Chatting with ‘The Pond Guy’

An Interview by Lenny Giteck

When Greg Wittstock built his first watergarden in his family’s backyard at the ripe old age of 12, it was designed to provide a home for his pet turtles. Unfortunately, his treasured pets were not all that appreciative of a residence that leaked and had green water, so they fled the scene. He wound up ripping out and rebuilding the pond seven times over the next seven summers.

He’s been building ponds ever since, and with considerably greater success — so much so that Aquascape, the company he founded in 1991 to provide himself with part-time work while he attended college, does nearly $60 million in business annually. “I started out as a hobbyist,” says Wittstock, now 38, “and ponds became my life’s passion.”

Although Wittstock has invented and patented a number of pond components, what really set him apart was his innovation of assembling and marketing prepackaged pond systems (he doesn’t like the term “kits”) that made building ponds easier and more efficient. Indeed, Inc. magazine, for whom he now writes a regular business blog, once dubbed him “the Henry Ford of ponds.”

To some in the watershaping industry, Wittstock — who anointed himself “The Pond Guy” and trademarked the title — is a brilliant and enormously successful entrepreneurial wunderkind; others have reviled him for his alleged arrogance and aggressive approach to business.

Wittstock is certainly one the nation’s high-profile watershapers. In addition to his Inc. blog, he has appeared on numerous television shows and has been featured in many newspaper and magazine articles. Aquascape has made Inc.’s annual “Top 500 Companies to Watch” four times, and Wittstock himself was named one of the nation’s best bosses to work for by Fortune magazine.

That may be due in large part to Aqualand, the company’s 256,000-square-foot headquarters in St. Charles, Ill. Completed in late 2005 and topped by what the company says is the largest sloping “green roof” in North America, the facility is loaded with employee amenities — including a gym, hot tub, basketball court and indoor soccer field. Aqualand is also fronted by an enormous and spectacular waterfeature (“World’s Most Extreme Pond,” according to the company) and is bordered on one side by the opulent AquaGardens, which are open for public viewing.

Recently, we spoke with Wittstock about Aquascape and the business philosophy behind his phenomenal success.

Talk about the Eureka Moment when you got the idea to put together prepackaged pond systems.

It came to me when I started breaking down the construction of every waterfeature into a step-by-step, sequential process. I realized I could use the same 20 components to build any waterfeature, whether it was a small backyard pond or a one-acre lake.

Many people in the industry reacted negatively, thinking that by turning watergardens into a commodity, you cheapened what had been a truly artistic profession.

The perception when we started was that, because every waterfeature should be unique, the installation techniques to build it must be unique — and that perception is wrong.

I’m sitting here looking out my office window at what I consider to be the Grand Canyon of waterfeatures. It required approximately 26 million pounds of stone, yet it was built with the exact same methodology I use to build a small backyard watergarden. It just took bigger rocks and more thought.

The truth is, each pond we build is a custom creation, because every rock we use is unique, every setting is different, and so forth. Actually, I’m convinced that our system frees up people to be even more artistic.

In what way?

By standardizing the process, you can spend a lot more of your time and energy on creative details — like exactly how to position the stone, where to place the stream and so forth. You don’t have to spend nearly as much time thinking about how to hook up the pumps and what kind of filter system you should install.

So, are you a businessman or an artist?

Hopefully, I’m both. We coined the phrase “Ponds Done Right,” which in my view entails three aspects. The first is that the pond has to be beautiful. The second is that the pond needs to be low-maintenance. The third — and this is the one that eludes many people in this industry — is that building the pond has to be profitable.

A lot of people out there build beautiful waterfeatures, and they might even be low-maintenance. But there are not a lot of people building beautiful, low-maintenance and profitable waterfeatures – certainly not to the level of profitability they need to grow their businesses. In my opinion, they’re not businesspeople, they’re hobbyists.

Some attribute your success to your ability as a marketer.

It’s true that we’ve figured out how to package our product and to market it in a way that sells. But to dismiss Aquascape as just a marketing company is to dismiss what I’m looking at right now outside my office window, which is as beautiful a waterfeature as you’ll find anywhere in the world.

What else has been key to your success?

