Complete Landsculpture got its start before founder Chris Strempek was even physically able to pull-start a lawn mower. At age 10, his father would pull-start the mower for him at his house and Strempek would push the running mower for up to two blocks. “We were totally OSHA compliant,” he laughs, thinking back to those early days. “But I never cut off a finger or toe. And it also kept me in shape for high school football.”
Forty years later, the company sits at No. 130 on the LM150 list with $27.5 million in revenue in 2024. Strempek has always been a go-getter when it comes to his business. As a youth, when he saw a for-sale sign in a home’s lawn, he’d call the real estate agent and see if he could add the yard to his roster of clients. More often than not, the answer was yes. But at the time, he was only making $5 a lawn.
Strempek had a friend whose dad was in the lawn care business, so as he got older and into college, pursuing a degree in real estate finance, he got a taste of the opportunities that were out there.
“I was surprised at the type of money people would spend on their properties and the types of projects there were in Dallas,” he says.
He convinced his roommate in his second year of college to come with him to knock on some doors to see if they could get a project to do over spring break. When they scored a $50,000 job — his friend was sacking groceries at Tom Thumb for $2.65 an hour — Strempek started to wonder if real estate finance was his true calling, or if it was landscaping.
Do the right thing
Founded in 1985, Complete Landsculpture offers landscape management, residential and commercial design/build, pool construction and remodeling and tree services to its clients in Dallas, North Texas and Oklahoma. The company first expanded into Oklahoma with a satellite office in 1998. In 2008, the company moved into its “dream location” in the heart of Dallas — a 30,000-square-foot office and design center on nine acres, adjoining a 20-acre lake and surrounding parkland. With additional growth, the company most recently expanded with a new 20-acre office in Oklahoma City.
Vice president and co-owner Gene Freeman says he attributes the company’s success to both working hard and trying to do the right thing.
“You have to do the right thing for your clients, and you have to do the right thing for your team. Then everything else takes care of itself,” he says. “And the second thing is, you have to realize this is not an easy thing. You have to put in the work. You have to show up and put up.”
Strempek says he’s always been enamored with large landscape installation jobs, and used to call maintenance a “necessary evil.” Today he sees maintenance as an essential part of the company’s program, set to be the No. 1 growth opportunity in all locations. Maintenance is more than 70-percent of the Oklahoma City branch’s business model. Strempek hopes that 50 percent of Complete Landsculpture’s revenue will soon be from maintenance and maintenance enhancements.
Strempek adds that a key to Complete Landsculpture’s success is finding and hiring the right people. Having a good interviewing process to filter the right kind of people into the company has paid off.
“There are two components to every employee: the technical side, which is your skill set, and then there’s the cultural side, which is how you play in the sandbox with everyone else,” Strempek says.
“We try to learn about the people — what’s important to them, what’s important to their families. You have to see if you can connect with them and learn what’s important to them outside of work.”
When someone is hired at Complete Landsculpture, they get “check-ins” with a supervisor after seven, 30, 60 and 90 days. And regular meetings — from safety reviews with supervisors to cheeseburger
cookouts — allow the team to stay well connected.
“We celebrate birthdays and anniversaries. We take our executive leadership team and our leadership team off-site every year for a goal-setting and team-building event,” Strempek says. “We do an Easter egg hunt every spring. We have a big Christmas celebration and celebrate Thanksgiving together. And we encourage one-on-ones. Get to know someone, don’t just talk about work.”
Freeman says he is excited to see the results of the team they’ve assembled. Each day, more of the young leaders in the company are evolving into bigger positions within Complete Landsculpture.
“We have some great leaders on our executive team, and we have some incredible young talent that’s stepping up and looking for the next level,” Freeman says. “We’re doing some great training and mentoring, and we’re seeing the payoff. Some of these young leaders, they’ll be running the company someday.”
Looking to Grow! 2026
Complete Landsculpture will host GROW! 2026, the annual event hosted by Marty Grunder and The Grow Group. This will be the second time Complete Landsculpture will serve as the host of the event, the first company to serve as a repeat host.
“About 10 years ago, a fleet manager came to me and said, ‘Hey, this group wants to bring in 600 landscape companies to your company to walk through and talk to you about your company … what do you think?’” Strempek recalls. “I wasn’t sure what we’d get out of it, but I thought, maybe we’ll get something, so let’s do it. Now, we’re in an ACE Peer Group. We’ve learned a lot by being with these other group members.”
Strempek and Freeman are excited to see GROW! — which has grown in numbers since the last time they hosted — come back to Dallas. This year, when the event visited Hidden Creek Landscaping, approximately 1,000 people made the trek to Columbus, Ohio, to attend.
Some of the things the company will be talking about will include their goals for the future, how they grow their maintenance division, grow their high-end services and how they can employ artificial intelligence in departments like human resources to get the job done better and faster.
“We’re trying to get to $50 million in the next five to 10 years, and we need to use scalability and replicable processes so we can teach others how to do things the same way,” Strempek says. “Each and every time, the experience with our company has to be the same, because we’re trying to build fanatical customer experiences. We have to be fanatical about our training to consistently deliver a fanatical experience. That takes systems we can replicate with our team members. We’re really diving in right now on our people and our processes.”
Editor’s Note: The 2025 LM150 list is sponsored by Aspire Software, John Deere and Weathermatic.
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