Richard Rodriguez
Nobody had ever been more thrilled to sit behind a desk situated in the guest bedroom of their own home than Winter Moore was in September 2014.
Today, Moore is the founder and CEO of the wildly successful WinterGreen Synthetic Grass, the Fort Worth-based company that’s created an enormous footprint in the metroplex turf scene. The company increasingly sells its unique brand of synthetic turf to other businesses, but its primary footprint is residential, which Moore says is a huge untapped segment of the sprawling metroplex housing market.
But before Moore ever created one of Fort Worth’s fastest-growing companies, he was still figuring out the direction he wanted to take in life.
For as long as he can remember, Moore had wanted to own his own business. Gifted with a natural entrepreneurial spirit, Moore’s only problem is that he was never quite sure which business he wanted to start. The longest job Moore had ever held was selling paint for Sherwin-Williams. He opened his own Sherwin-Williams store in Burleson in 2009 and briefly considered opening his own paint company.
But Moore continually ran up against Sherwin-Williams’ corporate atmosphere. And it didn’t sit well.
“You had to go through 27 strings of management to get to someone who is a decision-maker,” Moore said. “I was a college dropout, so they’re all about hiring kids with college degrees, and it definitely gave me a chip on my shoulder.”
Moore quit Sherwin-Williams and ended up working for a pest control company, crawling into attics and crawl spaces to kill bugs. In the meantime, he was also a server at Ruth’s Chris Steak House to “help get ends to meet,” he says.
During his time at the pest control company, Moore went to a job at a home in Southlake to treat a customer’s house. It was here that he first saw synthetic turf for the first time in a residential setting. It blew him away, and it was at that moment that his entrepreneurial spirit latched onto his future calling for the first time.
“I saw turf, and it kind of fits my personality,” Moore said. “To feel accomplished, I like to see visual results. The instant change in a yard is perfect. I knew when I started seeing that, that that’s what I wanted to do.”
In September 2014, Moore decided to run toward the roar, leave his pest control job, and take the leap into his entrepreneurial dreams.
Sometimes the safest place to be is the one that feels the scariest. Lions — with their intimidating teeth and deafening roars — are designed to provoke fear. But the real danger lies with the smaller, quieter lionesses. In the animal kingdom, the lion’s job is to roar and send prey scattering away from the startling noise — right into the path of the waiting lionesses, the true hunters. If gazelles knew to run toward the frightening sound, they would have a better chance of survival. The roar doesn’t represent the real danger.
Likewise, humans sometimes have an instinctive desire to shy away from pursuits that look and sound scary. But often, running toward those challenges and conflicts is the best (or only) way to grow and meet our goals. In business, those who run from the deafening noise never reach their full potential, while those who turn and face the fear thrive.
This was Moore’s run-toward-the-roar moment as he sat at his desk in his home reveling in the fact that he was finally chasing a dream that he could own. Alongside his wife, Ashley, Moore founded WinterGreen Synthetic Grass in September 2014, and the early days were lean. Both Moore and Ashley kept their jobs at Ruth’s Chris until about a year into their company’s life cycle, only then feeling secure enough to dive entirely into the business.
And dive they did.
Moore believes his business savvy is tinged with a dose of good timing. At the time his company was born, the DFW market was extremely lightly saturated with turf options. Moore is quick to point out that the perception of turf is as a solution for commercial sports fields, but for individual residences? The idea had not taken full root in the area. More common in Arizona and California, turf for homes isn’t nearly as common in the metroplex.
In that sense, Moore was out ahead of the market. That’s part of the reason why, over the past three years, WinterGreen Synthetic Turf’s growth has exploded. The company has grown more than 800% over the past three years, and its plans of expansion are well underway. And, much to the surprise of some, the company has done it by selling the majority of its turf to residences, not to businesses.
Moore is proud of the leaps his company has made externally, but he’s even more proud of the internal strides it’s made to build the right way.
“I had some pretty rough bosses, and it must have been early enough in my teens and 20s that I didn’t want to be that. I’m as close to a friend as I can be for being a boss. It’s about being fair, being kind, being professional … I would say that’s the biggest thing for me, is creating an environment that’s fun, because it’s hard work.”