26-Year Landscaping Brand Built on Quality, Not Scale - Kevin Runyon | Everyday Excellence

In this episode of Everyday Excellence, host Todd Baldwin of Everyday Media Group sits down with Kevin Runyon, the owner and operator of Custom Creations Landscaping and Lawn, a design-build landscape company based in the Ozarks of Southwest Missouri. Kevin started mowing yards in high school in the year 2000. He needed money to put himself through college, and a friend mentioned that mowing was a decent way to earn it. He borrowed his brother's push mower, made some flyers, hung them in hair salons around his 3,000-person hometown, and had more yards than he could handle within weeks. Twenty-six years later, he runs a boutique landscaping operation with a consistent 6-month waiting list and no plans to change the model. The Case for Staying Small In an industry where growth is often treated as the only goal, Kevin made a deliberate choice to go the other direction. He was a solo operator for the first 8 to 9 years, added one employee at a time, and never scaled to multiple crews. Today he has one design-build crew, a full office team, and a landscape supply store and garden center on the same property. Kevin explains why reputation is the one thing in business you cannot recover once it is lost, why he would rather drive past a job he did 10 years ago and have it still look perfect, and why being light on people and heavy on equipment keeps a small crew competitive with operations twice its size. What Homeowners Get Wrong About Landscaping Kevin shares one of the most relatable and honest segments in the episode: clients consistently underestimate what professional landscaping actually costs. He describes walking a local zoo through a property that needed roughly $200,000 worth of work, only to hear that their total budget was $3,000 to $4,000. He blames HGTV, partly in good fun, for setting expectations that do not reflect the real cost of materials, labor, or the expertise behind a proper design-build project. Marketing: From Skeptic to Believer Kevin admits he used to feel like he was lighting money on fire when he advertised. Now he is a full believer and tells younger landscapers that they will stagnate without a real advertising budget. His team runs paid Google ads, social media, billboards, radio, and direct mail, and all of it works in his market. He also used two agencies before bringing marketing fully in-house. His experience mirrors what Todd hears constantly at Everyday Media Group: over-promise, under-deliver, and a long contract that makes it expensive to leave. Kevin shares exactly what those conversations looked like and what finally pushed him to build his own team. Todd adds perspective on what it takes to run marketing well from the inside, why lead attribution and tracking are often harder on the client side than people expect, and why good photography and drone footage are some of the most powerful assets a contractor can invest in for a website that actually converts. Chapters 0:00 Introduction 1:00 About Custom Creations Landscaping and Lawn 1:20 How Kevin started with a borrowed lawnmower in high school 5:42 Did he ever think this would become a 26-year business? 7:18 The 10-year mark that changed everything 10:03 Why Kevin chose a boutique model over scaling 14:55 Quality control: type A principles applied to landscaping 17:23 Team size, crew structure, and the landscape supply store 18:40 Light on people, heavy on equipment 22:00 Do customers understand design-build vs. basic landscaping? 25:38 The biggest misconception homeowners have about landscaping costs 30:16 Large projects vs. small jobs: the profit math 33:19 Best lead channels: paid ads, social, billboards, radio, direct mail 36:48 Agency pain points and why Kevin brought marketing in-house Connect with Custom Creations Landscaping and Lawn in the Ozarks, Southwest Missouri. For digital marketing built for home service contractors, visit EverydayMediaGroup.com or connect with Todd Baldwin on LinkedIn. #landscapingbusiness #tradesbusiness #everydayexcellence #designbuild #entrepreneurship #smallbusiness #landscaping #digitalmarketing