HOW RELIABLE LANDSCAPING GOT STARTED
Jerry Brown and Richard Long always dreamed of living and working in Hawaii. The high school classmates shared a love of surfing and the laid-back Island lifestyle. While in their early twenties, the friends spent six months in Mexico, living out of the back of a van and surfing their days away. But life has a tendency to get in the way of dreams. Years later, Long had his own landscaping service in California and Brown was operating a candle-making business in Colorado.
However, when both went through difficult circumstances, the friends got back together and decided that they should try to live their Hawaiian dream. They decided to move to the Islands and start a landscaping business, buying one-way tickets to Honolulu and shipping over some of Long’s lawn-care equipment.
“We came here on Martin Luther King Day, almost 20 years ago (1987),” says Long. “I remember listening to his famous speech over the airplane and thinking that we had a dream, too.”
Brown and Long rented a house in Waialua (on the beach) and went right to work, knocking on the doors of their North Shore neighbors and offering to mow their lawns for a monthly fee. Business was brisk.
“Within a month of arriving, Richard and I were making enough to take care of all the bills and pay for whatever we had. We didn’t have much at the time, but we were doing OK,” says Brown. “We were maintaining 125 yards a week. At sun up we’d be firing up the equipment, and we wouldn’t stop until sundown. We just kept going.””
from Hawaii Home & Remodeling Magazine – November Issue, 2005
Today, Reliable Landscaping & Sprinklers has become a small family-run business now operating in Hawai’i for over 35 years as a licensed landscape contractor. Richard Long is President and Owner of the business he dreamed of. He is the face of Reliable, still meeting with customers across O’ahu and working alongside his dedicated crew on a daily basis. Despite the ups and downs of the economy and the arrival of the pandemic in 2020, Reliable continues to navigate through challenges to offer professional-grade landscape services to its customers.
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