The People Behind Rock Solid Landscape
How it started
Zach Franz started Rock Solid Landscape in Wauseon in 2015, but the work goes back a lot further than that. He was raised in large part by his great-grandmother, and the two of them were always outside gardening and working in the flower beds. In school, the FFA program steered him toward its landscape programs, which brought those memories back. He decided this was what he wanted to do.
Today Zach spends less time planting shrubs and building walls and more time building people. “It gives me more excitement to see a person grow than the installs that we do anymore,” he says. The crews, the training and the culture are his job now.
What we do differently now
Four or five years ago we took on everything that came through the door. Crews were working six days a week, people were worn out, and turnover climbed. That is not who we are, so we changed it.
Now we stick to the work we know we do well and the work our people can finish to our standard. We don’t take every client that calls. That lets us put our people first, and it is why your project gets a crew that isn’t running on empty.
Four tens, and Fridays with family
Our crews work four 10-hour days. As a rural company, we found it makes more sense to pay a livable wage, offer a real career, and give people Friday, Saturday and Sunday with their families than to work them until 6 p.m. on a Saturday. It is also why our office closes at 1 p.m. on Fridays.
Our team gets retirement plans with IRAs, company-paid life insurance, HSAs, health care and paid uniforms, plus room to move up and keep learning. See careers at Rock Solid.
The project we’re proudest of
About four years ago, a sports-focused charter school moving into the Toledo area bought an older school property of roughly 30 acres. Only about six acres of it were building and lawn, and they wanted ball fields for their students.
Getting there meant taking down more than 200 trees, leveling the site, putting in drainage, and working with the City of Toledo so everything met code and EPA requirements. It was the most tedious, headache-filled job we have done, and at the end we looked at it and said we couldn’t believe we did it. The fields turned out great. Zach’s own kids have since played against that school on the fields our crews built.
These are our neighbors
We support local school teams and bands and take part in events around Fulton County, including our booth at the Fulton County Fair. The people we work for are the people we see at those events. “I don’t want to go to those events and hear our name go across and hear somebody mumble,” Zach says. That is the standard.