Follow Along With The Interview:

Hal Pruitt + Tony Bass – Landscape Experts TV

Oct 10, 2024

0:05 – Tony Bass

Welcome, welcome, welcome everybody. My name is Tony Bass and I want to welcome you to Landscape Experts TV. This is where the leading lawn and landscape companies get to compare, get to show off and showcase their finest projects and share their expertise by featuring real-world examples of their work. Now, here with Landscape Experts TV, we help inspire creation and preservation outdoor spaces that you admire, that you think about all the time. And our platform highlights the craftsmanship and the passion that goes into the very best in the landscape industry. And I want to introduce you to somebody right now that I think is one of those expert craftsmen, and his name is Hal Pruitt. And so I’m going to see, do we have Hal on the line now? Are you there? There’s Hal.

 

1:00 – Hal Pruitt

Sir.

 

1:01 – Tony Bass

Is this the real Hal?

 

1:04 – Hal Pruitt

It is.

 

1:06 – Tony Bass

Well, Hal, thank you for joining us today on Landscape Experts TV, and I’m excited to show and share some of the projects that you have completed. But as I get started, I wanted to give you just a moment to help us know a little bit more about you. I’ve just changed the slide, and hopefully can see it, but give us just a little introduction of Cumming Lawn Service and how it grew.

 

1:40 – Hal Pruitt

Okay. We started out with just a bobcat and a duck truck and was really just hauling dirt to like a landscape supply. I kind of fell in behind the guy I was working for. He was probably not really someone I needed to be around, but it kind of fell in place that when his equipment broke, I was able to follow him behind him and get my own equipment. And I just picked up where he left off. And so I got to start, just basically took over his company. And as I did that for a little while, I started moving in and working with some builders and landscapers just doing grading work, hauling, and then the more landscapers I started working for and grading companies I’m working for, then they started buying their own bobcats and kind of started pushing me out. And then I went more towards landscaping. And then the first watering ban came along in Forsyth County and shut us down. And we were not able to water grass or anything like that and you know while they were getting the rules regulated about that one of my friends had just started running a power equipment store and I started meeting some landscapers around there and

that’s when the lawn maintenance started and that was in 2000 and about May of 2000 was when I started full-time lawn maintenance and that’s when I learned about 12-month contracts. That’s when it changed from peace to famine into learning how to get a year-round income for my family. And the more I learned about that, you know, it seemed like the way to go. And that’s kind of how I came along.

 

3:40 – Tony Bass

I understand today that you do quite a bit of lawn maintenance, but you’re also doing landscape and we wanted to talk a little bit about those projects today, and I appreciate you sharing a handful of photos and images, but is this right, and I don’t know if you saw what I had on the screen a moment ago, but does this explain your company’s service line, lawn maintenance, landscaping, and hardscape? So we’re gonna show them.

 

4:11 – Hal Pruitt

Yeah, we started more landscaping in 2012, I mean, we did a little bit all along, but we started trying to get a full time crew going in 2016. That got better in 2020, you know, when all the pandemic came about. And then the last couple of years, we started slowly getting some hardscaping going. And our SEO is getting a little bit better with that. So we have, you know, we’ve added that the profits are good in there. So we were trying to get that going really well and some of those jobs are picking up.

 

4:47 – Tony Bass

Well, Hal, I want to begin with a photo you shared with me. And I’m going to flash on the screen. I want to know, can you see the photo now, Hal? So you’re familiar with this project, right?

 

4:59 – Hal Pruitt

I am.

 

5:00 – Tony Bass

So here’s a before picture that Hal shared with us. And then here’s an after picture. So let’s go back. You’ll see the concrete, the driveway, you’ll see these big crape myrtles that are a little overgrown, haven’t been maintained, you see the mailbox over there, and then boom, voila, okay? So begin with, what made this job stand out as one of your favorites, Hal?

 

5:28 – Hal Pruitt

Well, you can’t really see it for the trees, but the guy’s front yard here, He did have some pine trees, like you can see in the background there, that came halfway out in his front yard. He had those taken out before we started, so there was two massive stumps in his front yard, and just behind the driveway there, you can kind of see it at the very back of the picture, that came out and just dropped straight off, so we actually took I mean, we took a good bit of dirt out of his front yard and we made that front yard usable. He’s a young guy getting his family started and he really had nowhere for him and his family to go outside and do anything. The backyard is very small. You can see it’s very shaded. There’s really no backyard. So we made that front area a place where he can take his kids out, you know, and have a place to you know, to kick a ball around or whatever.

