At eight years of age, Silverdale resident Ken Perry knew a lucrative business when he saw one. Today, at age thirty-five, Perry still knows better than to yawn when it comes to someone’s lawn. The business acumen he developed at age eight while mowing neighbors’ lawns for cash is the same acumen – enhanced by a degree in industrial psychology – that enables him to manage Team Innovative Services, a million-dollar a year landscape maintenance and management company.

Still based in Silverdale, Perry founded Team Innovative Services – then known as Team Innovative Landscape – in 1990, just a few months after completing his college education at Western Washington University.

Perry explains with a smile that the motivation behind starting a lawn maintenance business with just five hundred dollars and a lawn mower came about in part due to a desire to prove himself, by himself.

“Both of my parents were very successful and well known in the Silverdale and Bremerton business arena,” Perry explains, “my mother as a well known historian (and author of fourteen books on Washington state and Puget Sound history) and my father as the manager of a successful group of (Kitsap) radio stations and as owner of a major insurance agency. It was just kind of assumed, I think, that I’d enter the family business.”

Instead, Perry says, he chose to start a small business of his own, turning to the type of business that had always put money in his pocket – as a kid, as a teenage college student and now as an adult.

“Don’t misunderstand…my parents were incredible mentors and they encouraged me to do whatever I wanted to do but I think there was still that need in me to prove myself…to become a ‘self-made man.’ Even in college, I could always pick up a weekend job doing landscape work and put a couple hundred dollars in my pocket,” Perry laughs. “It just made sense to return to what I knew I could do easily and do well.”

As he’d always experienced, doing one or two houses in a neighborhood resulted in word-of-mouth and drop-by neighbor referrals that resulted in doing eight or ten houses on a block; by 1993, he had five full-time employees and Perry was ready to expand his business into additional services such as parking lot maintenance and facilities management.

By slowly adding commercial and large, multi-residence complexes to the company’s client list, the company began growing in sales and sales profits. Perry’s wife stepped in to manage the offices and administration until 1995 and now Perry’s in-laws perform the same roll in the offices and in the field.

And, where “in the field” used to mean residential neighborhoods in the greater Silverdale and Bremerton area for the first six or seven years of the business. Innovative Team Services now services major clients ranging from the Kitsap Mall and City of Bremerton facilities to apartment complexes, condominium homeowners associations and Home Depot locations throughout Kitsap, Pierce and Jefferson counties.

To accommodate the growth in territory and client size, Perry looked long and hard at what it was that would make his company stand out and the word “image,” says Perry, sums up a lot of his company’s success.

“We spend a lot of time and money on what we refer to as our ‘team image,’” said Perry. “Generally when you say ‘landscaper’ or ‘lawn maintenance’ to someone, they think of people mowing lawns in t-shirts and working out of the back of their trucks. We deliberately set about changing that image.”

Perry goes on to explain that the company’s eighteen full-time employees in the winter months and thirty employees in the summer months are required to wear clean uniforms at all times, abide by company rules regarding their general appearance and the company maintains a fleet of fourteen clean and attractively painted vehicles.

“We’re a service-based industry and there’s a real sense of you are what you send out there, what you look like,” Perry insists. “For us that’s our people, our team. When we’ve got staff out working on a project on Silverdale Way, we’re there for all the passing traffic to see. What they see is our employees, looking professional, doing a professional job, driving professional vehicles. That plays a big role in how a company is perceived.”

And Perry has learned a lot over the years about recruiting the kinds of people that he wants representing his company and part of that, he admits, came through trial and error in the general recruiting exercise.

“I could place a general, $100 classified ad in the Bremerton paper one weekend and get ten to fifteen responses in the first two days that the ad runs,” Perry says, “or I can place that same ad with the addition to the ad that our applicants must pass a drivers license review and pass a mandatory drug test. Add that and you get one, two responses. But you know what? That’s how you get the right person for the kind of company we run.”

Innovative Team Services does in fact require both a driving record review and drug test for all its employees but Perry stresses that turn-over within his company is minimal and that his clients appreciate the difference in his company and the company team.

“We are a team here, really,” emphasizes Perry, “and the fact that we’re the region’s largest company doing what we do proves that. Companies don’t refer you to other companies, people don’t ask you to take on bigger and bigger contracts within their organizations unless they trust you and our growth and the fact that we do the sales volume that we do is proof of that.”

“Let’s face it,” Perry laughs, “landscape maintenance is nothing new…mowing lawns is nothing new. We’re not reinventing the wheel with what we do and what we offer…we’re redefining that wheel.”.