Sometimes the crew arrives with a plant and the homeowner decides it isn’t what they wanted after all. Grayson Blackie doesn’t argue. The plant gets changed out.
“We’re very willing and able to change it out and make the customer happy,” says Blackie, who owns Goose Creek Landscaping in Franklin with Ernest McKennon.
The same instinct shapes how he handles the parts of the job he can’t control. “Landscaping is unpredictable in terms of scheduling and weather,” he says. A job can slide a few days, sometimes a week, and sometimes the delay comes down to the plants. His rule is to tell the customer as soon as he knows. “Just communicate to them whenever you know something,” he says. Most people take it in stride. The ones who don’t are rare, he says.
He says Goose Creek has never had a no-show, and he traces that to the way he grew up. “It’s not even just business wise and helping the business,” he says. “It’s more out of respect for them and their time.” Plenty of companies don’t show up, he says, and “I don’t want to be known for that.” What he wants instead, in his words, is “to make sure that we’re both on the same page fully throughout the whole process.”
Goose Creek does mostly residential work, and most of that is installation: tearing out and redoing whole landscape beds. The crew also builds retaining walls, smaller patios and fire pit areas. Franklin is the biggest market, followed by Brentwood, with some work around Spring Hill.
A homeowner who had the crew redo a set of front-yard beds described a two-day job, one day to pull out the old plantings and prep, the next to plant and mulch. Blackie offered ideas on flow and color, the homeowner said afterward, and when plans changed at the last minute the crew went along with it.
Blackie dates the business to 2021, when he was a student at Middle Tennessee State University and his partner was still in high school. It became a full-time job in 2023, after Blackie graduated. The crew is four people: the two partners, McKennon’s brother and one more worker.
He would like to run multiple crews someday but is wary of getting there too fast. He has watched companies scale quickly, he says, and seen their quality slip and their customers grow unhappy. “Time is the biggest thing,” he says.
The company’s name came from a road. “Goose Creek Bypass is the road that my buddy lives off of,” Blackie says. When the partners were trying to come up with a name, that was the one they landed on.