Nate Farley is the founder and CEO of NationScapes. He took his company from three employees to more than 35 and has grown their annual revenue from $600,000 to $4 million in less than four years.
His success in the industry and commitment to providing fulfilling careers for his team earned him the 2024 Young Professional of the Year award.
“It’s beyond wild and humbling to me,” Farley says. “It’s just a reflection of NationScapes and the things we’ve done.”
Unlike many others in the industry, Farley started out as a CPA and then became a commercial banker. He became friends with Tom Tolkacz, owner of Swingle Lawn, Tree & Landscape Care, who opened his eyes to the landscape industry.
“By that point, Pandora’s box was open,” Farley says. “I’d seen the opportunity. I’d seen what was going on in the industry. I set out on my own to figure out what I wanted to do in the industry.”
Farley ended up buying an irrigation business on bizbuysell.com, which is where smaller companies go that aren’t big enough to be brokered or represented. He admits when he bought the company, he didn’t know anything about irrigation at the time. Farley leans on his employees for their technical expertise.
“My employees know that I know very little about sprinklers, but they know when they need something, I’m working behind the scenes to provide equipment or uniforms or do all the other administrative parts of the business,” Farley says.
He was attracted to the industry because he saw the ability to approach the business from the eyes of the consumer.
“I thought we could apply the small amount of tech into basically a no-tech industry and become very efficient,” Farley says. “So that’s what we did. We way over-invested in people and systems and technology so that we could drive a better customer experience.”
He says the biggest key to their growth has been consistency in their employment base, which drives a great experience for their customers. Farley says he has built the business around taking great care of their people, which helps with their retention.
“Just take care of the people that take care of you,” Farley says. “Take care of your employees. If you want to be successful, you have to have an engaged employee base. Everything else we’ve done has been driven y taking care of our people.”
He says it didn’t take him long to figure out that they were losing employees every year due to staff going on unemployment over the winter and becoming disengaged with the business. His solution was to pay the team year-round.
“The way I think about it as a teacher salary in reverse,” Farley says. “We take the winters instead of the summers, and we just know we have to go produce during our season to afford this model.”
To ensure they have recurring revenue, NationScapes has annual programs that renew on January 1. This allows them to be very dense and very efficient with their work. They can get through their existing customers faster than their competitors so when the prime time comes for new inbound customers, they have availability.
Farley say an easy win for them is simply answering the phone when a customer calls.
“We track what our answer rate is, and if we fall below 90%, we know we’re failing in that category,” Farley says. “A lot of it is just being available and having the capacity to take on new customers.”
NationScapes also started growing through acquisitions of other irrigation companies.
“I worked with SBA’s 7(a) program, which was very flexible and allowed us to start acquiring sprinkler businesses and customer lists,” Farley says. “Somewhere along the way, we decided we were more or less going to be complete sprinkler experts. We’re definitely a unicorn in the fact that we have 35 employees and all we do is irrigation – all day, every day – especially in a place like Colorado.”
Farley says part of their culture is going from being a commodity to experiential for customers. Part of this is achieved through connecting with their customers by helping the community. He believes it is the responsibility of businesses that are profitable to find an outlet to give back to the community that supports them.
“I don’t believe our customers hire us because we are the best sprinkler company,” Farley says. “I believe they hire us because we have an elevated customer experience. We’re reliable. We do what we say we’re going to do. We’re good communicators.”
This article will be published in the November/December issue of the magazine. To read more stories from The Edge magazine, click here to subscribe to the digital edition.
