Lewis Beam still runs the Fairview lawn business his father started in 1980
Lewis Beam was 13 when his father started a landscaping business in Fairview, N.C., and he still runs it with his wife and a three-man crew, without a computer.
Fairview, NC
The client had said to meet at 5 p.m. At six minutes till, Lewis Beam was already at the site of a big landscape project, waiting, and the client was nowhere in sight. “If you’re on time, you’re late,” Beam says. He had another client booked for 9:30 the next morning.
The business goes back to 1980, when his father, Fred Beam, started it in Fairview, North Carolina. “My dad started the business when I was 13,” Lewis Beam says. He learned the trade from his father, and he now runs the company, Beam’s Lawn & Landscape Service, out of Fairview, southeast of Asheville. The crew keeps lawns and landscapes for homes and businesses across Buncombe and Henderson counties.
It is still a family business. “I ain’t got no partners,” Beam says. “It’s just me, myself, my wife.” He has three helpers. Together they handle about 40 or 50 jobs a month. He sees clients by appointment only.
Fred Beam was an Army man before he was a landscaper. He served nine and a half years during the Vietnam War and received the Purple Heart after he was wounded, according to his obituary. He owned Beam’s Landscaping in Fairview, the business his son now runs, and later started a produce business at the farmers market. He died in 2009.
His son has kept the business close to home. The company buys its sod, turf grass, mulch, hardware and tools in the Asheville area, and over the years Lewis Beam has built partnerships with local businesses for most of the materials the crew uses, according to the company’s own description.
The work list is long. The crew mows and edges, trims hedges and shrubs, fertilizes, aerates and puts down mulch. It lays sod for customers who do not want to wait for seed to come up. On one sod job, a customer wrote, the crew leveled the yard and worked in topsoil and amendments before the sod went down. It clears leaves with blowers, because raking can damage a yard, the company writes. It hauls away brush piles, trash, scrap metal, brick and rock. When it snows, it clears driveways and sidewalks and plows commercial parking lots.
The hauling has a practical reason behind it. The company writes that recycling services around Asheville have become few and far between and that most companies have removed their recycling stations, which leaves families without a truck no easy way to get their junk to the dump.
The service area runs across two counties, from Weaverville and Leicester to Arden, Fletcher, Hendersonville and Black Mountain. Beam takes residential and commercial jobs alike.
Customers often mention that the owner works alongside his crew. One wrote that he was on site every day of a large installation. Susan H., who helped hire the company for a big cleanup on a Fairview property, wrote in a Google review that she was impressed to see Lewis right there with the crew, working just as hard as they did. Another customer, Ivan P., wrote that Beam shows up at the appointed time with a crew and a truckload of well-kept equipment, and gets a remarkable amount of work done quickly.
Some of the jobs are simply large. One customer wrote that the crew spread more than 30 yards of mulch across several acres, and that Beam came out to give an estimate the same day he was called. A homeowner had the crew haul off a brush pile that held eight years of debris, then called them back for a second pile. At a new development, the crew planted and mulched a steep slope.
Others noticed the details. One said the full crew arrived the week after the estimate, trimmed bushes, trees and hedges, spread 18 yards of mulch and hauled off bags of yard waste that nobody had asked them to take. A customer who had tried three other services wrote that Beam’s was the first to cure a weed problem that had spread across the lawn. Another noticed that the crew came back after the job to check on the lawn.
Beam runs all of this without a computer. “Only thing I got is a phone and a tablet,” he says. Email reaches him on his watch. “I always got my phone with me,” he says. He gets four or five calls a day. “Work is not the issue for me,” he says.
The crew is the limit. “I keep a three-man crew,” he says. Once the current list clears, he figures the crew could take on four or five more customers. Until then he takes what the three men can handle and lets the rest go by. “We do what we do now,” he says, “and then we leave the rest of it on the highway.”
He has no plans to sell the business his father started. “Selling the business is like selling melted ice cream,” he says.