How a Summer Job on a Golf Course Shaped a CEO | Stories With Traction Podcast

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Show Notes:

In this episode, Matt Zaun sits down with Christopher Brown, co-founder and CEO of Teed & Brown, to unpack what it really takes to grow a thriving service business from the ground up. Christopher shares how a teenage summer job on a golf course shaped his work ethic, how the right partnership fueled early growth, and what it took to scale from a two-man operation to over 135 employees, with plans to double in size.

In this conversation, they dive into:

✅ The power of pairing street smarts with book smarts
✅ Why the best leaders build teams of people better than themselves in specialized roles.
✅ The “1 to 10” rule

…and much more!

BIOS:

Christopher Brown is the co-founder and CEO of Teed & Brown, a leading lawn care service company serving Connecticut, New York, and beyond. Since 1995, Teed & Brown has grown from a two-man startup to a regional industry leader recognized for its consistent quality, strategic growth, and a culture that attracts top talent.

Matt Zaun is an award-winning speaker and strategic storytelling expert who shows leaders how to inspire action and drive results through the power of story. With a track record of helping 300+ organizations transform sales, marketing, and culture, Matt helps decision-makers lead with clarity and connection.

 

*Below is an AI-generated transcript, which may contain errors

 

Matt Zaun 

I'm excited for this conversation because today I'm joined by Christopher Brown, co-founder and CEO at Teed & Brown.

 

Christopher Brown (Teed & Brown)

Welcome to the show, Christopher. Thank you for having me, Matt. I appreciate it.

 

Matt Zaun 

Ian, I appreciate your time. I know you're incredibly busy, so I really appreciate you spending time with us today.

I just want to dive right into what you do as a business. Just give the audience a sense of your business, how many people you have out in the field, and what your main focus is as it pertains to lawn care.

 

Christopher Brown (Teed & Brown)

Sure, yeah. We are a lawn care service provider. We don't do mowing or cleaning up leaves or the things that you might think of when you think of lawn care.

We provide the treatment services, so fertilizer, weed control, controlling insects, that sort of thing. Also a lot of seeding work.

Aerating. And then we also provide irrigation services, so we do sprinkler systems. you. Youυérieur. You're Both installation and general maintenance of those systems.

And then on top of that, some other isolated, smaller project-type work, like bringing in topsoil or sod or something on an as-needed one-off basis.

And yeah, that's what we do.

 

Matt Zaun 

Okay, and what's the area that you serve best? Just to give people the scope of where you are.

 

Christopher Brown (Teed & Brown)

Yeah, we service most of the western half of Connecticut. And if you just sort of draw a line vertically through the middle of Connecticut, the left half is – we do have a few clients on the right half, not a lot, but we're mostly on the left half.

And if you want to dive down even more, the majority of our client base is down in lower Fairfield County, Connecticut.

So that's a very small section in the very southwest of Connecticut. I tell people if you look at a map of Connecticut, it looks kind like a rectangle with this weird little thing sticking down on the bottom left.

And that weird little thing is where a good chunk of our client base is.

 

Matt Zaun 

And then just over the border into New York, we have about maybe 20 to 25. 5% of our client base is in Westchester, Putnam, and Dutchess Counties, New York.

And then we'll also go a little bit to New Jersey. We're starting to build out our New Jersey customer base right now, but it's mainly Connecticut and New York at the moment.

Okay. And how long have been in business and how many employees?

 

Christopher Brown (Teed & Brown)

We started in 1995, September of 1995 is when we actually legally incorporated the business. We picked up a handful of clients that fall and really started hitting the ground running in the spring of 96.

And right now we have about 135 employees.

 

Matt Zaun

Okay, great. So I want to backtrack a little bit. I want to talk a little bit about your younger self, okay?

Because I think it's important for people to understand your upbringing, what positioned you for leadership, for business. So I want to go back.

If we had a remote and we could hit the rewind button, what did Christopher as a teenager want to

 

Christopher Brown (Teed & Brown)

Oh, boy, oh, boy. If you go back and say, can we find some evidence that this person would become an entrepreneur and a business leader, you wouldn't have been able to find any of that with the most powerful telescope in the world staring into my brain.

