After 47 years of growing McAdam Landscaping with his brother, Rob, Scott McAdam retired in July.
Though McAdam, 68, is still primary owner of the company and is keeping up with his landscape architecture license so he can still help out with some design plans at 2001 Des Plaines Ave., his son Scott McAdam Jr. took over as company president two years ago. Rob McAdam will continue working at McAdam Landscaping, and his daughter, Jen, is general manager.
“We’ve got young, energetic people and fresh ideas,” Scott McAdam told the Review. “Things change and that change is good, but the fundamentals of how we started, I believe, will never change. It was family-driven. The first thing we thought about was we didn’t want to be exclusive.”
McAdam Landscaping has installation, maintenance and snow divisions. And though they’ve completed $10,000 projects, “If someone says they have a project for $700, which would be very small for us, or they say ‘I want one tree,’ we’re happy to come put one tree in,” McAdam said. “We’ll have people walk in here with a branch or a leaf and ask a question.”
What started in 1979 out of Rob and Scott’s parents’ basement in River Forest moved to a small office at 218 Lake St. in Oak Park the following year, then to 7313 Franklin St. in Forest Park in 1983.
“After we purchased it, we thought, ‘We will never need any more space.’ We have 6,500 feet in the warehouse. We have 15,000 feet outside,” McAdam said. But the brothers soon outgrew the Franklin Street office and bought a lot across the street, then tore down a neighboring house to build another parking lot.
“In 2001, we knew we couldn’t stay there any longer,” McAdam said, as the company outgrew its Franklin Street space. “We talked to [then-Mayor] Tony Calderone. I said, ‘I’d like to stay in Forest Park, but I need bigger space.’”
Calderone put the McAdams in touch with Woodlawn Funeral Home and Memorial Park, which sold the landscaping company four acres at its current location on Des Plaines Avenue.
Woodlawn was using the land to store the dirt and rocks leftover after digging burial plots — and the McAdams had to clear out 30,000 yards of those grave spoils. McAdam said he knew someone who worked for the Chicago Park District, which had just torn out tennis courts near Garfield Park Conservatory and was looking for 30,000 yards of dirt to fill it in. So the park district took the grave spoils, allowing McAdam Landscaping the use of all four acres.
McAdam Landscaping moved from Oak Park to Franklin Street in Forest Park, then Des Plaines Avenue, to accommodate their demand for larger commercial maintenance projects.
“We have much more equipment, so we can do much larger facilities,” McAdam said. Though they couldn’t when they started, McAdam Landscaping now snowplows the Forest Park Plaza on Roosevelt and Cermak Plaza at Harlem and Cermak.
The team has also grown to include more management positions, like staff in charge of maintenance, construction and design teams.
“I think our biggest success is the length of time we have employees in this business. Our very first employee that we hired in 1979 is employed with us today,” McAdam said. He added that, in retirement, he’ll miss his staff and helping them grow. He specifically mentions an employee who now runs the yard outside and didn’t have a license when he was first hired.
“We helped him get a car loan. Now his credit’s good. …Forget the business, that’s successful, changing someone’s life for the better,” McAdam said. “That’s what I’m going to miss.”
Growing business
McAdam started his landscaping career in middle school, when he made $7 from cutting his first lawn for his neighbor, Helen.
After a year or two of borrowing his dad’s lawnmower — an exchange where McAdam had to cut his own family’s yard and stopped getting an allowance because he had a job — McAdam went to Dressel’s Hardware in Oak Park, where he got his own account and, a year later, bought his own lawnmower.
McAdam cut grass through college, when he had 40 clients over the summer. He went to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s school of agriculture, where he got a degree in ornamental horticulture.
“I came out of my senior year thinking it might not be a bad idea to start a business,” McAdam said. His older brother, Rob, was in the insurance industry, and their father suggested he join McAdam in launching their own company.
McAdam Landscaping didn’t make any money in the first three years of business “because every nickel was going back into getting it going,” McAdam said.
Before his dad died at age 69, McAdam said, “He was a driving force for me to keep doing this. He taught me long, long ago that nothing’s free. You have to work for it.”
Volunteering in retirement
Along with a family-first, non-exclusive attitude, McAdam Landscaping has prioritized giving back to the community from its inception.
Every year, the company donates a project to a local space, starting with the Oak Park and River Forest Infant Welfare Society in McAdam Landscaping’s first year of operation. Since, the McAdams have donated landscaping projects to Opportunity Knocks, Sarah’s Inn, and most recently, a Make a Wish participant for an area surrounding a wheelchair swing.
“We want to give back to the community who supported us from the beginning,” McAdam said. “There’s not a year we don’t do that.”
In retirement, McAdam aims to do more volunteer work. He plans to spend half the year in Sarasota, Florida, where he owns property, and volunteer at Sarasota Memorial Hospital. He also hopes to spend more time volunteering for Rotary International.
McAdam scaled back his role at his landscaping company from 80 hours a week to about 15 hours in 2017, when he became a district governor for Rotary. He led clubs throughout Chicago, where Rotary was founded in 1905, and its surrounding suburbs, visiting and supporting clubs with whatever they needed and helping connect them to resources.
McAdam is also a trustee and lead landscape architect of the Paul and Jean Harris Home Foundation, which preserves the home of Paul Harris, who founded Rotary. Though the house has been restored to its state in 1947, when Harris died, the Foundation is now working to rehab the surrounding gardens where Harris planted greenery that Rotary members brought him from around the world.
“We’re rebuilding all the terraces. We’re going to restore the gardens back to what it would have been with material that only would have been available up through 1947,” McAdam said of the historic house for Rotary members — whom he hopes to meet more of in retirement by traveling to international Rotary Club locations.
“There’s 38,000 clubs in 220 countries, so I’m going to do some research in the next few months, figure out where I want to go for a trip and help out on a service project,” McAdam said. “I’ve been fortunate in my life. It’s time to really focus on giving back. It’s time for me to feed Scott McAdam, and that’s what drives me.”