the same.”
One of his students had never hit below 90. After a lesson with Todd, who helped him straighten out his swing, he hit an 84.
“That’s immediate job satisfaction,” Todd says.
Now, working in two roles at Level Green Landscaping, he’s still making people happy on nice green grass.
If you’re one of Ryan Rimshaw’s landscaping customers, you’ll get to know each other pretty well.
But there's a lot to discover, so here’s a shortcut.
He collects cars, and has two Jeeps painted exactly like the Jeeps in “Jurassic Park.”
He owns five dogs. He built a train track around his house with a working train you can ride. The dogs love it.
He rode dirt bikes professionally, until one day he crushed a disc in his tailbone — the hazard of doing jumps on a dirt bike at 100 miles per hour.
And if you want to talk landscaping, the Level Green account manager studied it for eight years and owned his own landscaping company.
Wayne Taylor started his landscaping career at age 14, when he and a couple friends got into the yard work business.
They hauled their gear around in a little yellow truck, and came up with a pretty great company name: Banana Landscaping.
“That’s when I got the bug,” Wayne says. “I realized I loved working outside.”
A lot has happened since then, from life as a U.S. Marine to world travel to six kids and a spider-eating cat.
But Wayne, an account manager at Level Green Landscaping, still has the bug.
Mario Argeta Perez shows up to work every morning at Level Green Landscaping a half hour before he has to be there.
Ask him why he likes the place so much and he talks about “convivir.” It’s one of those Spanish words that’s tough to accurately translate to English.
But it basically means living with others in harmony.
It’s what everybody says about working at Level Green: It’s like a family.
And Mario is like that cousin everybody has who’s always smiling.
Warning: This story is about to make you really hungry.
Two things about Gabe Hohman: He’ll never show up late. He doesn’t consider failure an option.
Brett Hardy started mowing lawns when he was 9, and hasn’t looked back.
Well, he looked away for a minute and tried his hand at construction. But it wasn’t for him.
“I always liked being outside and getting my hands dirty,” says Brett, an account manager at Level Green Landscaping.
If you can’t find Marion Delano, he might be away. Really far away.
