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A driveway-started landscaping company hit $5M in revenue while living day to day on cash, fixed its job costing, and grew past $10M before joining The Landscape Collective in December 2025.
$10M+ before the December 2025 acquisition · design-build alone at ~$2.2–2.5M around 2020–21
Top-line growth can hide a cash crisis: Atlas reached $5 million in revenue while living day to day on cash and making no money.
Fewer bars = easier, cheaper, or faster for an AI-assisted solo builder. Editorial judgments based on the case details.
Sam Gimble started Atlas Outdoor on June 10, 2011 from his driveway to support his family. In about five years, the landscaping company had crossed $5 million in revenue, but Gimble says it was still operating day to day with cash and making no money. He initially filled many roles, from mowing and irrigation to sales, then hired a worker to replace him in the field so he could pursue larger jobs and property-management relationships. The company’s early growth exposed a basic operating problem: sales expanded faster than cash discipline and job-level visibility. Gimble describes a turning point around 2020, when revenue dipped but the company finally made money. Later, budgeting and job-costing systems helped the team see the scale needed to support overhead. Atlas subsequently grew beyond $10 million and was acquired into The Landscape Collective in December 2025. Gimble told this story himself on a landscaping podcast; none of the figures are audited.
Atlas’s first customers came the old-fashioned way. Gimble floated between a mower and sales calls and built a base of roughly 60 properties, mostly residential, plus a couple of small apartment complexes.
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Data credibility: Founder-reported: Sam Gimble tells the story himself on the Growing Green podcast (host Jeremiah Jennings). The $5M and $10M+ revenue levels, the roughly $500K owed to suppliers in 2022 and the $5,000-a-week repayment plan are his own recollection; no financial statements are shown. Revenue is not profit — he says the company made no money at $5M. The acquisition terms are not disclosed.
In the early years Gimble was the jack of all trades: on top of mowing he handled irrigation, low-voltage lighting and even trash pickup to pay himself.
For years Atlas’s growth engine was the owner selling. Gimble calls selling his safe spot: when payroll was short, he sold more landscape jobs to collect deposits, spending about 85% of his time on sales.
Atlas’s hardest stretch was not a lack of customers but a lack of cash. At $5 million in revenue, Gimble says the company lived day to day and faced $50,000 and $100,000 problems instead of $5,000 and $10,000 ones.
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