 

6:32 – Tony Bass

And so that’s exactly the second question I was going to ask you, Hal, is is what kind of client were you working for here? And and how did their their needs influence this design, this result that you created, which is which is really clean and neat. And and so you said young family kids needing a play area. Is that it or is there anything else?

 

6:59 – Hal Pruitt

Yeah, he kind of had an idea of his own what he wanted to do. And so we we just kind of worked together. And I mean, we tried to get him to to take the cross or the timber wall out front and and either, you know, regrade that or change it to block so we could make one wall and give him a little bit more room there. But that that took a little bit too much of the budget. So, you know, we just kind of worked together with his idea and ours, and then just kind of transformed it. I think in the future, we’re going to add some more hardscape to the left and try to redo his backyard to give him, you know, more of an outdoor living area in the back as well. But I think that’s a little further down the road, but we just kind of took what he had in mind and what we could do and just kind of worked together. Until we met his budget, and then went from there.

 

7:56 – Tony Bass

So this is an example of a front yard makeover. That’s what I would call it. Would you call it anything different, Hal?

 

8:05 – Hal Pruitt

That’s it. That’s it. Okay.

 

8:07 – Tony Bass

So you shared another project, and let me put those slides up real quick. We’ve got a before, and we’ve got an after. And let me flip it back. Before, you can see the raised deck. To the left upper corner of the picture, you can see a gently sloping yard to the right, natural areas. You see a back patio underneath the upper deck, but then boom, now we’ve got something completely different. We have well-defined beds for the natural areas. Obviously, you guys have sodded the entire backyard. But you’ve defined the space. It looks much more like someone’s property, their backyard is being maintained and being used. So start with what made this job stand out for you as one of your favorites?

 

9:06 – Hal Pruitt

Yeah, so they again had a lot of trees, had too much shade. It had a TF-419, which was a a builder grade sod that needed a full sun and they just had lost about all their grass. So when they had the trees taken down, then we come in, got rid of what 419 was there, sprayed and killed it, defined the areas that still had shade, switched over to a TIF-TUF, which can survive with four to five hours of sunlight, brought the grass in, defined that area, with pine straw and then gave her a little bit of both worlds there.

 

9:50 – Tony Bass

One of my jobs, Hal, here at Landscape Experts TV is to make sure that the landscape experts don’t use too much technical language to confuse people and so let me just interject here for just a moment. Hal’s referring to the Tifway Bermudagrass 419 which is a long-standing successful turf grass used in golf course industry, but it is a full sun turf and the improved variety that he’s talking about, Tif-Tuf, is a newer variety of Bermuda grass, hybrid Bermuda grass, which does have some shade tolerance that until recently was completely unavailable. So you’ve modernized the turf, right Hal?

 

10:40 – Hal Pruitt

That’s it. That’s it. We use it a lot and have had great success with it.

 

10:47 – Tony Bass

Tell me about the client. Tell me about the client, the person you’re working for. Is this the backyard of the house you showed us a minute ago, or is this a different project?

 

10:58 – Hal Pruitt

This is totally different. This is totally different. So her husband had passed away, and I think, if I remember correctly, they had started this project when he got sick, and then they had to stop it until he went through the cancer. He passed away, and then, you know, once she got all that stuff stopped, then, you know, she finished the project. And that’s when, you know, after he passed away, that’s when she hired us. And I wish she would have got us before, you know, she did hire another company to put some steps and stuff in, and they did not treat it fairly. You can’t really see it in the picture. It’s over to the far left, but they did a terrible job on the steps, and so, you know, we could have done it, but she didn’t know that at the time, so we just got to do the softscapes. Let’s take a look at a couple more photos now.

 

12:03 – Tony Bass

You shared this photo of what appears to be a porch or carport area off of a home. Tell me about this project. Why did you select this? What made this job stand out?

 

12:18 – Hal Pruitt

I wish I could have found the before picture. I dug and dug for it, but this particular side of the home right here does not get any sunshine. And they had some…

 

12:35 – Tony Bass

to Holly there.