I wasn't very focused. I had parents who, thankfully, both good and bad, they really were wonderful parents, and they did a great job, made sure we had a good roof over our heads and good opportunities in life.

My father was a pretty successful guy in the marketing industry and set a very good example that way in terms of wonderful work ethic.

But I was also the kind of guy who, as a teenager, my parents would tell me, you've got to clean your room, and I just would ignore them for weeks on end until finally they browbeat me into doing it.

I didn't want to do my homework. I didn't want to do anything like that. I don't know why. I just wasn't super motivated.

But I had a certain amount of innate intelligence, so I did reasonably well in school. It did require them to sort of crack the whip to make sure I was doing my homework and doing the studying.

And then when I got my first summer job, or my first job was actually at a bakery. And something clicked when I got into a work environment.

And I don't know if it was the fact that I was taking home a paycheck and suddenly felt like, hey, I owe these people my best efforts.

And I don't feel like I owe my parents my best efforts, which, you know, there's a very small worldview as a teenager.

We don't really have the whole big picture. And then I went from there. I worked in the bakery for like a year or so.

And then I wanted to get outside because I felt like I'd missed the whole summer sitting in an air-conditioned bakery.

smelled nice, but I missed the whole summer. So the next year, I got a job on the maintenance crew at a local golf course.

And I remember going out there and working, and they would put me in charge of things. And the superintendent just really took a liking to me because he saw that I did have a strong work ethic, and I did want to do a good job.

And so he started, you know, giving me more and more responsibility. Thank you. You Letting me get a better understanding of what it was, what goes into actually maintaining a golf course.

And I remember he called my parents at one point in time, because I was about maybe 16, 17, and just said, boy, you know, Christopher is such a great kid.

I can't, you know, if he has any other friends that, you know, that need work, I'd love to have him here.

My parents were like, is this my son you're talking about? What are you, really? Like, he's actually showing up.

I think they thought I was going to go out there and flop and then learn a good life lesson that, hey, you need to really put it forward, put your best foot forward out there.

But for some reason, it just clicked, and I really enjoyed working and, you know, feeling as though I had actually earned that paycheck, whatever it was, whether it was big or small, just the fact that I had earned it.

So I think that maybe, you the strong work ethic was somehow there, as long as there was a paycheck involved.

So I guess that would be the only thing right there. But I didn't have a strong entrepreneurial streak as a teenager.

 

Matt Zaun 

That really came later when I was in college. You did mention that your father was successful in the marketing world.

Do you think... That you seeing him and just being in that environment of success helped get you ready when you were a teen to show up and actually do a good job?

 

Christopher Brown (Teed & Brown)

Oh, 100%. Yeah. I think it just showed me that if you do focus and you do have a career goal and you work hard and you try to be the best at what you do, you can see some real success.

Now, don't want to oversell it and say we were living in the lap of luxury or anything. I would say maybe upper middle class.

But certainly a nice home and nicer than what a lot of my friends' parents were able to provide for them.

And, yeah, I just think that sort of attitude of focusing as a significant part of your life on achieving something significant in your career, you know, both for the monetary benefits, but also just for that self-satisfaction.

Like, hey, look, I left my mark on the world. I did something really cool. That left a laughing impression on me.

 

Matt Zaun 

And so I think that was a big motivator. Yeah. Wow. Okay. So you're outside. You're a part of this maintenance crew.

then at that moment, did you say, hey, I want to figure out how to build a business outside because you enjoyed being out?

 

Christopher Brown (Teed & Brown)

Not quite that quickly. What happened was each summer, I would go back to the golf course for a few summers, for the last couple summers in high school.

And after I graduated high school, I went off to college for my first year and had zero idea what I wanted to do.

I really didn't have any idea. And the idea of starting up a business still wasn't really much of a thing in my mind.

