How She Bought a Niche Landscaping Doing 40% Margins With No Website

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Meet Bethany.

Bethany spent years climbing a ladder she was increasingly sure she didn’t want to be on. She started as a registered nurse, broke into medical device sales using her clinical background, and eventually landed a director-level role overseeing a national team. She was good at it. But somewhere in that rise, something shifted.

“I didn’t want to work for anybody,” she said. “I just knew it.”

She’d been listening to Codie on YouTube for about a year, thinking about her next steps, when her company decided for her: Bethany was laid off.

But instead of panicking, she leaned into the severance cushion, joined Contrarian Academy, and started searching for a business.

After a long, hard-fought search, Bethany closed on a 20-year-old hydroseeding and landscaping business in western North Carolina in April of this year for mid-6-figures.

Since closing, Bethany has:

Here’s how she got there, and what she’s focused on as a new owner.

Bethany knew she wanted a service business, but she got more specific than many searchers do: she wanted a niche within a niche.

Over time, she zeroed in on landscaping services with better margins and fewer headaches than a standard mowing operation.

Her reasoning was strategic. Many owners in this corner of the market are exceptional at their craft but weak on the business side. They don’t advertise. They don’t follow up. They run on paper and word of mouth.

The company she eventually bought didn’t even have a website. To Bethany, that wasn’t a red flag, though. It was exactly what she was looking for.

When Bethany was evaluating this business, the thing that moved her most may not have been the quality of the trucks, the strength of the contracts, or even the health of the margins.

It was a contractor the previous owner had brought on about two years ago.

She has a degree in horticulture and has taken the lead on answering the phones, handling bids, and working with customers in a way that actually gets them to sign on.

Bethany noticed the business’s numbers started trending sharply upward about three years ago, exactly when the contractor joined. Once Bethany connected those dots during due diligence, she treated the contractor as a core part of the acquisition thesis.

That bet has paid off.

In the first week after closing, Bethany and the contractor sat down with the previous owner for 3-4 days of recorded conversations, working through 16 pages of prepared questions.

Every answer went straight into AI, which helped them build a quote generator and turned the recordings into SOPs automatically.

Within days of submitting her LOI, Bethany got the call: the seller was going with someone else. Two doctors had come in together as a buying pair. She was out.

“I was devastated,” she said.

But a few weeks later, the broker called back. One of the buyers had backed out. The deal was hers if she still wanted it.

She was on a trip with her son when the call came, editing the LOI from her phone at the hotel. She got it submitted that night.

What followed was, by Bethany's own description, a really, really long due diligence process. The business ran almost entirely on paper. It took about two months just to get basic numbers together, and for a while, it felt like the seller wasn’t truly committed to selling.

Around Christmas, she called the seller directly. “Do you really want to sell this?” she asked him. “Because if you don’t, I really just need to move on.” He said he did. But she needed more than reassurance. In January, she asked if she could come look at the trucks and the barn. She drove out, walked the property with him, and went to lunch. That afternoon, everything changed.

“I think being one-on-one with the seller made him feel a lot more comfortable,” she said. She visited on January 15. Over lunch, she named a date: the SBA was ready, and she wanted to close by the end of March. She had practical reasons to push, too.

The deal ended up closing on April 2.

Bethany closed on a Thursday. She drove straight to the area that night. By Friday morning at 7:30, she was at the barn when the crew arrived.

Her first move as an owner was relational. Show up. Be present. Make sure the team understood their jobs were safe.

What she noticed quickly was that her crew lead already knew exactly what to do. He’d just never been trusted to do it. The previous owner had handled the scheduling himself, leaving his crew lead underutilized. But Bethany found him funny, a little goofy, and very good at his job.

So Bethany watched for three weeks, then sat him down.

“Not only could I tell he was good at selling, but he’s also good at truck maintenance, electrical work, and other really useful things,” she said.

She gave him a raise, formalized his title, and gave him a clear set of responsibilities: get to the barn at 7:15, review inventory every Thursday, and have the next day’s plan ready before it starts.

Her second move was adding capacity. She posted on Indeed, got about 40 applicants, and hired a fifth crew member within her first month.

The biggest challenge post-close has been pricing. The previous owner kept the bidding knowledge in his head. Things like how much to charge and how to account for labor and materials on different job types.

Extracting that and turning it into something usable has been the hardest part of the transition. That’s what she worked through with him during his 30-day handover period, and what her Claude-generated pricing tool is starting to solve.

Bethany is not starting with a complicated growth strategy.

Aside from hiring further, she’s starting with the things this business has never had: a website, active social media, Facebook and Google ads, outreach to developers and general contractors, and a CRM that generates quotes automatically.

She also got hold of a list of customer emails the business has never used.

“It should not be that hard to see some fresh growth in the business,” she said. “These are basic but key improvements we’re talking about.”

Her long game is to shift further toward hydroseeding and away from general landscaping. The margins tell the story: landscaping runs around 20%, while hydroseeding shoots for 30 to 40%.

It attracts more DOT contracts, more residential developments, and more commercial work. Plus, recent storms have created demand for erosion control throughout the region.

“I’m about to grow the s*** out of this,” she told us. “Right now, I need more people trained so that once we do get really busy, we’re ready.”

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