 

12:37 – Hal Pruitt

And so we, and they just wouldn’t survive at all. They just kept getting really thin and leggy. And so we tore all of those out. They’d get some runoff the way the driveway comes around and kept pushing the mulch into the yard. And so we changed over and in the summertime we used the Impatient there, the sun, I mean the shade tolerant impatiens. Sure. And we made the two flower beds, changed over to a better shade plant there in the center, and they just really show off for them.

 

13:17 – Tony Bass

So in the previous photos, Hal, the previous projects, I couldn’t help but notice a large amount of pine straw mulch in the flower beds, but here you’re using a it appears as the bad mulch. What was your reasoning behind that?

 

13:40 – Hal Pruitt

I’m sorry for the noise. I didn’t know that one of the crews were stopping by. Can you ask me that again?

 

13:48 – Tony Bass

Yeah, the question was in the previous projects we saw pine straw mulch and then in this one we see the river rock being used as a bed.

 

13:59 – Hal Pruitt

The runoff from the driveway was just washing the mulch out, so we put rock all around to help that, and then we used the mini nuggets around the flowers to really make the flowers stand out.

 

14:14 – Unidentified Speaker

Gotcha.

 

14:14 – Tony Bass

Neat project. It really looks clean. All right, here’s another Tell me a little bit about this project, and maybe even tell us about who you have in the photograph.

 

14:30 – Hal Pruitt

Yeah, so the landscape foreman is on the right, and one of my best lawn maintenance crews there to the left. This is the wintertime, so I was able to pull him in to help. The guy there in the middle, he’s been with me next year, will be 10 years. He had worked for me before a long time ago. He can do it all in this industry. So he helped on this job, but this particular job has been a long time customer and they had had a border wall around this landscape bed here and it had moss all over it and I told them two or three times that the that they had were just killing their grass and also their their bed as well that their plants were just hardly had no leaves on them none of their plants were shade tolerant so we talked about making a better border around the bed and also they had a lot of erosion from the way the water come down the road so instead of just putting a border back around it we built this small wall and we convinced them to cut down a pretty large tree and then really raise the canopy on another one and that opened that you can see the sunlight coming in now. We built this wall all the way around the bed which also helps slow the water down and it’s going to open up for their fescue there a little bit. They still got enough shade for the fescue but that little wall turned out really well around that bed.

 

16:15 – Tony Bass

Let’s take a look at another project. It seems like this theme of walls is starting to pick up here in your designs in your landscape projects. Tell me just a bit about what made this job stand out as one of your favorites.

 

16:31 – Hal Pruitt

This one here, this is more of just leveling up for the fire pit. This couple here, they did just have the chairs in the metal fire pit you see just sitting in the yard. So, we we also do the maintenance at this property. So, we were getting calls constantly. Your guys came out. They moved the chairs but they didn’t put them back. So, I said, well, hey, would you guys like to fix that problem? Let us come out and design you a fire pit area and level it up for you and then you’ll have a place to sit and they’ve said and the guy said, well, come on out here and let’s um so I told him you know I gave him my pitch what I thought would look really good and so we put that together for him and uh put in the walkway over there to it from the steps and made it all flush so we can continue to mow the grass and um so we just put up the little grate I mean those are just Home Depot block nothing fancy for that but we put just enough to level it up and put everything back just like it was and just put the the slate rock around the flagstone and then put the fire pit back and they love it. He said during the fall, they’re out there every night with neighbors.

 

17:47 – Tony Bass

It seems as though you’re helping people enjoy their outdoor spaces more than ever. That’s what it sounds like,

 

17:57 – Hal Pruitt

Yeah, and we did the same thing for him behind his garage and made him a better storage area and took that block and made it level, and he put a little storage shed back there for the same customer.

 

18:12 – Tony Bass

So the projects never stop. How about this one, Hal? I see air conditioning units, and I see river rock, and I see a wall structure again. What was the problem that you’re trying to correct?

 

18:26 – Hal Pruitt

My back is almost touching the house next door so here again we got a shade problem the grass would not grow water running between the houses and was just walk you know when they put these units in they’re sitting on a plastic uh foundation for the for the ac units and it was just washing it out um okay so we did a little something to divert the water to the outside and then just you know leveled up the ground a little bit and put river rock around it to help hold the, you know, stabilize the area so his units would stay level and work efficiently and properly.

