Tyrrell Hughes is the Founder of American Landscape. For 40 years, he has served as the company’s guiding light. His experience in landscape maintenance, design and development, and snow management services are steeped in breadth. He has worked, planned, and helped lead in every aspect of the company’s existence and that continues to this day. Tyrrell works with an extremely loyal group of clients and he deeply enjoys working on creative projects.
Tyrrell was raised in a small Midwestern farming community and went to school in a one-room country school. His father was an early practitioner of sustainable agriculture and conservation, taking a rundown farm that would grow corn only 4 feet high and yield barely 35 bushels per acre, and through patience, hardwork, suffering and practicing restorative agriculture, changed that land into the most productive in the area, winning a national award in 1947. “I remember to this day my father scooping up soil in his hands in a freshly plowed field on a Thanksgiving Day, running it between his fingers, demonstrating he could tell by feel the qualities or deficiencies of that soil.” These early experiences proved profoundly formative and ultimately led him to return to working the land, but in a different way than his father.
In the early 2000’s, Tyrrell’s son Shea, an accomplished CPA was serving as a controller for a manufacturing company in Tennessee. Through his business experience, Shea began to have the desire to run his own company. With the timing being right, Shea and Tyrrell began having long distance discussions about the operations of American Landscape. In 2002 the talk became reality: Shea’s experience elsewhere earned him the position of managing the company and helping directly shape the next phase of American Landscape’s future.
In the time since, Shea has made it his mission to take American Landscape to the next level. Shea became the President of American Landscape in 2004. Under his management, we have seen significant growth in all key company landscape service ventures, particularly in design and development, a stronger supervisory staff, an advanced sales team, and implementation of fresh ideas for productivity, customer service, and overall viability.
American Snow Professionals: In 2004, Shea created American Snow Professionals, a division of American Landscape created to focus exclusively on commercial snow and ice management. Shea earned national recognition by sitting for the rigorous “Certified Snow Professional” instituted by the Snow and Ice Management Association, becoming only the second individual in the state of Wisconsin to receive the designation. Other staff followed suit and by 2008, American Landscape became the only company in the state of Wisconsin with three “Certified Snow Professional” staff members. Correspondingly, professional credentials and certifications have risen up among all the staff.
New Snow and Ice-Control Building: By 2009 American Snow Professionals was in need of its own facility so that we would eliminate the high likelihood of being at the whims of salt companies that cut-off supplying contracted salt without warning even in an average snow year, sending it instead to the municipalities. The facility, completed in early 2010, houses more than 5,000 tons of salt, allowing us the capacity standing alone against any other local competitor to literally guarantee more than an entire season’s supply of salt prior to the first snow flake falling.
Building Company Family: The accomplishment Shea feels strongest about has been building an ever stronger sense of company family, with recognition and reward for achievement. Signature to this end, he developed an annual awards presentation to recognize countless team members for their contributions. Shea believes strongly in developing the next generation of leaders in the company and sees appreciation, loyalty and recognition as ways to show that no contribution is small. Shea aspires for American Landscape to be the kind of place where every person is treated with human dignity and immense respect. “We are great because we aspire to be so and we never stop trying,” Shea often says at company meetings.
