Our story

Built from experience.
Built to last.
Still just getting started.

Granite Hills wasn’t created in a boardroom. It was built over years of experience, hard lessons, relationships, setbacks, opportunities, and a belief that there was a better way to build a landscaping company.

Our name came later.
The foundation came first.

The Foundation

2011 The foundation

Built on hard-earned lessons.

Granite Hills’ story begins with LandCare Innovations and our founder, Chip Eleazer.

Before founding LandCare Innovations, Chip helped grow a landscape business across the Southeast during the housing boom. When the Great Recession hit, revenue fell sharply, and Chip and his longtime business partner eventually went separate ways. The experience shaped what he wanted to build next.

In 2011, he founded LandCare Innovations in Charlotte, North Carolina, with a clear conviction: take care of people, build genuine relationships, do great work, keep your word, and create something built to last.

The company was small.
The ambition wasn’t.

Those early lessons still shape Granite Hills today.

2020 A bigger vision

A shared vision for what came next.

Nearly a decade after founding LandCare Innovations, Chip Eleazer connected with Kreamer Rooke and Station Partners. Station Partners invested in the company in November 2020, and Justin Martin joined shortly afterward.

Chip continued to serve as CEO through 2025, providing continuity as the company entered its next phase. During that five-year transition, Justin took on increasing responsibility and helped drive the culture, build the leadership team, lead investor relationships, and shape the company’s growth.

Chip, Kreamer and Justin brought different backgrounds and different strengths, but a shared belief that the commercial landscaping industry could be better.

Better for the people doing the work.
Better for our customers.
Better for leaders ready to build.
Better for owners seeking the right home for their business.

We didn’t have a new name.
We didn’t have a polished brand.
We didn’t have everything figured out.

But we knew what we wanted to build.

2021–2022 Building the foundation

Growth came quickly.

GroundWorks joined us in Raleigh-Durham in 2021, followed by Sodfather in Greenville-Spartanburg later that year. New teammates joined. Leaders stepped up. Customers trusted us with more.

Five Granite Hills team members standing together outdoors.

As we grew, we made deliberate choices about the company we wanted to build: a place where people could grow, customers knew what to expect, and local leaders could keep the relationships and accountability that made their businesses strong.

The name could wait.

Becoming Granite Hills

We built the company
before we built the brand.

2022–23 Becoming Granite Hills

Then we needed a name.

We tried to put into words what we had been building, and it turned out to be harder than we expected. We worked with outside experts and explored names, identities, and ideas.

Nothing quite felt like us.

So we went back to the foundation, and eventually the answer came from within.

Granite

Granite is strong, durable, and foundational. In its natural form, it can be rough and unassuming. With work and refinement, its character emerges.

No two pieces are exactly alike. We see ourselves in that: different people, backgrounds, and strengths coming together to build something stronger.

Build something stronger together.

Hills

Hills connect us to the landscapes at the heart of our work. They also remind us that growth takes effort and the journey keeps going.

We keep moving, learning, and taking on the next climb.

Keep getting better.

Granite Hills wasn’t a name we put on a company. It became the name for the company we’d already started building.

Still Building

Heads down.
Building.

And then we got back to work. We expanded into new markets, added capabilities, developed leaders, welcomed great companies and people into Granite Hills, and grew organically by earning customers’ trust one relationship at a time.

For years, one of our team members called us “the biggest landscaping company nobody had ever heard of.” We kind of loved it. We weren’t trying to impress anyone, and we weren’t particularly interested in what everyone else was doing.

We were heads down building.

Building teams.
Building careers.
Building customer relationships.
Building systems.

Making mistakes. Learning. Getting better.

And challenging ourselves to raise the standard for what a commercial landscaping company could be.

Two Granite Hills team members standing beside a Granite Hills truck.

What can’t change

Growth changes a lot.
It shouldn’t change who we are.

Granite Hills today is very different from the company that started this journey, and we’re nowhere close to finished.

We intend to grow. We intend to enter new markets, create opportunities for more people, serve more customers, welcome more great companies to our team, and make a greater impact in our communities.

But getting bigger isn’t the point.
Becoming better is.

Granite Hills team members sharing a meal together in the shop.

As we grow, there are things we refuse to outgrow:

Our humility and scrappiness.
Our belief in local leadership.
Our obsession with getting better, and owning our mistakes.
Our belief that no one is too important to roll up their sleeves and help the team.

We don’t ever want Granite Hills to become the kind of company that forgets what made it successful in the first place.

The next chapter

The story is still being written.

We’re proud of how far we’ve come, but we’re far more excited about what’s ahead.

We’re building a place where passionate people can build exceptional careers and lives.
We’re building a partner our customers can count on.
And we’re building an organization that gives back to the communities that have given us so much.

There are a lot of chapters still to write.

WE’RE BUILDING SOMETHING BIGGER THAN LANDSCAPING.

And we’re just getting started.

Built from experience.Built to last.Still just getting started.