Building a Marketing Juggernaut

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That summer, Wittstock also began thinking about branching out. He had recently finished his sophomore year at Ohio State and had a summer job at a subsidiary of Union Carbide, where his father was an engineer. One afternoon, he says, he was driving home, ruminating about how miserable he was in his job and wondering what else he might do, when a thought popped into his head: What about starting a pond-building business? Everyone who saw the Wittstocks' pond wanted one--the mailman, the UPS guy, the neighbors. He told his parents about his plan. "He said, 'No one builds ponds like me. All I need is a wheelbarrow, a shovel, and a strong back," says his mother, Lauri. "And he had a name, too. He wanted to call it Aquascape Designs." For Christmas, his parents gave him the wheelbarrow and the shovel.

Wittstock went into business the following summer, marketing his services by placing classified ads in newspapers and leaving business cards at rock yards. He also wrote a letter to the gardening editor of the Chicago Tribune. The response came a year later, in the summer of '92, when one of the newspaper's freelance writers called. By then, he'd built 17 ponds and had a small backlog of orders, but he was eager for publicity. The article appeared on the front page of the Tribune's Tempo section on Sunday, August 2--and Wittstock's telephone started ringing. All told, the article wound up generating orders for 81 ponds. Suddenly he was booked for the rest of the season and into the following year.

Wittstock could no longer handle the business alone. He was building ponds by day and making sales calls, lining up pond parts, and doing other chores by night. As it happened, his father, Gary Wittstock, was available to help. He'd left Union Carbide by then and started his own engineering consulting business, which wasn't doing well. In September, he began working at Aquascape.

Exactly who did what is a matter of dispute nowadays. It appears that Gary worked primarily on sales, administration, and engineering, while Greg focused on pond-building. He began looking for ways to reduce the construction time--by having all the parts on-site at the start of a job, for example, or by laying the pipe before digging the pond, so that the dirt from the hole had to be shoveled only once, not twice. Out of such efficiencies came the 20/20 rule and the one-day pond-building methodology. He also hired his first foreman to work with his crew and build ponds without him.

But it wasn't until the fall of '93, he says, that he began to see the real potential of the business. His mother--an English teacher turned corporate training consultant--urged him to speak to a former colleague of hers, who was working for Arthur Andersen in Columbus, Ohio, where Greg was still finishing up his college degree. The two began talking about Aquascape's strengths and quickly zeroed in on Wittstock's homegrown, hands-on knowledge of pond-building. The consultant encouraged him to expand his horizons, to think about reaching the masses. Franchising was an obvious option. Wittstock tried to set up a franchised unit in Columbus, but after six months of negotiating, the deal fell through. Disappointed and frustrated, he decided to forget about franchising and focus on the booming business in Chicago.

"The back-order policy at Aquascape is simple: There will be no back orders. If one occurs, the flag in front of the building is lowered to half-staff."

But he didn't stop thinking about the masses, and one day in 1994, he says, the answer came to him. So what if he couldn't sell his knowledge by franchising? Why not just give it away? Through newsletters and catalogs, he'd teach landscapers what he knew and sell them the products they needed to do it on their own.

From that epiphany, an entirely new Aquascape evolved, but it took a couple of years. Complicating the transition was the increasingly rancorous relationship between Wittstock and his father, who had become his 50-50 partner in April 1993. At the time, it had seemed reasonable to divide the equity between them. The two had been making ponds together for more than 10 years. In the past, moreover, they had gotten along well. "I never had a fight with my dad growing up," says Greg. "Here, we couldn't talk without fighting."

On one level, it was a clash of personalities. They were polar opposites. "Gary is very detail-oriented," says Lauri Wittstock. "Greg is an entrepreneur." Of course, every business needs a combination of those traits, and the people who have them don't necessarily wind up driving each other crazy, but--as time went along--Gary and Greg were increasingly at each other's throats. "He's an engineer, and he was always over-engineering everything," says Greg. "My deal is KISS--Keep it simple, stupid....Ed [Beaulieu] and I were running construction back then. We'd design a filter with one pad, and my dad would put in two, even though it made the pond harder to maintain and had no benefits. It was like that all the time."

"We built the business together in my opinion," says Gary. "He was the hard-working installer, and I was the engineer that engineered the system. The fighting was because of control. Greg wanted to run everything."

Inevitably, the conflicts had repercussions outside the company. "I was traveling a lot, and when I came back, each of them would tell me his side of the latest fight," says Lauri, who generally sided with her son. "They both advanced the business. Gary brought maturity, and Greg brought creativity. But the business was always Greg's. We were just parents supporting a kid in his hobby, which Gary would never admit."

The situation came to a head in 1996. By then, Lauri and Gary were getting divorced, largely because of the battle for control of the company. "I just couldn't see my husband doing this to my son," says Lauri. "We really had a picture-perfect family, and it all came apart." Gary, for his part, was so upset about the divorce that he withdrew from the day-to-day operations of the company. Eventually, however, he decided he wanted to come back, much to the chagrin of Greg, who moved to end their partnership. Greg says that he offered his father seven different buyout formulas, including one whereby Gary would get 3% of Aquascape's sales for 15 years. In 2002, that would have amounted to almost $940,000--more than 22% of the company's net pretax profit. According to Greg, Gary dismissed the offer, saying, "3% of nothing is nothing, and if you're running this business, it will be nothing."

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Bo Burlingham

Burlingham joined Inc. in 1983. An editor at large, he is the author of Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big. The book was a finalist for the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award in 2006. Burlingham is also the co-author with Norm Brodsky of The Knack; and the co-author with Jack Stack of The Great Game of Business and A Stake in the Outcome.

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