At 66, after several years of so-called “retirement,” most would be content to tend their own gardens.
Or perfect the pitching wedge.
David Minor
However, that’s not David Minor, an entrepreneur's entrepreneur, who says his golf game has already peaked.
“I'm just really not very good at golf,” he jokes. “I mean, I got better, but I'm just not that good at golf.”
Instead, Minor is returning to what he's not just good at, but great at — a businessman in the landscape industry where he became a leader and, in many ways, helped shape over five decades of business.
And this endeavor might be his magnum opus.
The Fort Worth native and businessman has launched The Greener Good, believed to be America’s first 100% carbon-neutral commercial landscape company.
The mission of The Greener Good is “to transform commercial landscape services delivery by embracing sustainable practices that protect and enhance the environment.”
It’s the manifestation of an “epiphany” he had concerning the landscape services industry, which, he says, “is really, really bad as it relates to carbon output.”
“I had no idea all these years that I was doing this work,” Minor says by phone. “Climate change wasn’t on hardly anybody's radar screen until about the last 10 years. I mean, some people, yes, but most small businesses, and definitely landscape people, we just didn't think about it that much. But then I started doing some research.”
What he found troubled him.
The Greener Good is Minor’s third venture in the landscape industry.
Minor, a past president of the National Association of Landscape Professionals and a recipient of the National Landscape Professional of the Year award, began his business journey as a 15-year-old student at Southwest High School. He had an itch for entrepreneurship, and he had a lawn mower. He recruited a partner who was 16.
The partner had a driver’s license. Off they went, charging neighbors $6 each to mow their lawns during the summer.
By his senior year in college, Minor was running three crews.
His mentor was Bob Bolen, the longtime mayor of Fort Worth and toy, card, and bike shop entrepreneur.
“He was like the only entrepreneur I knew in Wedgwood,” Minor says.
Minor turned what became Minor’s Landscape Services into an annual revenue generator in the tens of millions and a place on Inc. magazine’s list of the 500 fastest-growing privately held companies in the country. In Fort Worth, the business grew to become the Fort Worth Chamber’s Small Business of the Year. Across the old turnpike, Minor’s ascended to the “Dallas 100,” the list of fastest-growing companies over there.
He even had a program that paid for employees to go to college.
In short, Minor had become the face, at least in this part of the country, of the suddenly booming service sector of the economy in the late 1980s.
At 39, he made a successful exit, accepting a buyout offer from TruGreen-ChemLawn, a brand of ServiceMaster Co. At the time of the sale, the company had three offices and upwards of 300 employees.
In 2000, Minor was named founding director of the Neeley Entrepreneurship Center at TCU, his alma mater. Over 11 years as director, he built a nationally recognized program. In his last year at TCU the entrepreneurship program was named the model undergraduate program in the country. He was awarded the title Founder Emeritus when he retired in 2011.
Minor’s work at TCU was a determining factor in his being selected Fort Worth Inc.’s Supporter of Entrepreneurship Award winner in 2022.
Minor left TCU to devote more time to another endeavor, Landscape Partners. After 15 years, he made another successful exit.
Joining Minor in this enterprise will be Rick Onstott, former president of Landscape Partners, who will serve as CEO of The Greener Good. Patrick Wallace, a well-credentialed landscape and irrigation professional in DFW, has been appointed as operations manager.
The Greener Good was something Minor began working on before the pandemic, which interrupted everything in society, including the evolution of his research and planning.
But post-pandemic, he got it back on the rails.
Minor has been environmentally progressive in the past. At Minor’s Landscape Services, he began an initiative to help conserve landfills. The “Don’t Bag It” program for his Tarrant County residential customers was designed to recycle grass clippings back into lawns to spare the city’s landfills. The company invested in recycling mulching mowers for its work crews. Estimates at the time indicated that the program reduced residential grass clippings deposited in area landfills by 3 million pounds a year.
Still, with The Greener Good Minor was committed to the vision of combating the industry's outsized ills, which, he says, are significant.
For example, he cites research which concluded that operating a commercial lawnmower for just one hour produces as much smog-forming pollution as driving a car 300 miles.
Minor notes that “we operated hundreds of these for an average of 800 hours per year.”
Moreover, running a gas-powered leaf blower for one hour emits as much carbon dioxide as driving a car 1,100 miles, he says.
And, lastly, gas-backpack leaf blowers can reach noise levels of up to 115 decibels, which is comparable to the noise of a jet engine at takeoff.
You’re not telling us anything we don’t know on that one.
The tools of The Greener Good will be electric, including blowers that operate at about 65 decibels. The vehicle fleet will be electric, too, except for some of the bigger vehicles, which have to use gas. That carbon output, however, will be offset with another program.
Furthermore, Minor has formed The Greener Good Charitable Foundation, which is designed to promote sustainability in business and combating climate change.
“This is not about making a bunch of money for me,” says Minor, who stops to add that, naturally, he wants the company to be profitable. He wants a return on his investment and see that his partners do well. “But it's as much of a social mission for me than anything, trying through my business to make a difference in the world.”
It reflects a commitment to the belief that we should strive to leave the world a little better than we found it — a guiding principle of his mentor, Bob Bolen, who inspired him years ago to live by the mantra.
And that, of course, also beats the hell out of the frustration of lipping four-foot putts on the golf course.