But I found myself my first whole year of college just taking a general smattering of liberal arts classes, hoping that something would really trigger something in me to think, hey, this is a career path I might like to pursue.

But I found myself that whole first year just looking forward to getting back out on the golf course the next summer and looking forward to that summer job.

And then at some point, I just thought, well, you I think there's something to this. I'm really enjoying that.

Let me talk to the superintendent and find out what would it take to become a golf course superintendent. And so that's what I did.

And I went back. Over the summer, and he was all excited to think, oh, wow, you want to go down this career path?

That's pretty cool. And he said, well, the first thing you have to do is you have to go to Penn State, which they have a very well-known turfgrass program at Penn State, and that's where he had graduated from.

So he pointed me in that direction, and my first year had been at Franklin and Marshall, which is another Pennsylvania college down in the Lancaster area, much, much smaller.

Very good school that, quite frankly, in retrospect, they probably should not have let me into because I was an okay student in high school, but I had a very hard time keeping up.

It's a very good school, especially for pre-med and pre-law students, and I wasn't really in that caliber as a student at that time in my life.

So, yeah, so that was the next step, is it got me, I looked into transferring to Penn State. I don't want to take you through the whole journey to get to that point, but my grades at Franklin and Marshall were not really good enough to get me into Penn State, so I had to kind of go through a backdoor.

Long story, I don't want to bore you with the whole thing. But yeah, I went there and started studying about turfgrass science with the hope of becoming a golf course superintendent.

 

Matt Zaun 

Wow. Okay. So then you go from being a golf course superintendent. I'm guessing you attained that position?

 

Christopher Brown (Teed & Brown)

No, no, never did.

 

Matt Zaun 

Oh, wow.

 

Christopher Brown (Teed & Brown)

Okay. So I, you know, studying in school, I was there. And, you know, over the summers, we'd do internships at different golf courses.

And of course, I got to know a lot of the other guys in the program. And at that time, that industry was such that they were building up golf courses left and right.

But there was a ton of other young people like myself getting into that industry for just really exactly the same reason.

They had had a job at a golf course, really enjoyed it, liked being outside, liked. I think the job appealed on a superficial level to those of us who are very prone to ADHD because you're outside riding around in a golf cart, checking out what's going on.

And then you get back to the shop and then maybe you have some budgeting to do, and then you have a crew to manage and then.

So you're not staring at a computer all day or staring at books all day or doing any one thing for prolonged periods of time.

You've got a variety of responsibilities. And so that looked like something I might really enjoy. And so the same thing appealed to so many other people that what was happening was by the time I graduated, you had probably 300 people applying for every open job.

And so what the golf courses did is leaned into the economics of it, supply and demand, let's pay as little as we have to pay and get as much out of these people as we can.

And I was watching guys working 100 hours a week for very little money and having maybe a seven-year time horizon before having a legitimate shot at a decent superintendent job.

 

Matt Zaun

Wow.

 

Christopher Brown (Teed & Brown)

And I thought to myself, you know, that doesn't appeal to me. I like the work of managing a golf course, but I don't want to kill myself.

I do want to have a personal life outside of there. And so I started while my last year or two in college seeing the writing on the wall and thinking about

What else could I do with this education that I've been able to pull together? And I started thinking about maybe going in a more entrepreneurial way.

Right before I graduated, I did get a call from an acquaintance in the industry who was a superintendent, was looking for a new assistant, and he had worked with me for one of the summers on the golf course and really liked me.

And he said, look, I heard you're graduating. If you want the assistant job, it's yours. And all of my friends were just having a really hard time finding anything.

And I thought, boy, I'd be a real jerk to turn this down because it's just being handed to me on a silver platter here.

So I decided, okay, let me give this a shot. Let me see what happens here. And usually you'd work as an assistant for a few years and then apply for a superintendent job somewhere.

So I got out and spent maybe three months and realized this was a mistake. I just wasn't happy. The work of being on the crew is one thing.

Then the work of being in some sort of a leadership management position of much more responsibility was a whole different ball of wax.

