There are not many high school baseball fields around the country that look and play like the one in Nitro, West Virginia. Brandon Matthew Sneed Field hosts more than 100 baseball games a year and truly sets the bar high for other baseball fields in the state. Fitting enough, the field is home to one of the state’s top high school baseball teams, and it has become a showcase for the community of 35,000 residents.

When four warehouses located in Regina, Saskatchewan picked up their stakes and left for Calgary, Alberta, Dan Todd not only lost his job, he lost nearly any chance of finding a new one. He and wife Shelley had two choices: They could move to Calgary and Dan could have his old job back, or they could stay behind and Dan could try something different. They chose to stay.

Walker Mower owners pride themselves in having a machine that does more than mow a lawn; Walkers, they say, actually “manicure” a lawn. As a manufacturer, we like to hear that, yet at the same time we understand that the way an operator uses the mower can mean the difference between an averagelooking lawn and a spectacular one.

What’s the secret to growing a successful lawn maintenance company? For Tony Lowe and Chase Hall, owners of Top Notch Lawns in Montgomery, Alabama, the answer is quality. Deliver it, and customers will come.

One of the first ways people like to measure a business is “how big are you?” or “how many employees do you have?” The size question follows popular thinking: “the bigger the business, the more successful the business.” After 44 years in the manufacturing business, we have never been a big business, so we don’t know about being big. However, we have worked with many different sizes of businesses, and our experience says that a lot of success has been found in small businesses as well as big.

Robert Lodge wasn’t in the lawn maintenance business nine years ago when a neighbor asked Lodge to mow his front lawn. Lodge worked full-time in the sheriff ’s department. Yet, he mowed the front lawn as requested, and, as he walked away, the neighbor asked him to mow the back yard, too.