When a crew lead at No Limit Landscape sees one of the workers doing a better job than normal, the lead tells the owners. Those reports feed what the company calls its three-strike rule, and here the strikes are good ones. “Once somebody gets three strikes, we give them a gift card,” Keith Smith says. The card is for a place to get dinner, and the point, he says, is “to keep the morale up.”
The rule is one of several small systems Keith describes. Most of the others face the customer and deal with a plainer problem: knowing when the crew is coming, and hearing about it when it isn’t.
Keith runs the company with his twin brother, Kyle. Both wanted a business of their own long before they had a chance to start one, he says. They settled on landscaping because they both liked working outdoors, and they launched No Limit in 2023. Keith’s bio on the company’s site says he started working in the industry at 13.
Commercial maintenance is what he wants the company known for. The accounts include a number of FedEx locations and what he calls high-end properties, and he credits the work for landing them. “Our good work is what really got us into those,” he says. The company lists a dozen towns near its base in Fords as its home territory, among them Edison, Metuchen, Perth Amboy and Old Bridge. Keith says they try to stay as local as possible but take work statewide, with properties as far north as Jersey City and Newark and around Union.
The brothers handle clients themselves. “It’s face to face. The client is dealing with myself or my brother,” Keith says. “It’s not like they’re dealing with 10, 15 different people.” Other people may be working in the back end, he says, but the client won’t know it.
Inside the company, he says, he and Kyle lead by example and do a lot of training, and the office has plenty of slogans. The idea he comes back to is that a customer should be treated the way the brothers would want to be treated.
Estimates run on a deadline. Customers typically get one within 24 hours, Keith says. When a job is big enough that pricing it will take longer, “we have no issues being honest with that customer and letting them know.”
The company has also built systems to notify customers before a crew arrives. One client whose office property the company looks after has praised Keith for warning her ahead of a snow or ice event and leaving her room to change the plan. She also noted the care he takes with the drainage pipe on the property.
Keith does not claim every day goes to plan. “There’s times where things happen where we’re not going to make it,” he says, “but we’re going to let that customer know.”