And that was my first introduction to that fact of life. So I got – and then about that time, I met who became my eventual business partner, Peter Teed, through the fact that his older brother was dating my older sister.

And he worked at a local lawn care company. I don't want to say the name, but it was a national franchise.

And the owner of that franchise was making about 10 times what the superintendent I worked for made. And he worked about 150 hours.

And I thought, okay, that's looking a whole lot nicer to me than the pet track I'm on right now.

And I could take you through all the twists and turns in that story, but that's what headed me down that other path.

 

Matt Zaun 

Wow. Okay. So let's jump to when you start the company. The first year, was it what you'd expected? Or was it way more difficult?

 

Christopher Brown (Teed & Brown)

No, I think it was what we expected. And interestingly, I go back and my partner, Peter, and I, we – I don't think either one of us for even two seconds had any doubt that we'd be able to make a living.

Weeed to this. this? um How big we would be able to grow it and what kind of success we might attain in life.

We didn't have that really well defined out, but we knew we could make a living at it and a reasonably good living at it.

He was a fantastic salesman, still is. And it was a great combination of street smarts and book smarts, where I had the book smarts, which is funny because I go back and talk about how I wasn't a great student in high school and even in the early stages of college.

But I did figure out my way around and became actually quite a good student by the end of my college career, and I was very much enjoying it that way.

He was more of a people person and would go out there and sign up clients left and right. So we just said, hey, look, I'll organize everything from the back end, and I can bring in my deeper level of turf grass knowledge from the education that I just got.

You go out and pull in the business, and let's both go out and bust our butts and make this happen.

 

Matt Zaun 

And sure enough, it worked out really well. I appreciate you mentioning that, the street smarts and the book smarts perspective, because I'm sure there's a lot of people listening that –

 

Christopher Brown (Teed & Brown)

They might be lacking one of those, right?

 

Matt Zaun

And maybe it's not any fault of their own or partner's fault, but I think a big part of that is coaching, right?

Mentorship, at least reaching out for someone to fill that gap. So for me personally, I don't have a partner, but I've reached out for business mentorship and coaching in order to fill those gaps.

And I appreciate you mentioning that because a lot of times a lot of leaders are not willing to at least humble themselves to the point saying, I'm not the end-all, be-all, I can't be everything to everybody, that they need someone else in order to really help in that regard.

So I want to talk about that. I want you to talk about the humility piece as it pertains to leadership.

For leaders that they don't know what they don't know, those blind spots, what would you recommend that they do?

 

Christopher Brown (Teed & Brown)

Well, if they don't know what they don't know, that's a little – I think the key is you have to be very honest with yourself and try to figure out what you don't know.

And just accept the fact that there might be somebody better out there for you, for that particular role within the business.

And as long as you know sort of enough to understand what that person is doing and can let them do it really well, know, building a business and being a leader isn't about doing everything yourself.

And in fact, I think probably the best leaders, if you put them in a room with all the key executives and all the key leaders that they've pulled into their business and the managers, they're probably, if there's anybody in that room who isn't better than them at the key tasks that that person is doing, then they probably haven't chosen well.

You need to find people that are better than you at the things that you're hiring them to do.

 

Matt Zaun 

So we had mentioned the first year, and then what you just said about the executive team and leaders. At what point did you realize that you needed to make some really wise hires?

Was it after year one? Was it year two? At what point did you say? Say, this is much bigger than we can handle.

We need to reach out and get people that actually know what they're doing in other categories of the business.

 

Christopher Brown (Teed & Brown)

Yeah, it's probably about year 10. And it took us a lot longer than it probably should have. But the two of us, like I said, we did complement each other very well.

And so we were able to fill out a lot of the needs of the business without bringing anybody else in specifically.

And we had a crew out there working. And when we got to about year 10, we had grown the business to, I want to say, somewhere in the neighborhood of about $2 million in revenue.

And we had about 10 employees. And we were kind of stagnating. We literally had spent several years growing by 1% or 2%.

We didn't really have any down years, but we just were not growing very quickly at all. And we realized part of the problem there was that I was now stuck in the office.

