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Construction Industry Poll

Contractor of the Year

Contractor of the Year finalist: EcoTurf, Raleigh, North Carolina

June 12, 2007 |

There was a time when traveling around the country building golf courses was fun work for Andy Smith. Raised on a tobacco farm in North Carolina, Smith grew up working on and around power equipment but figured out early in life farming was essentially a break-even proposition.

Working in various real estate sales and development jobs was profitable, but unfulfilling. “I was selling real estate on this golf course being built and slowly began to take a more active role in the actual construction of the course,” Smith recalls. Hurricane Hugo had blown through South Carolina and Smith helped the construction crew clean up and rush to meet its completion deadline in the aftermath of the storm.

“I realized I missed being outside,” he says, “and really enjoyed the idea of seeing a project through from beginning to end and changing the landscape to meet a developer’s vision. Moreover, there was a level of satisfaction in this work that I’d never felt before.”

Fired up by his new calling, Smith quit his job and went to work for Landscapes Unlimited out of Lincoln, Nebraska, running a crew building golf courses all over the United States. “I’d stay somewhere three months to a year, building courses,” he recalls. “I did that for seven years and learned a lot, including the growing importance of erosion control on these jobs. New government regulations were coming down the pike all the time and we were always scrambling to meet them with new tools and technologies.”

As much as he enjoyed building golf courses, over time Smith began to feel the desire to own his own business. He was winding up work on a golf course in Raleigh when a friend asked him if he was interested in speaking to an acquaintance about a business opportunity. The timing was perfect. Although he’d decided to leave the golf course business, he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do yet.

Seizing an opportunity
So Smith met Clayton Phillis. A Pennsylvania native and graduate of Penn State University, Phillis had worked for a well-digging company after finishing school. “I was one of those kids who was always fascinated by construction work,” he says, “and knew I didn’t want to spend my life working indoors.” Like Smith, Phillis wanted his own business.

Phillis started out in North Carolina working for a landscape company. He soon became friends with his boss, and the two of them starting talking about businesses they could start together. Then, a salesman visited to demo a hydro-seeding machine. “We looked at it and realized nobody in Raleigh was using them. All the other environmental contractors were using straw seeders. But this unit mixes wood mulch, fertilizer and seed together before spraying it outward in a thick cover with better retention.”

Phillis’ boss sold his lawn care business and the two partners pooled $13,000 to buy a hydro-seeder and founded EcoTurf. “It was just the two of us,” Phillis remembers. “Our wives – who both worked – were really supporting us in the beginning.”