Founded by two ambitious 22-year-olds, North Point Outdoors started off small, with a handful employees. Andrew Pelkey had his own modest landscaping maintenance business, while Dave Fairburn was in charge of a fledgling irrigation company. “With the two different disciplines, it made sense when we were kids to bring them together,” Pelkey tells us.
The duo made a commitment at the start: to treat staff and clients alike with the utmost respect, provide the finest customer service, and make North Point a place where men and women wanted to work and build their careers. In the first year, the business made about $450,000 in revenue and earned positive reviews from satisfied commercial and residential customers. Now, 17 years later, this Derry, New Hampshire-based company has grown to over 120 team members and over $25 million in annual revenue.
Earning hundreds of five-star reviews, North Point has garnered the trust of clients of all sizes, including FedEx, Hanover Company, Walmart, Target, Dunkin’, Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices, Evergreen Management Group, Tuscan Village, and many others.
Award-winning service
Since it was founded, North Point Outdoors has received praise from clients and numerous regional, industry, and business entities. In 2025, the company was voted the Granite State’s best landscaping and snow removal business by NH Business Review. That same year, North Point was featured on the cover of Landscape Management and made its Rising Stars List. The Snow & Ice Management Association (SIMA) has also nationally recognized the company as an ASCA Top 100 Snow Contractor.
Of all the company’s awards, one really stands out for Pelkey: being acknowledged by SIMA as one of the Best Places to Work in Snow & Ice the last three years in a row. “That’s something we’re really proud of,” he says. Businesses were judged in several areas, including company culture, managerial effectiveness, personnel engagement, trust in leadership, and demonstrated success in professional development and support. According to SIMA, the award “recognizes snow and ice industry businesses that are focused on being a great place to work and promoting the industry as one in which people can build successful and rewarding careers.”
Widely acknowledged as one of the largest and fastest-growing commercial landscaping and snow management businesses in New Hampshire, North Point’s trusted management team includes project managers, account managers, crew foremen, territory managers, and operations and production managers, along with sales. “Our true feeling of the reason behind our success and growth is that our strong team and employee retention creates strong client retention, which allows us to sell and build without having to replace lost accounts,” Pelkey explains. “For the last three years running, we’ve had a 97 percent retention rate with our employees, and a 96 percent retention rate with our clients. So we feel that those two go hand-in-hand with each other.”
For Pelkey, who serves as COO, and CEO Fairburn, attracting and retaining staff in an industry where workers often come and go isn’t all that complicated. “What we created was a place where workers are respected, treated fairly, paid a fair wage, and have the little things that make a day in the landscape world go well,” Pelkey says. This means investing in top equipment and ensuring it is always properly prepared, safe, well-maintained, and ready to go. Instead of holding on to machinery for years, lawn mowers are swapped out every three years, and workers always have the latest new equipment.
Taking aim at commercial growth
Instead of having to source and manage multiple contractors, North Point Outdoors offers comprehensive professional landscape solutions for its many clients. Soon after the business was founded, its services expanded to include hardscaping and planting on top of landscaping and irrigation. In the winter months, the company grew its residential snowplowing services and expanded into commercial snowplowing. “We self-perform about 90 percent of our snow removal, and sub out about 10 percent of it,” Pelkey shares.
For its residential customers, North Point’s services include landscape design and landscape lighting; turf care; irrigation; and hardscape and softscape installation. On the commercial side, the company offers landscape maintenance; landscape construction; turf care; irrigation; and snow and ice management. The team handles management and oversight of large-scale construction projects and maintenance for clients ranging from industrial distributors to high-rise condominiums and Class A office buildings, which attract top-tier tenants.
Today, about 80 percent of North Point’s clients are in the commercial sector, with projects including new installation work, maintenance, and snow removal for clients ranging from homeowners associations and apartment complexes to industrial customers. “We are actively trying to continue to grow our commercial sector,” states Pelkey, “and foreseeing more growth with our landscape maintenance and snow contracts. Residential isn’t our desired target market; the commercial world is.” Areas served by the company from its Derry headquarters extend north to Lake Winnipesaukee, east to Portsmouth, and south to, essentially, Boston North.
Introducing CrewHero
Built over the first 15 years of scaling North Point Outdoors to $20 million in revenue, the company released CrewHero two years ago. A proprietary software “built by landscapers, to help landscapers,” CrewHero was created to address operational issues, which were costing the company money and lost time in waiting for crew assignments, equipment decisions, and truck allocations. This chaos wasn’t merely frustrating; it cost the business in non-billable labor and lost productivity every day, says the company. “Landscape businesses often lose valuable employees not due to a lack of dedication but because of the stress caused by disorganized operations. CrewHero is built to change that.”
Now on the open market for other landscapers to use, CrewHero improves communication and streamlines dispatch assignments to help businesses operate with greater efficiency and profitability. Says North Point: “CrewHero isn’t just about optimizing operations—it’s about hearing and meeting the needs of the people who drive these businesses forward. By reducing chaos and improving efficiency, we help landscape companies retain and empower their most valuable asset: their people.”
Thanks to CrewHero, company staff members understand daily assignments and know what equipment they’re using and who they’re working with. It allows staff to access company documents and other resources all in one spot. “Basically, it makes working here easy,” says Pelkey. “If you have a repair request for a piece of equipment, somebody sees it. We took everything we learned over the last 15 or 16 years and built the CrewHero app that executes it all, now at a much higher level.”
A promising future
On the residential side, North Point often works on projects valued from $10,000 all the way to half a million dollars or more. Commercially, the company’s sweet spot is about $250,000 to $1 million in size, but the team is open to doing smaller jobs as needed.
“Just recently, we completed our largest landscape installation project to date, the Target distribution center in Hudson, New Hampshire. It was a two-and-a-half year project, and the price point was $5.2 million,” says Pelkey. “Our team is really proud of that one. Target, and the general contractors on site, had very high standards of safety and job site coordination standpoints,” he shares. “We did a great job meeting those standards, and were told by the general contractor that our team was the best landscape firm they had worked with across the country so far. It was a really cool project.”
The entire project required specialized personal protective equipment (PPE), and there were daily safety, reporting, and other requirements far beyond those of other general contractors, which were all met successfully. “It turned into one of our bigger landscape maintenance and snow contracts, as we were awarded the landscape, maintenance, and snow contract as well,” says Pelkey.
This year saw Dave Fairburn turn 40, with Andrew Pelkey also celebrating his 40th in a few months. With their milestone birthdays upon them, it is a time for the partners to reflect not only on their many years in business, but also on the decades ahead for them and the entire team.
“I think in the next five years, we’re going to continue to max out our current headquarters location,” comments Pelkey. “A second location in another saturated work area could be on the horizon, with some additional continued growth. We’re around the $25 million revenue size now. I think in five years, we will probably be around $30 to $35 million.” Not bad for two men who started out in their 20s with a few pieces of landscaping equipment and a dream.