So this is... I spending a lot of time doing what I would really think of now as busy work, a lot of charging credit cards, which we didn't have it automated at the time.

So I'm one by one charging credit cards for clients who wanted to pay for their service on a credit card, spending half of a day going through the week's charges and just doing that.

Whereas now it's automated and can all happen instantaneously. I was going through and adding up the payroll cards. I was talking to the insurance people, making sure the bills were paid, doing the bank reconciliations.

I was the accountant. was the marketing person. I was the HR person. And I wasn't very good at any of those things.

was just good enough to keep things afloat. And Peter was out there doing the sales and the customer retention.

So the customer called and complained about something. Peter would go out there and meet with them and talk them through and try to figure out a good solution as well as trying to bring in new clients.

And the crew was kind of left unmanaged. They were out there. We had some guys that had been working with us for several years, knew what they were doing.

Some of the people were doing a pretty darn good job. Some of the people really weren't, but they didn't have a whole lot of oversight.

And we realized this was a bottleneck for us. We needed to get some oversight. We needed to get some stability.

We needed to get some standards that were decided upon and enforced in a regular basis and in a fair way to help bring the crew into line and give us the ability to grow in a way that made sense, that our clients could expect a regular and predictable standard of care.

On a regular basis. So that's when we put out and we hired Chad, who became our COO and is still with us today.

That was about 12, 13 years ago, give or take. It's a little bit more than that now. But he, yeah, he came in.

He was a former golf course superintendent, actually, and left that business like I did much later than I did and took over the crew and really helped us whip that into shape, which allowed us to then start growing again.

Until we were able to get to the next inflection point that we had to change things up again. But yeah, it was somewhere in the 10-year range before we actually had to hire somebody.

We should have probably done it more in the six-year range, but we didn't realize that that's what we needed to do until we finally just figured it out.

 

Matt Zaun 

Wow. Talk to us about the growing pains from going from a 10-person operation to over 100 that you're at today.

 

Christopher Brown (Teed & Brown)

For anyone listening that's at that stage in their business, what would be some words of advice that you would have for them?

Something I didn't learn until many years later is that typically speaking, one good manager can handle somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 people on average.

They can't manage 20 people. You just can't do it. You can't give any one individual enough individualized attention. You can't keep tabs on things.

You can't coach people. You can't hold people accountable. It's just too many people. And that was something we didn't realize that there is sort of a one to 10 ratio.

In some cases, maybe it's only eight people. Sometimes maybe a really top-notch manager can handle 12, but it's not going to vary drastically from that 10.

And we didn't really realize that. And so as we started to grow and grow and grow, when Chad came in and took over, he was doing a pretty good job.

We had some turnover pretty quickly because some people didn't like the fact that they were now being held accountable and brought some new people in and remade the crew in a much more positive image.

And then we grew up and grew and grew. And then we got up to more like 20 and then 30 people.

And we were running into all the same kind of problems because it was one person trying to manage way too many.

And that's when, you know, and we all kind of realized it. so I said to him one day, I said, when did you start to feel like it was going to be too much?

Like how many vehicles out there on the road, usually two person per vehicle, do you feel like you could have handled effectively and properly?

And then once we started adding more vehicles, it became too much to handle. And he came right back at me, he said, seven.

That was just the number. And he said, once we got eight vehicles, then nine, then 10, things just started getting really out of hand.

So what we did at that point was took really our top crew guy, the guy who had demonstrated leadership characteristics and the guy who was upholding the standards of the company on a consistent basis and really somebody we could trust to do well.

And he became Chad's assistant and helped him to manage the crew. And then gradually we split it into a couple of teams, each one of them managing a different team of about 12 people.

And then as time went on, we split, we kind of stuck with that strategy and said, okay, we're going to need a manager for this many people.

And the managers are going to run it in this way. And we started to develop our internal way of managing a team.

But yeah, it really, you know, we started to learn these lessons just by, you know, first not... Learning a lesson and suffering the consequences of, you know, the lack of foresight and decision-making.

