Matt Jesson has been an entrepreneur since the age of 9, when he started his own neighborhood lawn-cutting business, Jesson Landscaping, in Havertown, Pennsylvania. He built his customer base by going door-to-door to his neighbors and asking if they needed their lawns cut. Jesson knocked on enough doors and got enough referrals that, before he knew it, he had over 100 customers and was hiring his friends to do much of the mowing.
Jesson was still running Jesson Landscaping though his college years at West Chester University, where he also played football, all the way through his early 20s. In 2004, he transitioned from landscaping to lawn care with the founding of Green Lawn Fertilizing. In the early years of Green Lawn Fertilizing, Jesson was a sponge. He called every business leader in the lawn care industry he felt he could learn from and traveled all over the country to pick their brains.
In addition to learning the secrets to running a successful lawn care business, he was building important business relationships that have been invaluable in the subsequent years. One of the things he took away was that if you hire and develop the right leaders, just about everything else will fall into place. Jesson took that lesson to heart, hiring a top-level senior management team, investing in education (including sending himself and multiple other company leaders to Harvard Business School) and starting an internal leadership development program to cultivate future company leaders from within.
Green Lawn Fertilizing/Green Pest Solutions is the largest independently owned and operated lawn care and pest control company servicing the Greater Philadelphia and tri-state area. “We make our customer’s lawns green, healthy and weed free and their homes pest free,” the company said. “Our core services are our Green Lawn Program, which is an eight-application fertilizer and weed control program, and our all-inclusive quarterly pest control services.”
Jesson was named Entrepreneur of the Year in Greater Philadelphia by Ernst & Young. In 2019, he received the Entrepreneurial Success Award for the Eastern Pennsylvania Small Business Association. In 2017, Jesson received Lawn & Landscape Magazine’s Leadership Award.
He led Green Lawn Fertilizing/Green Pest Solutions from $0 in revenue in 2004 to over $37 million in annual revenue in 2022. The company has experienced positive growth every single year in between, including over 20% growth each of the past five years, and 100% of that growth is organic. “The accomplishment that Matt is most proud of is being named a best place to work four years in a row by the Philadelphia Business Journal,” the company said. “The reason for this is because Matt is all about putting his team members first, and being named a best place to work based on anonymous employee surveys is validation that GLF/GPS team members love their job and love working for his company.”
