{"id":11937,"date":"2022-11-03T17:00:57","date_gmt":"2022-11-03T17:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.earthworksjax.com\/beta\/gardencenter\/?p=11937"},"modified":"2026-03-03T15:16:40","modified_gmt":"2026-03-03T15:16:40","slug":"how-it-all-started","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.earthworksjax.com\/gardencenter\/how-it-all-started\/","title":{"rendered":"How it all started"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"margin: 0in;\"><strong><span style=\"color: #0e101a;\">How it all started &#8230;in their own words.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in;\"><span style=\"color: #0e101a;\">Living in Jacksonville at the time, McGregor and Fechtel and their wives met by chance during a wedding in St. Petersburg. &#8220;Our good friends said we had to meet Doug and Terri because they are a fun couple,&#8221; said Fechtel. &#8220;Little did we know that eight months later, we were going to start our own business.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in;\"><span style=\"color: #0e101a;\">After graduating from college with finance degrees, McGregor worked as a banker and Fechtel as a financial planner when they decided to make the change. &#8220;We loved our jobs until the market crashed in 1987, threatening our positions,&#8221; McGregor recalled. &#8220;We decided to walk away from our coat-and-tie jobs. We neither had kids nor big mortgages, so we planned our exit strategy and started the company.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in;\"><span style=\"color: #0e101a;\">&#8220;I had worked in a garden center growing up, and Mark mowed grass as the &#8220;boy next door.&#8221; We knew landscaping was the kind of work we liked,&#8221;\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in;\"><span style=\"color: #0e101a;\">After growing their Lawn Care Business, the pair soon expanded their services to irrigation and landscaping. In 1999, they bought a swath of heavily wooded land bordering Beach Boulevard which became Earth Works Garden Center.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in;\"><span style=\"color: #0e101a;\">Jason Duffney, who joined McGregor and Fechtel as a junior business partner in ?, was hired in 2003 as a part-time employee while a freshman at the University of North Florida. &#8220;Jason started with us when he was 19 years old. By the time he was 33, he had grown with the company and became one of our business partners,&#8221; said Fechtel.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in;\"><span style=\"color: #0e101a;\">A native of Lecanto, Florida, Duffney had previous experience working in a nursery as a teenager before he moved to Jacksonville to earn a finance degree from UNF. &#8220;I came in as a nursery kid pulling weeds and making deliveries,&#8221; he said. Jason learned quickly and became well-versed in pond building. He contemplated starting a pond business of his own at one point when McGregor and Fechtel approached him with a proposition.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in;\"><span style=\"color: #0e101a;\">&#8220;They wrangled me in and said, &#8216;don&#8217;t be stupid. Let&#8217;s talk about how all of us can grow,&#8221; Duffney recalled. In charge of Earth Works&#8217; pond operations, he has built it into the award-winning Water Garden division it is today.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in;\"><span style=\"color: #0e101a;\">As Earth Works&#8217; third business partner, Duffney&#8217;s mission is to update and streamline the company so it can serve customers better.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in;\"><span style=\"color: #0e101a;\">Working together, we balance each other out, said McGregor. &#8220;Mark and I have different personalities&#8221; &#8220;I&#8217;m more Type A, and he&#8217;s a laid-back guy. I don&#8217;t think we&#8217;ve had ten disagreements in over 30 years. We like each other. We&#8217;re really good friends, and our families are close.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"margin: 0in;\"><span style=\"color: #0e101a;\">In the business, Duffney heads operations, McGregor oversees finances, and Fechtel manages sales. &#8220;Mark and Doug are opposites, and I fall somewhere in the middle, which makes for a nice blend,&#8221; Duffney said. &#8220;If we are dealing with clients or employees, everyone brings a different skill to the table.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How it all started &#8230;in their own words. Living in Jacksonville at the time, McGregor and Fechtel and their wives [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11937","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>How it all started - Garden Center<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.earthworksjax.com\/blog\/how-it-all-started\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How it all started - Garden Center\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"How it all started &#8230;in their own words. 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