Not every contractor wants to be big. There's a reason. Being big means incurring more overhead in the form of employees, equipment and property. Large contractors invariably assume more risk and higher insurance premiums than small contractors and there's that feeling of loss of control. So why grow?

What has your mower done for you lately? That's a fair question for any contractor. The answer for Ruth and Gordon Ewerks, owners of KK Enterprises, Lady Lake, Florida, is, plain and simple, "doubled our business."

When Scott and Company, Bay City, Texas, decided to get into the maintenance business, it took a short cut. Instead of starting from scratch and learning the business on their own, owners Scott and Pam Evans took the advice of an industry expert and visited a firm that already "cracked the maintenance code."

In one way, Kenneth Vaughan, owner of KLV Landscape Services, Inc. is your typical contractor. "From my early childhood, I wanted to mow," he explains. He mowed lawns while growing up in Arlington, Texas. He worked his way through college mowing lawns and when the opportunity arose, he purchased the lawn maintenance business from a landscape contractor... and never looked back.

When Jim Dubberly saw the light, it had nothing to do with the house he was wiring. He was observing a mowing crew tackle the new housing development in which he worked, and thought he could do a better job mowing and improve his lifestyle doing it.

You know a company is serious about its landscape when it has 100 acres of lawn to mow, maintains 25 acres of mulched planting beds, and has planted more than 15,000 trees and shrubs since the mid 1980s.