Liquid Landscapes requires artistic touch, heavy equipment

* Name: Liquid Landscapes

* Location: Wildwood, Tenn.

* Products/services: Rick Gattone designs and builds custom water features like ponds, waterfalls, pools and hot tubs, and also creates the landscape surrounding the water features to offer his customers a comprehensive package. "I build entire spaces," Gattone said.

* Age: 15 years old

* Startup investment/sales: While he started out with just a truck, expanding the business has required the purchase of much more equipment to handle large jobs. Nowadays, he does jobs from $7,000 up to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

* Target market: Gattone said 25 percent of the work he does is fixing shoddy work done by others, while the rest is for homeowners who don't want to move, but have disposable income with which to beautify their yard.

* Biggest hurdle: Much of the work is of an artistic nature, requiring a light touch and a critical eye, so he spends a lot of time training his employees to keep track of the small details. Details, Gattone said, make the difference.

* Biggest reward: Creating what he calls his artwork, and looking at the finished product for the first time is the biggest reward, Gattone said. "Sometimes it's kind of hard to walk away from it," he added.

* Challenges in the future: He's ramping up production on pools, trying to add more artistic flair to a trade that traditionally consists of creating a square hole and filling it with concrete, he said. As a result, he's spent a lot of time recently studying how to do better than the status quo.

* Lesson learned: It's important to charge enough to cover overhead and capital expenditures, he said, or else "you end up paying out more than you're getting in," even if he's not always the lowest bidder.

* Five-year goal: In five years he wants to work more in the computer-assisted design phase of the work, and share the burden of the actual artistic creation with others, he said.

* Contact: 503-6184, or liquidlandscapes.net

- Compiled by staff writer Ellis Smith

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