“Everyone’s really happy to pay their bill,” says Chris Wallenburg, and he has a specific reason.
When a job at Solid Rock Landscaping ends, the invoice lists the time and materials the crew actually used. The customer can lay it beside the itemized estimate written before any work began. “You see exactly what changed,” Wallenburg says, “in a very detailed way.”
That is how the company bills: for what the job took, not a flat number agreed on in advance. “We typically don’t even take deposits at all,” he says. The arrangement depends on the first document being detailed enough to hold up against the last one.
Solid Rock is a family company in West Des Moines. Jon Wallenburg, Chris’s brother, started it in 2003. Originally from Rock Valley, Iowa, Jon worked as a laborer and foreman in northwest Iowa, then spent three years running a landscaping operation for Wolf Construction in Des Moines before going out on his own. Chris is the other co-owner. He handles the consultations, designs and estimates. Jon manages the crews and checks the job sites.
The estimate starts with a walk around the property, usually 30 to 60 minutes, spent on how the space should work as much as how it should look. Within about two weeks the customer gets a first-draft CAD design and a fully itemized cost estimate.
Customers notice what happens when the two documents disagree in their favor. One homeowner, who wanted a low-maintenance yard, more privacy and the metal footings of a shed covered, wrote that the final bill came in under the estimate and that the brothers honored the lower number, adding that it would have gone unnoticed if they hadn’t pointed it out.
The work is mostly residential. Many of the customers have lived in their houses for years; some jobs are new construction, and commercial work is a small slice. The core of the business is hardscape: paver patios, fire pits and outdoor living areas. The crews also build retaining walls from block or boulders, set edging rock and plants, and take on water diversion, tile spouts and basement window wells.
Water features get Wallenburg’s enthusiasm. “They’re all different,” he says. “Everyone is very unique.”
He is just as clear about what the company leaves alone. “We don’t mow grass, we don’t spread chemicals, we don’t install irrigation systems,” he says. The brothers keep Solid Rock to design and construction.
Chris did not start out headed for any of this. He grew up in northwest Iowa and served in the military. When he got out, his brother got him a job at Green World in Sioux Center, where Jon was working at the time. Chris had planned on commercial art or graphic design. Landscaping changed his mind.
“I really felt like I could use my creative skills and art background to pursue something a little more outdoor instead of being stuck in a cubicle,” he says.
He went to college in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, for landscape design and horticulture technology and came out with an associate degree. He then worked for a run of companies in different corners of the horticulture business, including a season of pest management around Sun Valley and Twin Falls, Idaho, before settling in central Iowa and going to work with Jon.
The art training shows up at the design stage. Wallenburg exports his CAD drawings as 3D renderings and builds a video walkthrough of the planned landscape, so a customer can see the patio or pond before anyone breaks ground. The result, he says, is “a full animated walkthrough video with birds chirping and butterflies and, heck, you can feed the fish.”