 

19:05 – Tony Bass

Gotcha. And then I started seeing this theme with all kinds of aggregate, all kinds of rock, flat rock, edging rock. Here we got coarse stone and then we got a fine stone. So tell me about this. This looks pretty cool, man.

 

19:21 – Hal Pruitt

Sod and sod would not do shade and that’s a very level area. The water was standing right out in front of the patio there. So we dug a pit, filled it full of gravel, put a two inch pipe in it, ran it out the other side. So when the water fills up there, it just drains out. And then made a walkway

around with pea gravel and then filled the rest of it in with the larger area so that the water could flow of run through it out to the driveway and put a border in.

 

19:57 – Tony Bass

So this is the case where you had drainage problems and you’ve addressed the drainage problems it sounds like with some type of an in-ground cistern and then you have beautified the ground by using aggregates which will be much more tolerant, right? I mean it’s like this has got to be pretty low maintenance. When you start thinking about, you know, comparing that to…

 

20:25 – Hal Pruitt

This is a retired teacher, a retired teacher who wanted something to do, so he wanted to cut his own lawn, but he had a good bit of lawn, so he said, I’m okay if we just make this rock, but I want it to look good.

 

20:40 – Tony Bass

So, you know… I got to ask, Cal, who is the creative person at Coming Lawn Service? Is it how, or is it a combination of how and why?

 

20:52 – Hal Pruitt

I usually do most of the designs. I mean, they’re usually pretty simple, but a lot of times it’s me and the homeowner together. We come up with something that works for them, and then I help put a little bit of creativity in it as well.

 

21:09 – Tony Bass

I saw this one, this photo, and I thought, oh boy, we got, I don’t know if this is on the lake, because I know you’re not from Lake Lanier, but I was curious. I see these, you know, long set of steps going down the hill, someone’s backyard. Does the lakes run a property?

 

21:27 – Hal Pruitt

Yes, my guys asked me to not do this again because this guy does not have a carport. His driveway ends in his parking area.

 

21:39 – Tony Bass

Okay.

 

21:41 – Hal Pruitt

And then there’s steps So we tried with a skid steer to get those 400 pound steps down to the front of the house. And that just made a big mess to have to repair. So we ended up with a tree dolly from the road all the way to the bottom, one step at a time. And there was, I think there was 35 of them. And they’re a 400 piece?

 

22:07 – Tony Bass

Yeah, about 350 to 400 pounds a piece.

 

22:12 – Tony Bass

This is a big job, right? I mean, this is a really big job. And obviously, again, with the way you’ve got the large, I don’t know if you call that surge stone or riprap, but you’ve got this large branch.

 

22:23 – Hal Pruitt

The surge stone was already there. It was filled with silt. So we dug through and cleaned it out and set it aside, put the depths in, and then put the surge stone back.

 

22:35 – Tony Bass

Neat, neat, neat. So the aggregate and the hardscape work I’m showing another photo right

now. This looks like somebody’s backyard project. Tell us again, what made this job stand out as one of your favorites? What were some of the challenges? What you’re trying to solve here?

 

22:54 – Hal Pruitt

Problems you’re trying to fix? They wanted a sitting area out away from their, so right, I’m standing at the edge of their patio basement right under their deck, and they wanted another sitting area. Sun came in in the evening it was it was right on their deck and coming in their patio. So they wanted another seating area that would be in the shade late in the day. So we put the walkways you see in the grass and they had again too much shade it was killing some of their lawn. You see some new sod there.

 

23:28 – Tony Bass

I don’t know if our viewers can see it right now but there is new sod and some established turf over to the right. So you’re trying to obviously work within a budget and try to preserve grass there. Tell us about the grass that you have planted inside the stone patio. That’s Mondo grass.

 

23:53 – Hal Pruitt

That’s Mondo grass. That’s a 12 18 area. And in the center section, we have all of that flagstone really close together. And that’s the actual sitting area and then as we got to the outside we spread them out to about four inches apart and then we’ve got mondo grass mixed all in between those and then those will eventually all grow together and that’ll just be solid green.

