EPHRAIM—Travis Good, owner of EcoLife of Ephraim (283-6002) says he never consciously chose lawn care and landscaping as his career interest.
“I think it chose me more than anything,” he says. He grew up in Mayfield, and after a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, decided he wanted to live in Sanpete County permanently.
He started spraying lawns to work his way through Snow College. “We realized there was a need. We just found a niche, and we took it.”
He started his company, initially called Good’s Lawn Care, in 1996. It quickly grew from one truck to three, mostly focused on consumer services, including sprinkler systems, lawn fertilization and weed control.
In 2007, Good changed the name of the company to EcoLife, reflecting the broader menu of services the company was offering, including pest control, landscape installation and large-scale noxious weed management.
Today, EcoLife has six trucks and 11 full-time employees. The company employs an additional 9-12 people during the summer. And EcoLife does work not just in Sanpete, Sevier and Juab counties, but around Utah, in other Rocky Mountain states, and beyond.
After Good got his contractor’s license with a landscaping endorsement in 2003, his landscape installation business took off. EcoLife has landscaped scores of private homes, “anything from patios to waterfalls to firepits,” he says. “If you can dream it, we can build it.
The company has also done many commercial jobs, including at LDS church buildings, for school districts and municipalities.
“We’ve even done work in Maui (Hawaii) for eight or nine winters in a row,” Good says. The company did a lot of work on the Plantation Golf Course in Maui, ranked as the No. 1 golf course in Hawaii.
From keeping yards weed-free, EcoLife has branched into huge projects to keep noxious weeds from overtaking land.
The company’s integrated weed management crew gets rid of weeds on hundreds of acres in Wyoming and Nevada, including in oil fields.
“Just yesterday, we completed a project that was four months long for Grand Staircase National Monument,” he said during a recent interview. “We cut down tamarisk and Russian olive trees, and as of yesterday, we planted 60,000 cottonwood trees along the Escalante River.”
Nevertheless, the foundation of EcoLife’s business is the consumer services it provides in Sanpete and adjacent counties. The company doesn’t mow lawns. But it make sure your lawn stays beautiful and green through spring, summer and fall. And it keeps pests away from your plants and veggies.
The company can turn on your sprinkler system, repair it if needed, and stop by regularly to treat your lawn, including fertilizing, spraying weeds and controlling for pests.
EcoLife combines fertilization, weed control and pest control into what it calls its “Complete Protection Package” for a pest-free home and beautiful green lawn.
The company recommends five applications between spring and fall. And if weeds pop up or pests appear, the package includes unlimited service calls.
In the last couple of years, EcoLife has set up a payment program called EcoPay that makes lawn care and pest control, “affordable for everyone,” Good says. The total cost of a customer’s program is broken into 12 equal payments, which are automatically drafted out of the customer’s bank account. The equal payments can be as low as $20 per month.
Underlying everything EcoLife does is Good’s customer-service philosophy. “We are a customer-service business that happens to provide pest control and fix sprinklers,” he says.
“That’s how we train all of our technicians and all of our employees. That’s what everyone here hears over and over again.”
Good is married to the former Linsy Crouch, who is an RN at Sanpete Valley Hospital. His son, Braxton, 21, and Braxton’s wife, Mikeala Cox, are attending Snow College. Daughter Alexis, 17, will be student body vice president at Manti High next year. And another son, Maxwell, 14, is in eighth grade.
The Goods recently moved back into the home he grew up in while they build a new home in Mayfield.
Growing up, Good says, he imagined becoming a dentist or a lawyer. He never dreamed of being a “lawn guy.”
But he says, “Sanpete has been really good to us, we we’re just happy that several of us can make a living from this company, and be able to live here and raise our families here.”
