Artificial Turf Makes Dreams Come True in Georgia

Football fields play a large part in the artificial turf business. But if you get to talking with a turf installer, you might be surprised to hear that the smallest jobs actually make for the most rewarding work.

“It is always the mother who’s at home with her children and the yard is a muddy mess. I enjoy coming into those jobs, spending a day, and when you leave the moms are nearly crying because now their kids aren’t playing in the mud,” says Jeremy May, CEO of Nationwide Turf in Gordon County, Georgia.

Of course, it can be tricky to find machines capable of tackling jobs as large as stadiums and as small as somebody’s backyard. Luckily for Jeremy and Nationwide Turf, he found Bobcat^® equipment.

“You ought to try one of these.”

That’s all Jeremy needed to hear from his old friend, Derek Forester, the general manager at Rhinehart Equipment Company, before he took the Bobcat^® MT85 mini track loader for a spin.

“Derek gave me one to try, and I took it for the first week and didn’t want to give it back. It cut down on our labor cost and made us so much faster. So much more efficient.” Since then, Jeremy has also acquired a Bobcat MT100 mini track loader.

With the mini track loaders, Jeremy could bring three crew members out for a job that would’ve taken eight crew members without it. Not to mention, the unmatched maneuverability of the MT85 and MT100 have proven invaluable as more and more of the artificial turf market moves from large-scale commercial projects to smaller residential ones.

“You can come in with the mini track loaders and not tear up a yard,” says Jeremy. “It is the difference between three guys doing a job or getting a whole bunch of guys with wheelbarrows and telling them to go at it with some shovels. They don’t like that very much.”

To maximize the versatility of the Bobcat mini track loaders, Jeremy and his crew arm them with a variety of attachments, including a general purpose bucket, a grapple and a landplane.

According to Jeremy, the original machine recommendation from Derek continues to pay dividends for Rhinehart Equipment Company all these years down the road.

“There are probably 30 Bobcat mini track loaders out there that were sold just because people saw us operating them and thought how neat they were. I’ve definitely got nothing but praise for it.”

No Advertising Needed With the Bobcat MT85

Since 2001, Jeremy has built the bottom line of Nationwide Turf on good old-fashioned referrals. That means he doesn’t spend a single dime on advertising.

“Everything we do is word of mouth. So we don’t market or advertise or pay for any of that. We do a person’s lawn, and they are just so happy with us, they put us on social media and say, ‘call these guys because these guys did my yard and now my lawn looks like this.’”

When it comes to protecting that hard-earned reputation on job after job, Bobcat equipment is the only equipment Jeremy trusts to keep customers coming through the doors.

“The MT85 is leaps and bounds ahead of what the market is,” he says. “If we go to the job and the loader doesn’t start, then we’re not working today. So, for us, the machine is everything. We can haul the stone and pick up the rolls — or we can’t.”

With genuine Bobcat^® attachments, including the different types of buckets and land planes the crews use at Nationwide Turf, the MT85 becomes a workhorse for all kinds of close-quarters projects. Even when Jeremy and his crew have to work around an in-ground pool install happening at the same time.

The Big Game in Their Own Backyard

In 2019, Atlanta was selected to host the biggest football game of the year just about an hour away from Gordon County, where Nationwide Turf is headquartered. Atlanta’s hometown team, the Falcons, and the Arthur Blank Foundation went to Jeremy ahead of the game to see if Nationwide Turf could install surfaces on a series of flag football fields around the city.

The turnaround was as quick as it gets, but the answer was still the easiest of Jeremy’s career.

“We went in and actually used Bobcat machines on those flag football fields for children in some areas that were hit hard economically,” he says. “We put two crews together and ran probably 10 guys total for almost a month period.”

With a couple of crews and some Bobcat equipment, the team at Nationwide Turf was able to come through for the good cause. And today, all those neighborhoods have football fields as nice as any neighborhood, anywhere.