Since 1915, and Still Answering the Phone
How do you tell a good irrigation company from one that just bought a nice truck? And does thirty years in business actually get you anything a three-year-old company cannot match?
In this post, you’ll learn what a company’s age actually predicts, which local decisions only get made correctly by someone who has dug up the wrong ones, and why we cap our seasonal service list at 100 properties.
Does It Matter How Long an Irrigation Company Has Been in Business?
How long an irrigation company has been in business does matter, though not for the reason most homeowners assume.
A company that has run for decades has outlived the people who did the work.
That predicts whether anyone will still drive out to your yard in fifteen years.
Simmons Landscape & Irrigation was founded in 1915, and we cap our service list at 100 properties.
Three years in business is not proof of anything bad.
What you cannot know about a young company is what happens to your system when the one person who understands it moves on, and that is not a hypothetical around here.
The company we bought equipment and a client list from in Findlay lost its main irrigation guy suddenly last July.
He told us plainly that he had no intention of rebuilding that side of his business.
Forty-odd homeowners with backflow paperwork due to the city woke up without a contractor.
What Decades of Local Experience Change About the Work on Your Lawn
Local experience changes four decisions, and every one of them gets made before a single pipe is buried.
Where does the water come from?
What your city actually enforces.
When the season really opens and closes.
Whether the plan accounts for a system that runs while you are asleep.
On a lakeside property, tapping the lake looks like free water until rough water turns the intake into a liability.
We have moved a design from lake water to city water for exactly that reason.
Then the municipality.
Ohio requires annual backflow testing on irrigation systems, and most of the communities we serve do not enforce it. Findlay does.
Findlay runs a separate water meter for irrigation, and if the paperwork is not filed on time, the city comes through and pulls that meter out of the ground.
Only two companies were licensed to test irrigation backflows down there, so you cannot just hop in a truck and run to Findlay.
We are in the middle of adding that certification ourselves: an exam at the state capitol, a written test, and a hands-on test, then paperwork filed with the city.
We get going early to mid-March, sometimes early April if March turns out crappy, and we shut down right before Thanksgiving.
Winterizing runs from late September to about that Thanksgiving cutoff.
A company working its second or third season is still guessing at those edges.
Then the four-in-the-morning problem.
Most systems we service run at four or five, before showers and coffee, so they are not fighting the house for water.
Nobody watches them run.
A sheared head or a dead zone stays invisible until we show up, or until a nasty surprise water bill shows up first.
That is why our service package includes a visit in late June or early July.
The Simmons Story, From a Kew-Trained Founder in 1915 to Four Generations Later
Our founder, George Simmons, left his job as a landscaper at the Kew Royal Botanical Garden in England in 1915 and came to Toledo to build his own business.
He had a reel mower and a horse-drawn cart to get from one job to the next.
That was the whole operation.
From there, it passed through four generations of family ownership, and in the spring of 2020, Chris Corney, a longtime employee, bought it.
We run it out of Bowling Green now.
The fourth handoff went to an employee rather than a son.
A trade this specific lives in the hands of whoever is holding the shovel, so every one of those transfers was a chance for the business to quietly cease to exist.
That is a different thing to buy than having one person who has been good at this for thirty years.
Why a System Built Right the First Time Depends on Experience
The decisions that decide whether a system holds up all get made before anything is buried, and you only recognize them if you have dug up somebody else’s version of getting them wrong.
Pipe routing, zone splits, where the main line crosses hard surfaces, and whether you leave capacity for beds that do not exist yet.
None of it is visible once the trench closes.
All of it sets up your next fifteen years.
On a new-build lakeside home in Ottawa County, we ran into three of those at once.
The driveway had been installed with no sleeves under it, so the main line was routed through a crawl space and compacted gravel instead of straight across.
The original plan called for lake water, but rough water made that a poor long-term bet, so we tapped into the city water instead.
We ran piping for flower beds that the homeowners had not built yet.
Two weeks, one Hunter Hydrawise controller so Mike and Laurie could run the whole yard from wherever they happened to be traveling, and no reason to reopen the ground later to add those beds.
The whole job is on our Smart Irrigation Installation in Ottawa County, OH page.
None of that announces itself.
A main line buried under an unsleeved driveway still runs its first summer beautifully.
What it costs to reach that line is the question, and that bill arrives years after the crew has gone.
What Staying Power Means When Your System Needs Service Years From Now
It means your property is already on somebody’s calendar before anything goes wrong with it.
At the end of every January, we mail service contracts out to our client list, and they start coming back within days.
When Chris took over, four clients were on a recurring package.
Last year, 86 households took all three visits, and another 32 took a spring startup plus a separate fall service.
That number has climbed every year we have sent the letter.
We cap it at 100.
At 150 signups, we would be scrambling through the middle of the season to fit everyone in around the regular repair calls.
We have never hit the cap.
Overscheduling is what turns a careful crew into a rushed one, so we would rather turn work down than get there.
The previous owner tried that letter once, got a thin response, and wrote it off as a waste of postage.
He kept mailing the same four people.
We sent it to the whole list, and the mailbox came back full of checks from people who had no idea we offered it.
Those three visits are a spring inspection and startup, a check in late June or early July, and winterizing in the fall.
Our maintenance page lists that three-visit package at $637 a year, with your exact number set after we walk the property.
384 properties were active with us last year, across 647 jobs.
The forty-odd Findlay homeowners who lost their contractor are getting the letter this year, too.
That is the part of 1915 that is worth something to you.
A calendar with your address already on it.
Your Lawn Deserves a Contractor Who Will Still Be Here, So Reach Out to Simmons Landscape and Irrigation
If you take one thing from all this, take the question underneath the question: not how long a company has been open, but whether anyone will still be assigned to your system when it finally needs something.
That is a different question, and it gets you a much better answer. Fill out our contact form or give us a call, and we will come walk your property.
