2022 Future Founders Fellow Jack Hartigan started the work of his company when he was 13 years old, wrangling a teenage landscaping crew that grew in number with each passing summer. Now, many years and millions of dollars in revenue later, Hartigan Outdoors is still growing, more dedicated than ever to creating and maintaining beautiful, environmentally responsible outdoor spaces that connect people with the natural world around them.
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As a 13-year-old entrepreneur in Farmington, Minnesota, Jack Hartigan always had a sense that relationships mattered. It mattered that the folks around town who trusted him to tend their gardens and mow their lawns saw him as honest and responsible. It mattered that the classmates he recruited to work with him each summer—first one, then five, then seven, then twelve by the end of his senior year—respected him as a leader. It was only with the trust he built with his clients and crew, Jack reflects, that he was able to achieve almost $400,000 in revenue before graduating from high school.
Jack spent the next few years at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, coordinating projects virtually between classes and driving back and forth to Minnesota every other weekend. It wasn’t until the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic that Jack decided to “make it official” and begin focusing on his landscaping work full-time. With the same values of integrity, hard work, and a commitment to growth that laid the foundation of his earliest business relationships, Jack formally founded Hartigan Outdoors in 2021.
Since then, he hasn’t looked back. He’s spent the past two years growing and expanding his team, recruiting landscaping experts to lead his crews and building out operations and sales personnel—all the while continuing to work part-time towards his degree. He’s also pursued professional and personal development, earning multiple landscaping certifications and even a pilot’s license. “Constantly learning and developing are at the core of everything I do, including my company,” he says. To Jack, being a founder committed to constantly improving himself is essential for the kinds of relationships he wants to build with his team and his customers. If his entrepreneurial journey thus far has taught him anything, he says, it is that “relationships—in business and in life— are everything. Managing a team, balancing the need to cultivate and maintain individual relationships with all the other demands of being a founder is my biggest challenge—but it’s so important.”
Jack’s commitment to grow as a leader and community builder brought him to Future Founders. He joined the 2022 Fellowship with the goal of connecting with and learning from other founders and building up his entrepreneurial toolbox. Since then, he’s forged lasting connections with peers in the cohort and even found a mentor through the Future Founders network with whom he now meets regularly. Thanks to the community he has developed as part of the Fellowship, Jack is a more confident and connected leader than ever—and the proof is in the potting soil.
Since he began scaling Hartigan Outdoors, Jack has grown the company’s revenue from $750,000 to $3.5 million as of this past year. As part of that effort, he has expanded revenue from Hartigan’s winter offerings, historically a negligible fraction of its service portfolio, from $200,000 to more than $1 million. Most recently, Jack signed his largest single contract to date for $500,000, bringing the company’s annual recurring revenue (ARR) from $200,000 in 2021 to $800,000 in 2022.
Despite this success, Jack remains humbly committed to the relationships and values that first drove him to pull out the family lawn mower. “We started Hartigan Outdoors because we love the outdoors,” he says simply. “We continued with it because we love creating and maintaining beautiful, unique outdoor spaces for our customers. We wanted to build a business that is an active participant in the community, that people know and trust to do good there.”
Once again, it all comes down to relationships, says Jack. As important as the relationships he has cultivated while building and scaling Hartigan Outdoors are, so too are the relationships his work cultivates between his clients and the natural world around them. “As hard as we work to meet our clients’ needs and make their dreams a reality,” Jack says, “we work just as hard to be conscious, ecologically responsible stewards of the environment.” For Jack, the sustainable integration of human life with nature takes the same kind of integrity he has woven into each of the relationships that got him this far. And, like the landscaping in which he takes such pride, Jack has no plans to stop growing.
Learn more about Hartigan Outdoors here.
Learn more about the Future Founders Fellowship here.
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