Locally Owned and Operated

     Yellow River Landscaping LLC is a small landscaping company based in Covington, Georgia that was started in 2021. It was founded by Jacob Jensen and Trace Nicholson, two coworkers at Master Landscape Supply on highway 278 also in Covington. The company was built on a foundation of professionalism, hard work and accountability, which continue to be shown through our work and the testimonies of our valued customers. 

     Before landscaping or any thoughts of starting a business, there were just two friends from the third grade. We met playing flag football at the Covington YMCA at a very young age, and it was a love for the sport of football that carried on and had a large role in the development of Yellow River Landscaping. We both joined the Eastside High school football team during our freshman year, and became friends through playing football and the occasional pick up basketball games outside of school. Although we still had no thoughts of co-owning a business, this was what created the partnership. 

     The first steps towards the creation of the business was during our junior year at Eastside. Although we were in different periods, we had a project in a marketing class to create a small business and through this we both began separately doing small landscaping and lawn care jobs to make some extra money after school. After doing this for most of our junior year and enjoying hands-on outdoor work style, we both decided to make it a more full time activity. 

     We both applied and got more official jobs at Master Landscape Supply, a local supply and nursery owned by Mark Smith and Tim Reid, who much like ourselves, were partners in their small business. While working we continued to separately do small landscaping jobs on the side, which we found many more opportunities to do through customers who were looking for young kids to install the products they were buying, rather than hire a large company or do it themselves. We did this on our own for months before getting an offer for a large job filling in sinkholes, that was clearly too much for one person to do on their own, so we brought our services together and completed the work, which took over a week of one hour of working each day after work, which was about how long we had until the sun went down. From this point forward, every job was a two-man job. 

     We continued to spend most of our time working at Master Landscape Supply while doing our landscaping projects on weekends. We spent much of this time learning from Mark and Tim, who had twenty-five years of successful ownership experience, while we still were unsure of our plans of following that path. While employed by Master Landscape Supply, we gained extensive knowledge of horticulture and the local landscape processes. Through watching and learning the internal workings of business ownership, functional partnership, and their extensive understanding of the landscape industry, we were able to develop all the skills we needed to create a successful business of our own.

     In February of 2021 during our senior year we became licensed and decided to take a leap of faith and tell Mark and Tim that we would be leaving in the spring to continue on our own. They continued to take this time to teach us how to manage a business and tell us about all the mistakes they made early on, that they wanted us to avoid. This inspired us to use our business to continue this pattern as an opportunity to teach the youth in our community about business ownership and how to be successful as well as providing employment opportunities locally. 

     When spring came and we began on our own we still had a lot to learn through experience. We would go to school in the mornings and work for the second half of the day, and typically full days on the weekends. We still had to learn how to market our business, price jobs, and use multiple software programs to stay organized, and typically all in half a day while still having to put school work first. 

     After our first full year in business, we have continued to learn, grow, and pursue our goal to be a professional and reliable business for the benefit of our community. We maintain close relationships with all our clients, and currently are a five star rated company with multiple very positive reviews. We also continue to put Covington first and are currently the youngest members of the Newton County Chamber of commerce. All our testimonials are viewable on our website at yellowriverlandscaping.com, and we have continued to offer free estimates to anyone in or around Newton County, so give us a call and see our work for yourselves