Nobody does more education and training than we do. We have 439 distributor locations nationwide, and we’ve put on thousands of seminars for them. We have a training division that either works directly with distributors or has educated our longtime distributors to conduct their own training.

You could say that holding a seminar on how to build a pond in a day is a marketing vehicle — and I wouldn’t argue with that. At our seminars for potential Aquascape Certified Contractors, we say, “Hey, here’s what we’ve done, here’s how we’ve done it, and you can do it, too. We’ll give you the plan, and you just have to follow it.”

You’ve developed quite a larger-than-life persona. Has it been a factor in your success?

There definitely has been method behind the madness: Whether I want to admit it or not, pride and ego have been involved. But the marketing principle has also been sound. Basically, I sell my own Horatio Alger story: “If I can do this, you can too, buddy.” That’s where my signature thumbs-up stance, my emphasis on carpe diem and the persona of “The Pond Guy” come in.

Look, I have diehard fans — and then there are other people who look at me and conclude that I’m all about pride and ego. They say, “This guy is brash and ballsy.” OK, I admit it: I’m brash and ballsy. I’m a blocking fullback with a contractor’s mindset. But I mainly developed the persona because it supports the Horatio Alger story.

What is it about ponds that makes them appealing to people?

Nothing else homeowners can put on their property can have as much impact or as much curb appeal while providing as much tranquility as a waterfeature. Water is life, and at Aquascape, we sell the water lifestyle.

Unfortunately, this industry is still very focused on the technical benefits of products. They want to sell the features of widgets. Well, homeowners don’t even see the widgets when their waterfeature is built, and unless they’re engineers, they don’t care about the pond’s mechanical apparatus.

What does resonate with homeowners is knowing that the waterfeature will look beautiful and have a positive impact on their lives. That’s our focus.

There aren’t a lot of corporate headquarters with all the amenities that yours has. Why did you build Aqualand?

As the CEO of Aquascape, my most important job is guiding and guarding the company culture. Our company culture is a reflection of who I am; I was an athlete in my younger days, and I was raised with the idea that if people sweat together, they stick together.

That’s why I wanted to have a gym at Aquascape where employees could work out, and facilities where they could play volleyball and baseball and soccer. It’s so they can bond while they’re were having fun, whether during their lunch hours or outside the 9-to-5 environment.

Does that bonding really have an impact on the bottom line?

I think the number one sign that a company is struggling is not its sales. The number one way you know a company is in trouble is when employee morale goes down. When that happens, guess what kind of service your customers get.

Some people say, “You built this Taj Mahal [Aqualand] as a monument to yourself.” No, instead of putting the money into a corporate jet for me, I built this for my staff. When people say, “Your customers are paying for that indoor soccer field,” my response is that they’re paying for the outstanding employees who work here because of the indoor soccer field and all the rest. These are the same employees who give our customers top-notch service.

What are your goals for Aquascape?

Last year we did $58 million in business. This year our sales are down, but our profits are actually up. That’s because in December of last year, when we were running the numbers, we realized there was no indication the 2008 economy would be better than 2007 — and that was before the whole economic crisis. So we had to make tough budgeting decisions, which included laying off some employees.

As far as the long-term goes, I have a business plan for $100 million annually. That’s my goal. That’s my dream.

A lot of people who’ve achieved your financial success would buy an island somewhere, sit on the beach and count flies. What makes Greg Wittstock run?

My definition of hell is a life without problems. Business is all about solving problems. If I had no problems to solve, no markets to conquer, I don’t know what I would do with myself. I do what I do because I love it. When we’ve gotten offers to buy us out, I ask myself what else would I do? There are only so many waterskiing trips you can go on.

Plus, everyone wants to be part of something bigger than themselves. I’m pitching an ésprit de corps, a community, a higher purpose. We want to improve people’s lives through waterfeatures. We want to impact the environment in a positive way. We want to become more eco-friendly — hence our new focus on rainwater-harvesting/storage systems. Now we’ve established The Aquascape Foundation, which my wife is spearheading, to install these systems in Africa, so more people can have clean water to drink.

When you help other people get what they want, you’re going to get what you want. I believe that.