Four years after Lawrence Hoye, then 13 years old, went door-to-door during a winter storm offering to shovel his neighbors’ driveways, his little resolve has grown into a year-round lawn care business with six employees.
Hoye, who is currently 17 years old, will graduate early in December from McCleur South-Berkeley High School’s STEAM Academy. He credits his success to his mother’s unwavering support.
“Without her, I wouldn’t be where I am today,” Hoye told First Alert 4. “When I didn’t have a driver’s license, she would take me to all of my customers and get me where I needed to go.”
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Ferguson teen Hoye has progressively expanded his business over the last few years, offering lawn and landscape maintenance in the spring and summer, as well as leaf and debris collection in the fall and winter. This winter, he noted, will be the first in which he will no longer provide snow removal due to rising insurance costs and liabilities.
“There’s a lot of risk involved, with the guys and the trucks,” he explained. “But we are beginning to offer other services.”
With the assistance of his six employees, he hopes to continue growing his business, revealing projects like gutter clean-outs and window washing.
“It makes me feel accomplished in the sense that how I started at 13 years old and just saw it could be so much more than kid pushing around a lawnmower making a few bucks,” he said.
After graduating from high school in December, Hoye said he wants to buy a house in St. Louis before traveling south to Atlanta in the hopes of establishing relationships with clients there to grow Hoye Creek Lawn & Landscaping.
“My vision is to hire a general manager to oversee operations here locally, so I’m able to go out and try to start franchising the business in other parts of the country”, he said.
Since expanding the business a few years ago, Hoye said he has dozens of clients, most of whom are in the Maryland Heights and Creve Coeur region.
“I’ll go to the Starbucks, walk random neighborhoods, get dropped in a neighborhood by an Uber or something and literally knock and pound doors,” he said. “A lot of the ‘no’s’ can be turned into a ‘yes’ in the sense that while they may not need a certain service we provide, they may be interested in another.”
Many of his employees are former friends and classmates, and a few of them are full-time employees.
“He’s put a lot of hustle and heart into this, and I definitely believe he can go far,” said Joe Holliman, who has worked for Hoye for the past year.
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Holliman and Dominic Mason, who joined the company earlier this spring, assist Hoye with projects during the week during the school year.
“At first, I was like, does he really have a business?!” Mason laughed. “When you hear that from somebody younger than you and it’s like…nah. But coming and seeing how he does stuff, I can see his hustle.”
Employees like Holliman and Mason hoverboard across various areas on the weekends, knocking on people’s doors to offer services and share information about the business and its history.
“That’s what a lot of people say, they’re like, ‘we love to see young men doing something productive in this world,’” Mason remarked. “We’re doing something with our lives.”
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