Greenway: Aerating lawns for 20 years

By Peijean Tsai

When it comes to lawn aeration, homeowners generally ask about how the process can improve their front and back yards. But the most common question asked at Greenway Lawn Aeration is directed at its business owner Scott Lawn, whose surname suggests a born affinity for the landscaping business.

Greenway Law Aeration owner Scott Lawn is celebrating his 20th year in business. Photo by Peijean Tsai

“It’s a question I’m asked most often,” said Lawn, owner of Greenway Lawn Aeration in Poway. People started asking if this was his real name (it is) when he began to head the business in 1992, he said. “Now I don’t go to someone’s house without being asked the question. I just kind of wait until it happens, and it always does.

“And I never get tired of it either,” he added, noting it’s a fun and memorable conversation point.

This year Lawn crosses a milestone, having run Greenway Lawn Aeration for 20 years. Over this time he has taught customers about the benefits of lawn aeration on their residential landscapes — it’s commonly done on golf courses — and building a base of thousands of repeat customers across San Diego County and beyond.

“We’ve educated a lot of our residential customers over the years to the benefits of aeration and most of our customers are repeat customers,” said Lawn. “It works, and they like it, and they do it again.”

According to Lawn, when soil becomes compacted from use and from simple irrigation, roots don’t grow sufficiently. Greenway mechanically decompacts the soil by pulling plugs out of the earth; root growth is stimulated and the roots are then allowed to spread out. The result is healthier, more beautiful grass on top, he said. The aeration process takes approximately an hour for most homes, and the homeowner does not need to be at home during the treatment.

Water also reaches roots quicker on a treated lawn, and overall an aerated lawn uses 25 percent less water than a non-aerated one, so it’s a great conservation measure for homeowners, said Lawn.

“It’s an excellent way to save water and still have your lawn look great,” he said.

Greenway’s lawn aeration service costs $40 for a lawn up to 1,000 square feet, or $65 for both front and back yard aeration (up to 2,000 square feet). Most residential customers aerate their lawns twice a year, as recommended.

While lawn aeration is its primary work, Greenway’s second most popular service is irrigation repair, upgrades and installation, and this is carried out through the business’ irrigation lawn and landscape division, according to Lawn. This has been a huge area of growth for the business in the last few years, as water-wise solutions such as drip irrigation and rotor head sprinklers can drastically cut water use — important given restrictions in recent years by Southern California water districts that have trickled down to local municipalities, Lawn said.

“Wasting water is just not acceptable anymore,” Lawn said. “We’ve stayed on top of all the irrigation transformations here in the last five years. There have been great strides in water-saving technology,” he said.

Other services offered by Greenway include: reconditioning and replacing lawns, synthetic turf, outdoor lighting, landscape draining, fertilization, over-seeding, landscape consultations, and more.

Lawn was previously a business broker and consultant, helping business owners build and grow their companies and assisting clients with the buying and selling of small businesses. He intended to buy and resell Greenway but fell in love with it, so took over the business in November 1992 after it had been open for about a decade.

“When I realized that I could wear a T-shirt and shorts in the summertime instead of a suit and tie, and the customers really liked what we did…it was a whole lot better than the grind of sales and marketing,” said Lawn, a resident of Rancho Bernardo who serves on the executive board for the Rancho Bernardo Business Association and the board of directors for the Rancho Bernardo Community Foundation.

For more information, reach Greenway at 858-486-8277 or visit www.grnway.com.

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Posted by Staff on Jan 18 2012. Filed under Business, Business Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry