A flower garden along a parkway in Evanston. Photo: I'm nonpartisan / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
Buy The Yard Inc., the family-run supplier of bulk landscape materials in southeast Evanston, marked its 20th anniversary in March 2014, just ahead of the spring planting season.
The business grew out of an earlier venture. In 1964, Evanston native Jim Gannon started a small landscaping and snow-removal company that became recognizable around town for its burnt-orange trucks. As the work grew, Gannon bought property on Main Street in southeast Evanston to store equipment and materials such as mulch, soil and compost.
Demand for those materials came from two directions: professional landscape contractors and homeowners with a yard project and no easy way to haul a cubic yard of anything. Gannon saw an opening, and in 1994 he and his wife, Sandy, opened Buy The Yard as a retail operation. Listings for the company describe it as a family-owned, Evanston-based supplier of bulk materials, with pickup and delivery.
A second generation takes over
The shop became a family operation almost immediately. Sandy Gannon handled the office. Their daughters, Laura Weldon and Kathy Wicks, ran the storefront. Weldon had worked in accounting and Wicks had been an elementary school teacher, and both were weighing the demands of full-time jobs against raising young children. Sharing the job at the yard worked for both of them and for the business.
About a decade in, the sisters bought the company from their parents, who retired and moved to Arizona. By 2014 Weldon and Wicks had been running the place for years.
Service as the pitch
In a market where the product is largely a commodity, since mulch is mulch to many buyers, the owners said they competed on service. They described a routine that is simple but not universal: mailing a thank-you card after each delivery, then following up by phone to ask whether the order arrived as expected. The sisters also spent time with customers on which material suited a particular project, and said they had trained the office staff, the delivery driver and the yard crew to treat customers the same way.
They traced the habit to childhood, when business calls came to the family home at all hours and their parents answered them professionally.
For a yard that began with snow removal, the calendar has always run in both directions: plowing in winter, then mulch and topsoil from spring on. Twenty years in, the business was still, by its owners’ account, run by the family that started it.
Daniel Okafor covers business, startups and the Innovators section for The Evanston Edge.