 

24:18 – Tony Bass

Okay and mondo grass for those of you don’t know is a is a ground cover that is shade tolerant it only grows up to what I don’t know depending on I guess the variety but this variety looks like a

 

24:31 – Hal Pruitt

dwarf mondo.

 

24:32 – Tony Bass

Pure dwarf mondo, so it grows up to what, two and a half, three inches height or something like that. It’s really short and compact, doesn’t require mowing, so it would be a low maintenance way to create some greenery within the hard surface. Pretty creative, pal, pretty creative. All right, so tell us about this project. I’m trying to wrap up here and let’s not go too far beyond about 30 minutes of introduction here. On your projects, but tell us about this.

 

25:01 – Hal Pruitt

So this lady wanted to add some more color in her backyard. When we started working for her, that is all HOA common area in the far back. She wanted to hide some of that, but she also wanted color. So we started off to begin with just adding the screen trees that you see in the very far back. We did that the first season. Here again, this is probably a lower end economical neighborhood. So we started out putting the spring trees in first. The next year we come back and we put the crape myrtles in. And then the next year, which you can’t see, we put some color bushes around her house. We kind of went every other one with a burgundy and a yellow leaf shrub to give her some color around her house. And then this past year we did this one and we got a Japanese maple, a limelight hydrangea, which got the big cone blooms. So you got the burgundy and the white in the back. We got some Encore azaleas and some drift rose. And then we got some in the front left, kaleidoscope abelia and so all different colors of leaves and blooms just a really bright backyard.

 

26:31 – Tony Bass

Oh no okay all right we’re getting here towards the end we’re getting here towards the end but I just we just had to get this in here you were so proud of this this project you recently completed tell us about this fire pit and this project and and the customer that you’re working for?

 

26:51 – Hal Pruitt

Yeah, so we’ve been working with this customer for probably, I don’t know, 12 years, and we did a little bit of everything for her, from drainage all the way to, she called me the other day and said, we want to, I mean, that area was, the only thing that was there was the rosebush you see on the left and the camellia in the corner, and the rest of it was just blood. And so they said put uh they wanted to put a fire pit there um or or a crepe myrtle whichever one would fit their budget and I think they really wanted the fire pit so because there was a big difference in that but we talked to her about um either pavers or flagstone and they wanted the more natural um so we uh you know we we put that together and um uh we got it got everything done we got the uh got the pit put together, they picked out the logs, and that is a gas fire pit.

 

27:50 – Tony Bass

So they don’t have to go out and cut a bunch of wood or go haul wood in to enjoy a fire pit in the evening, huh?

 

28:00 – Hal Pruitt

Yeah, and we put the flagstone down, and everything we do is dry. We don’t do any masonry work, so that’s polymeric sand around the flagstone, and then we got flagstone path going out to the grass, which is where the picture’s taken, and then over to the patio. And that job was just finished about 15 minutes before we started, and they got the picture over to us.

 

28:32 – Tony Bass

So let me try to summarize here for just a moment if I can, Hal. Because I’ve known you for quite a while. I know that you continue to work on growing your business, and I was thrilled that you agreed to come on to Landscape Experts TV. Our goal was to introduce you and some of

your work to folks in your service area who might be interested in hiring your company to help them with their landscaping, with their lawn maintenance, or with their hardscaping. But help me zero in here for a moment, Hal. What is your company service area? Tell us that, please.

 

29:16 – Hal Pruitt

We work in the Cumming, Georgia area and the North Alpharetta and Milton area. We’re pretty tight. We are about 50 miles north of Atlanta, and we stay pretty compact in those areas. We have probably for about 15 to 20 years now been the one of the top five fastest growing counties in the nation. And so I figured why drive to Atlanta when we got the fastest growing population in the country.

 

29:52 – Tony Bass

So let me ask you this, how if someone was interested in working with your company, what is the best them to get in touch with you.

 

30:08 – Hal Pruitt

Cominglawonservice.com and there is a request to quote link on any page you go to and to submit that form. That alerts us right away. There’s a message box on that form to let us know what you’re wanting. From there, we can get a link to you that will allow me to come out and meet with you if you want to do that. The phone number The number’s also there on the screen. You can call. We’re happy to talk to you or through the, you know, a lot of people want to do digital now, or you can do the form, either one.

