On the Job: He's Planted a Business and Watched It Grow

John Lock used to be in the corporate world, sitting behind a desk.

Today, he might be on your front lawn, in your neighbor’s backyard or on the grounds of the condo association down the street, mowing grass, trimming hedges, planting trees or coming up with a new landscape design.

He’s much happier now, having traded his briefcase for a shovel and his tie for a comfortable pair of work boots.

After eight years as west coast regional manager for a paramedical company in San Diego– sometimes having to be on the road three to four days a week– Lock decided to return to his roots and start his own business, .

Lock, who’s lived in Santee about 15 years, says returning to a lawn-care and landscaping business “sort of feels like you’ve come back home in a way.”

“It’s nice to be able to create a vision with (clients) and when it’s all said and done, to actually step back and see what you’ve accomplished,” says Lock, who ran a similar business for five years in Colorado. “That is really difficult to see in the corporate world. At the end of the day I’m not sure I could ever look back and see what I accomplished.

“(There) it’s the same problems, over and over again. (But) if I take a dirt lot or a dead lot and completely overhaul it, to see what it looks like when you’re done, well, there’s a lot of satisfaction there.”

Years in the Army

Lock grew up in Georgia and got up-close-and-personal with the 3.5 acres his family owned, doing whatever work was needed alongside his six brothers and sisters. It was something he liked, something he continued as “a hobby” as an adult.

“I guess you could say it was sort of bred into me,” says Lock, 48.

But Lock took a long, winding road– from Georgia to Germany to the Middle East to Colorado and then California– to open his own business in Santee.

Lock joined the Army and stayed in 12 years. He was considering making it his career until an injury forced him to take a medical retirement. He was stationed in Germany much of that time, in armor, before being assigned as a driver and security for a general. It was in that role that he served in Kuwait and Iraq with Operation Desert Storm, which concluded in early 1991.

He recalls the interesting nature of his work in Desert Storm, assigned to a division commander. He also remembers the sad sight of hungry children, barefoot, begging for food, and the skies turned black by the smoke from the Kuwaiti oil fields that had been ignited by the retreating Iraqi forces.

“That was a really strange situation, knowing it was 10 or 11 in the morning and it’s normally sunny, and you have to have your headlights on and a flashlight to get around,” Lock says. “At times it was pretty unbearable.”

Shortly thereafter, Sgt. Lock left the Army and started a landscaping business in Colorado. At the time, he says, he wanted to go into business for himself to get away from the “barking of orders and constant instructions” of military life.

But working outdoors in Colorado Springs, where he lived, isn’t always conducive to a guy working on yards, so he eventually decided to move to a warmer clime.

“It could be brutally cold there,” he says.

That’s when he took a detour into the business world. It was a good job, he says, but one he had to get out of.

“I told my wife I really had had enough,” he says. “I wanted to get back to what I really loved doing, which was the landscape and lawn care.”

Residential and commercial work

So, 14 months ago, Lock’s Lawn Care was born.

Today, Lock drives his truck and trailer all over the East County– and from Chula Vista in the south to Carmel Mountain in the north– doing yard work for single residences, homeowners associations and commercial properties.

About 60 percent of his jobs are residential. He and his crew – he uses two people on a regular basis and two other workers during busy times– do lawn maintenance, trimming, planting, irrigation-system work, pruning and large-scale projects such as yard re-designs. For commercial properties, they tend to the landscaping and parking lots. On commercial properties, some of the work is done after hours and on weekends.

He says he’s been pleasantly surprised how well the business has done over a short span. He thinks part of that might be due to a good Internet advertising strategy, and also word-of-mouth based on the work he’s done.

“Our motto is ‘second to none,’ so we try to be a step above the typical blow-and-go guys when it comes to lawn care,” he says. That means they’ll do extras on each call, such as weed control, trimming and spraying.

The days can be long (nine or 10 hours or more), with several jobs a day. While he’s involved in much of the hands-on work, he’s also constantly thinking about the next project, the next week and the week after that. His cell phone and his schedule book are always with him.

“My mind stays pretty busy with planning and trying to maximize the day,” he says.

He likes to get an early start, but not always.

“There’s still a family side to this,” he says. “I couldn’t do it without them, so I try to support them. I try to make things work where I can help drop off the kids at school.”

The family includes his wife, Sandy, who works at Grossmont Hospital, son Casey, 14, and daughters Erin and Kristin, both 16. Lock has three adult children as well, two in Colorado and one in the Army in Louisiana.

Away from work, he tries to carve out as much time as he can to be with his kids and their activities, Erin and Kristin in volleyball, and Casey in floor hockey, baseball and softball.

Between work and family, what little time is left is used on hot, redemptive showers after a long day of physical labor and finding some comedies on TV at night so he can get “that laugh at the end of the day.”

Though Lock intends to run the business for a long time, he smiles as he notes he can feel the work in his muscles more than he could in his younger days.

The upside to getting out from behind a desk is his overall health and fitness is better these days. Getting outside and being active is what he likes.

But some aches and pains come along with it.

“Those will probably never go away,” he says.

His own boss (to a point)

As Lock sits in a Santee early on a weekday morning, getting ready for his first job of a long day, he says he’s glad he decided to go back to what he enjoys.

“It’s worked out,” he says. “I’m very pleased.”

But he knows that as an independent contractor, he and his business have to constantly measure up and sell themselves in a competitive world, especially when homeowners and businesses are watching their expenses.

“You take care of that customer, that’s the bottom line,” he says. “My business is the customer. So many people like to think, ‘Oh my God, you’re self-employed, you can work when you want, do what you want, pay yourself what you want.’ But they don’t understand that’s not the case. I might be my own boss, but I have almost 50 bosses and each one is an individual customer.”