Evangeline Anderson used to sell cars. Then she hired a man to put up her fence, and she asked him a question: if she brought him customers, would he give her a referral?
He said yes. “In less than three weeks I had sold over 45 jobs,” she says.
So she made him a second offer. “I told him I was going to walk out on faith and start my own fence company where he worked for me,” Anderson says. “He said yes.”
That was in the early 2000s. The company became Cascade Fence, which works out of an office on Fairburn Road in southwest Atlanta, and it has been in business ever since. The customer behind her first job, she says, is still with her.
She goes by Van, and the business calls her “the lady with the hammer,” a name she says is branded and trademarked. The tagline is “home of the lady with the hammer.”
Fences are still the base of the work: wood, chain link, aluminum and PVC, for homes and for commercial customers. But Anderson says she is now a general contractor who has built houses, and a fence job can turn into a whole yard. “When we put up a fence now we can stain the fence if they want,” she says. Her crews pour concrete and build decks, she says, and they take on landscaping, roofs, electrical and plumbing, so “you get to call one person to do everything you need in your yard.” She says every crew is certified. Customers get copies of the company’s insurance and business license, and the company pulls the permits.
The saleswoman never retreated to a desk. “I’m more hands on. I relate to the customer,” she says. “I actually get out and work with the guys.” She has no partners. “I’m the only one,” she says. “100% me.”
She is a Black woman who owns a fence company, and she says a lot of people in her part of the city like working with her for that reason. The business describes itself as Black-owned and female-owned.
The pace she learned on a car lot shows up in how the first visit goes. A homeowner who was referred to Anderson described it in a review: within a few hours she was at the house, measuring, recording the project and listening to what the homeowner wanted, and she had an invoice ready within 30 minutes. The crew finished in three days.
She plans to keep the company in the family. “I’m just going to hand it to my grandson,” she says. She has him working toward an air conditioning license.
Anderson is originally from Jackson, Mississippi, and she credits her mother for the way she works. Her mother’s motto: “If you got time to lean, you got time to clean.”