 

30:39 – Tony Bass

So just in case someone is listening as they drive or listening as they jog, we want you to know that coming lawn service is available via phone at 770-337-8502. That’s 770-337-8502.

 

30:58 – Tony Bass

Our owner of Cumming Lawn Service is Hal Pruitt. He established the company in 1990. They today provide service to, I know, over 200 properties, both residential and commercial, in the lawn maintenance part of their business. I know that they are consistently, constantly working for folks that want to improve the look of their landscaping. They’re capable of doing hardscaping work, which is the inclusion of stone and walls and patios into their landscaping designs. And Hal, I want to wrap up with this, and I have no idea how you might respond, but do you have any kind of discount programs for certain types of the community or certain types of the year? Like, is there a certain time of the year where you’d say, hey, if you contact us during this time of the year, you’re bound to get a really great price from our company?

 

32:03 – Hal Pruitt

I mean, we have from time to time. We don’t usually have any specific things set up, but there are times that we do offer some discounts. We usually send those out once you submit the form. We do have newsletters that we send out that has discounts in those. There is a coupon on every one of those for whatever the, you know, the service is that is the time of year in that month. Whether i

there is a discount on every one of those. So getting connected with that newsletter would be the way to get that discount.

 

32:49 – Tony Bass

Okay, terrific. And then Hal, just so our audience knows a little bit about the size of projects, the scope of projects, can you give me a range? We looked at a number of projects today that include things like the outdoor fire pits, the hardscaped areas, flower beds, trees, shrubs, sodding. I mean, the work goes on and on. A project like this with these large steps for both, you know, that’s a big hardscape job. Working with aggregates, you got to have big equipment for that to move that kind of stuff around. What is the range of scope of projects? Like, you guys have a minimum size and what’s the biggest job you’ve ever done?

 

33:38 – Hal Pruitt

Yeah, so I would say that our projects range from $2,500 to $25,000. That’s about our sweet spots.

 

33:50 – Tony Bass

$2,500 to $25,000. So those are affordable projects for many property owners. So if you happen to be in the Cumming, Georgia area and you’re looking for a professional on a landscape company, we want you to know about how Pruitt and Cumming, lawn service. We want you to know that Hal is standing by. He’s ready to help you. And he would be, and I have to mention this, Hal, I couldn’t help but notice you guys have been in business a really long time now. So you’re not a rookie at this anymore, right? Right.

 

34:31 – Hal Pruitt

Been around a while.

 

34:45 – Tony Bass

Hal, are you still with me? Don’t lose Hal.

 

34:50 – Hal Pruitt

I don’t know. Somehow I got cut off. Sorry about that.

 

34:55 – Tony Bass

I can hear you, but it’s very Hello, I don’t know what happened.

 

34:58 – Hal Pruitt

I don’t either. Something popped up on the screen that I’d lost you, but I don’t know, am I back?

 

35:04 – Tony Bass

I hear you now, I hear you now. Okay, you’re back, you’re back, you’re back.

 

35:08 – Hal Pruitt

I don’t know what happened.

 

35:10 – Tony Bass

Well, let’s ignore that and let’s focus on this. I understand you’re not a rookie at landscaping anymore. You’ve been doing it for quite a number of years, establishing back in 1990, well-established in the area. Grew up in the Cumming area, and so you’re gonna be there. Any final words, Hal?

 

35:34 – Hal Pruitt

Yeah, I always tell all my customers, they say, where’d you go to school? And I say, well, I got a doctorate in failing and losing my own money and figuring out how to fix it.

 

35:49 – Tony Bass

That’s the best way to learn.

 

35:52 – Tony Bass

It looks like, It looks like a lot of people are trusting you to take care of their properties, improve their landscapes, and so I’m thrilled to get to meet with you here today, and I look forward to seeing you again real soon, Hal, okay? Thanks for being here on Landscape Experts TV. Remember, this is where we help lawn and landscape business owners meet the folks that need to enhance their properties. And if you have not heard about us before, please share. Share what you found or where you found us and tell your friends, hey, you want to meet a well-qualified landscaper to help you with your project? Landscape Experts TV. Thank you for joining us. I’m Tony Bass, your host here at Landscape Experts TV saying bye-bye and bye to you too, Hal. Thanks, Tom