Life Lessons
John M. Wilson, president, Aqua Doc Lake and Pond Management
» You need a good lawyer, accountant and banker. The bank has been wonderful. I have a credit line; we even got it raised by 20 percent last year.
» Do it right from the beginning. We prescribe the right program for do-it-yourselfers, which you get a lot of when they’re 30 or 35 years old. But now we have some customers from 1983 who have done it all themselves with our help, and now they want us to do full maintenance.
» We can make a difference. As we work with customers’ ponds that are really bad, I have a vision of what it should look like. When I see something run-down and overgrown, I know we can make make a difference.
» It’s not how satisfied you keep your customers; it’s how many satisfied customers you keep.
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John M. Wilson Jr. has been the president of Chardon-based lake and pond management company Aqua Doc for more than 20 years, and he’s still not afraid to get his feet wet. Literally.
“We have to go swimming to get the work done on docks,” he says. “It’s great to jump in on a summer day when it gets hot.”
Aqua Doc has grown 26 of its 27 years in business with 2009 being the first year the company backed off its growth strategy. After a record 24.8 percent growth in 2008, Wilson says he didn’t expect to repeat that kind of success right away.
“Last year we decided, we aren’t adding five new trucks; we’re adding two,” he explains. “We aren’t hiring 30 new employees; we’re going to hire five. The bottom line turned out to be better than
most years.”
Wilson has been around since the company’s inception. His lifelong friend Bill Cloonan started Cloonan and Sons Lake and Pond Maintenance in the early ’80s. Wilson originally worked for Cloonan on a part-time basis, but when he was laid off from his job in marketing at Pickler International, he joined his friend’s company full time, running heavy equipment, building new lakes and ponds, stocking fish, and fixing docks and fountains.
In 1989, Cloonan offered to sell the company to Wilson so he could make a career out of it. At first, Wilson thought it was ridiculous. “I made 10 bucks an hour; how was I going to buy a company?” Wilson says. But they worked out a very basic buy-sell agreement, and Wilson acquired a van, a boat and about 60 customer files.
Since then the company has grown to more than 3,000 customers throughout Ohio and in parts of Kentucky, Michigan and Pennsylvania. The growth can be attributed to a 100-page business plan Wilson drafted during his first year of ownership, which outlined an aggressive marketing plan for the company.
“My first thought was, We need to set up some programs and market the idea,” he says. “Educating the customer was the big thing. Most people who own a pond don’t know much about it. Anyone can mow a lawn, but to apply an algaecide or an herbicide with a green approach is not easy.”
Within the first year, Wilson had paid Cloonan back and blown his original business plan out of the water with the company’s success. In the years since, Wilson has made it a priority to foster a familylike environment at work as a way to retain employees.
Wilson’s right-hand man, Heath Spence, has been an Aqua Doc employee for 13 years. Spence originally planned to be a marine biologist, but jobs in that arena were scarce in Northeast Ohio. He now runs Aqua Doc’s lake management operation.
About eight years ago, Wilson was looking to hire a few guys for $8 to $10 an hour to do work around the water. Nate Robinson, a botanist with 20 years in the turf industry, came in for an interview.
“Nate walked in; he was this guy who was about 45 or so at the time, and he was making something like $175,000 a year,” Wilson recalls. “We were like, ‘We don’t have salaries like that right now!’ ”
But Robinson was looking for a change of pace, and he and Wilson worked out a deal to bring him on board. Robinson is now vice president of sales.
Wilson claims he has never come home saying that he hates his job. That doesn’t mean there aren’t challenges, but solving problems is what makes the work so rewarding. Take, for example, a lake in Concord Wilson encountered a few years ago that was one of the biggest disasters he had ever seen.
“It looked like a putting green,” he says of all the algae on top of the water. He laid out an action plan. Three weeks later, the lake was pristine.
“We turned a useless pond into a beautiful body of water,” he says. “I love seeing kids out swimming or fishing and getting 100 percent use out of something that wasn’t usable before.”