 

Matt Zaun 

Do you think the ability to delegate was tough early on in this phase? And if so, if anyone listening has struggled with delegation, what words of encouragement would you give to them in that regard?

 

Christopher Brown (Teed & Brown)

I think it can be tough. I don't think that was all that hard for me. I'm not a micromanager.

I'm not somebody who has to have control over everything. So, yeah, I don't know that I have any good words for wisdom, because for me, that part wasn't particularly tough.

And I think it's helped by the fact that I knew that I had somebody good in that position, and I didn't have to doubt them on a consistent basis.

So, yeah, you know, I was okay with delegating. So I don't know that I have any words of wisdom for somebody who's having a struggle trying to let go and let somebody else handle it.

 

Matt Zaun 

If we're to look five years in the future, where would you want to be? What are some things you're going to do to experience the next stage of growth?

 

Christopher Brown (Teed & Brown)

Yeah, so we're going to continue to grow. And the goal five years in the future, we would like to be about two to three times the size we are right now, which indicates somewhere closer to 300 employees.

We're going to have to get a few new physical locations. And in order to get there, what we really need to be doing, and we've been doing this quite a bit, is not only having our way of doing things, but really standardizing it in written format and creating more training programs internally.

And again, we've been doing this, and we just need to continue on with this in terms of standardizing things in a much more consistent way.

So just like you'll see. Large companies, let's go to the extreme example of Amazon, each one of their warehouses has standards on how they operate and how things are done in those warehouses.

And I guarantee that from warehouse to warehouse, it's pretty much the same set of operations. It's the same standards.

It's the same things people are doing. And the company's probably open to the idea of changing those if need be.

But there's an Amazon way to run a warehouse. And same thing, there's a Teed & Brown way to run a lawn care team and to make sure that services are being done properly at customer homes and that standards are being upheld.

So, and then, you know, and not just that those things are there, but that we are functionally watching the teams in a supportive but also critical way to make sure that they're, you know, upholding those standards and then being properly recognized and rewarded if they are and being held accountable if they're not.

And doing that with a very even hand and, you know, predictable. So that people, you know, really, need to make sure that all the employees in the company feel that whatever you're doing, you're doing it fairly across the board and that they're being given the same opportunities as everybody else.

And that, you know, you're not singling one person out. And so when you have different managers running different teams, they're going to have different personalities, you're going to have different ways of looking at things.

But ultimately, the employees on each one of those teams have to feel as though they're being treated the same as the employees on the other teams.

 

Matt Zaun 

Sure. Absolutely. That's a really good point. Thank you so much for sharing that. And thank you for your time today.

I really appreciate you spending time with us. There's three different things I'm going to have as a takeaway from this conversation, Christopher.

I really appreciate you sharing the street smarts and book smarts. I think that's really important because often we sometimes we think we might know it all when in essence, we need other people to help us.

need other people to lift us up. You know, for you, it was that partnership. For other people, it could be coaching.

could be mentorship. The second point is you mentioning someone out there is better than you. I really appreciate what you said about if you were to bring your executives and leaders in the same room, they should know more about you in a particular area of the business, and I appreciate you mentioning that.

And then the third and final piece, I really appreciate what you said about one good manager can lead 10 people on average.

I wish everyone properly understood that and implemented that in the business. They probably have way less turnover in their business by less people getting burned out.

So I think that's something that anyone listening to this episode should really think about, about those averages, trying to empower people, trying to figure out are there people properly equipped for the team that they are leading.

So I really appreciate those three points.

 

Christopher Brown (Teed & Brown)

If anyone wants to get more information on what you do, they want to reach out for your services, where's the best place they can go to get that information?

Sure, they can just, they can go to our website. website, which is just teedandbrown.com, and or they could email me, chris at teedandbrown.com.

 

Matt Zaun 

Perfect. Okay. I will include that in the show notes. People can just click and go from there. Really appreciate your time today, Christopher.

 

Christopher Brown (Teed & Brown)

Thank you so much. Well, thank you for having me. had a good time.