Nolan Gore
Owner/General Manager, Top Choice Lawn Care, Austin, Texas
1. What would you like readers to know about Top Choice Lawn Care and how did you get into the business?
We’re a residential maintenance company — mow, blow and go. We’ve currently got 1,733 routine maintenance (customers) for just mowing, and then we have a whole bunch of different packages we also offer. Our bread and butter are mows, but on top of that, we sell all sorts of services up until design/build. My dad is in the business, so I grew up running around a landscape business. He got a phone call when this business was small and looking for a new level. I was in the Marine Corps at the time when he called me and asked, ‘Do you want to put your life savings into a little business that is risky?’ I said, ‘That sounds like a really great idea!’ My wife and I moved back, and we’ve been going for 7 1/2 years since then. It’s great, it’s been fun and challenging. I fortunately have a great business partner who makes this process a lot easier. He is hugely important to our success.
2. What did you learn in the Marine Corps that you apply to your job today?
Stress management. The standards of stress are totally different from the military. A really bad day here — God willing — someone isn’t dead. I was 25, 26 and I was running a hundred guys overseas — I was telling them what to do, but I was also telling them when they could eat, when they could call their girlfriend and when they could sleep. When I came into this business at 27, it wasn’t strange for me to have guys older than me working for me. It wasn’t strange for me to hold people accountable and to recognize and respect their level of competence.
3. Do you have a family?
I married my high school sweetheart. We had our first kid, a girl, while I was in the Marine Corps. We’ve had three sons since then. Ages 8, 6, 4 and 1. Our fourth was born extraordinarily premature … like, four months. He was in the hospital for five months, that was last year. It’s still an extraordinarily challenging situation for our family. I have much more empathy for suffering now. I understand difficulties in life in a different way than I ever have before.
4. What is your favorite tool to get the job done?
The old iPhone. It’s inexpensive, and from an execution perspective, what you can do with these things is wild. I have 20 crews out there today, and I’m able to communicate with all of them individually or collectively. I write a lot of my marketing on my phone because it’s so accessible. I do tons of voice notes to myself. I listen to a lot of books on it. There’s just not an ROI that’s better than the iPhone.
5. Do you have a most memorable day at work?
You remember the bad days. The days people got hurt. The big arguments we’ve all had with our partners. But it’s more fun to talk about the funny things. We recently had a drunk driver drive up the ramp of our box truck, and then hide in the bushes.
No one got hurt, and she was arrested before I got there. We had a guy use a customer’s two trash cans as his personal men’s room. That customer — and that employee — are no longer with us. We had a customer call and explicitly cancel her service because Trump was elected president. That was her reason! Wherever you sit on the political spectrum, that’s just funny. You see the best and the worst of humans when you work in this business this long.
