CHASING THE DREAM

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Anyone in New Orleans can tell you where they were when Hurricane Katrina hit. Chase Mullin was in college at the University of New Orleans (UNO), studying exercise physiology. Due to damage from the storm, UNO closed for an extended period of time. During that small window of time, Chase’s career path turned in a completely new direction.

A family friend of Chase’s, who was a recently licensed landscape architect doing design work and installations, was completely overwhelmed with work in the Lakeside neighborhood of New Orleans, where flood waters breached the levee and rose nine to 10 feet.

“She asked me if I could gather some guys and help her,” Chase recalls. “I had spent summers in high school working construction. Not being afraid of hard work, my answer was yes.”

Shortly after doing the installation work for his friend, he ran into an older man at a gas station who got his attention. “I noticed a landscaping logo on his shirt, and I struck up a conversation,” Chase recalls. The man was Foster Henderson, a seasoned horticulturist with his own landscaping business. Chase ended up going to work for him the next day.

“He started bringing me to garden centers, on sales calls, to nurseries,” says Chase. “Even though I was just 21 years old, he saw something in me.”

In 2006, while working hard to clean up New Orleans, Chase fell in love with the landscaping industry. When UNO reopened, he decided not to return to college, instead teaching himself everything he could about the landscaping business.

“It was really gratifying to finish a project, and our work wasn’t just stagnant—it grew and changed,” Chase says. “I realized these clients would need us coming back, not like in construction when you install flooring and you’re done.”

Chase had always liked the idea of working for himself. His own father had his own small commercial real estate firm. So, at 22 years old in 2007, he launched Mullin. He started out on his own with the vision of growing to one maintenance and one installation crew, and partnered up with an established local landscape architect. He followed firms he admired, even traveling to observe Grunder Landscaping in Ohio, and modeled his business after theirs.

Business went well for years, until Mullin hit a plateau. “About eight years ago, I just felt we weren’t where we needed to be,” he says. “Some of our processes were outdated. We needed to be more team led. I felt tapped out.”

Chase remembers how much work it took to reach that $1 million in revenue mark and realized reaching the milestone of $10 million or $20 million would be exponentially harder. “I wanted to grow, but I had to determine if we should expand markets or offer more services in the market we were in,” he says.

Chase hired Envisor Consulting out of Atlanta to help him reach the next level. They identified that the company was in the adolescence phase. “You know, where you’re not comfortable in your skin and maybe you’ve grown a little taller than you’re coordinated for,” Chase says laughingly.

So, Mullin built new processes and created a strong leadership team and more employee buy-in. They implemented Envisor’s “start clean, finish clean” system that yielded better results, higher client satisfaction and less unexpected stress on the team. They better defined their customer and expanded their commercial maintenance operations, giving them the same white-glove service they had become known for by their residential clients.

“Our commercial clients expect more from us and get more from us,” Chase says. “We enable them to spend time focusing on their actual jobs and not worrying about the landscaping on their property.” and not worry about the landscaping on their property.”

Today, Mullin has approximately 200 employees in St. Rose, just outside of New Orleans, as well as 25 employees out of their new branch office in Baton Rouge. To keep everyone all on the same page, Chase says they rely on software like Slack, Trello and Aspire.

In 2022, Mullin exceeded the $20 million mark—reporting $21.7 million in revenue. Mullin’s clients range from historic mansions and upscale homes in New Orleans to prominent businesses and organizations like Hotel Saint Vincent, Oak Alley Plantation, New Orleans Museum of Art, Amazon and the Aquarium of the Americas.

Mullin has raked in numerous awards from the National Association of Landscape Professionals, as well as been named one of Inc. magazine’s “Best Workplaces in 2019” and “Top Places to Work” in the New Orleans Times Picayune in 2017–2021.

Chase is proud to be a top employer in the industry and hopes to attract more workers to the profession. He says he hopes more young people will consider landscaping as a career option. “A lot of kids aren’t cut out for college and can come directly into the workplace and skip the student loans they don’t need,” he says.

Hope for the Future

Chase also hopes the United States can figure out its H2-B labor issues. “There’s so much available labor south of the border,” he says. “They’re happy to work and pay taxes, and I can speak for the industry by saying we need them. We can give them careers and make such a big change in their lives. It’s a win-win.”

Chase Mullin

Founder & CEO of Mullin

Phone: (504) 275–6617

Email: info@mullinlandscape.com www.mullinlandscape.com