Twin Cities Business Monthly magazine

Name: Tom Suerth
School: University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Class of 2008
Major: Entrepreneurship
Founded: Lakeside Property Maintenance in 2003, a company that provides chemical-free aquatic-weed control
Lessons Learned: “The thing you always read and hear people say is ’just go for it.’ I jumped into things without knowing everything, and that’s something that business people sometimes do. I’ve had failures and have had to work though things that have gone wrong, but that’s part of the fun of it.”

   For people with homes on Lake Minnetonka, keeping aquatic weeds at bay is a challenge. Waves and wind wash chemical treatments away so they miss the targeted area; chemicals also restrict access to the water for swimming or fishing. Mechanical removal, which cuts weeds back to a level four or five feet beneath the water’s surface, is only a short term solution.

   But where residents saw aggravation, Tom Suerth saw a business opportunity two years ago. As a scuba diver who grew up on Lake Minnetonka, he realized he could swim down to the bottom of the lake and pull weeds out by their roots. Better yet, the season for this work—June to August—meant that the 17-year old could make serious money during his summer break from Mound Westonka High School. He had saved about $10,000 from other jobs, enough to start his own business that summer.

   Suerth formed Minnetrista-based Lakeside Property Maintenance in 2003, and he and one other diver ran it as a pilot operation to see if the idea was viable. By the end of the season, there was no doubt in Suerth’s mind that there was market for his service, so he planned for growth.

   “During the winter between 2003 and 2004, I wrote a business plan for the expansion of the business for a competition,” he says. He spend hundreds of hours at University of Minnesota libraries studying research on management of aquatic plants. Suerth’s plan finished first in the contest between Minnesota high school students. More importantly, it laid a foundation for the next stage of building his company.

   He hired 10 divers to help him serve about 50 clients during the summer of 2004. Even so, he worked many 80- to 100-hour weeks to meet demand. “It’s the school of hard knocks,” Suerth says amiably. “It was a surprise to be working 80 hours a week, but I hadn’t planned for such extreme growth.” This year, he expects he’ll be better able to anticipate response to his direct-mail marketing. Suerth expects to serve about 150 clients on Minnetonka and a few other nearby lakes.

   Being as young as he is, Suerth says he expected some resistance from homeowners who might not take him seriously. Instead, he’s been pleasantly surprised by clients’ reactions to him. “Most of the people who live on the lakes are very wealthy, and many of them have been entrepreneurs or CEOs,” Suerth says. “ Many of them have been in my place at one point in time.”