I was eating lunch with one of my clients on Tuesday and He asked me “Jake, when and how did you get into this business” and this sparked a great conversation! Also this sparked an idea for me to write this! So I would love to share with you as well on how I started into this business! I will keep it some what short and to the point! So here goes: I, Jake Warner, am a Granville High School graduate of the class of 2000! When I was a senior in High School they allowed me to do the half day school and work half a day program. I got a job working for a construction company making $6.00 per hr. I decided after a few months or so to quit this job and start a full service lawn, landscape, and excavating company. I called it Jake’s Lawn & Bobcat Services. I started to pick up work by sending out flyers and just telling people what I could do. That first year I made $25,000.00 while going to high school part time and I started late in the year! I thought that this was way better than $6.00 per hr. So I really was excited and was off to the races! I continued to offer additional services like Lawn seeding, and retaining walls, and patios, and larger excavation services! I bought and sold different equipment always trying to upgrade to be more efficient. This became my vision to own and operate a full service ALL TRADE company! As I turned 20 years old I met my beautiful wife, Sabrina, at Knuckleheads, and we were married within 7 months! We had our first baby, Kaleigh, who is 8 now, very soon after we were married. Now I had to get serious! Are you kidding me to try to live off of a small business and buy diapers is hard! I mean it is almost impossible! But we continued to work hard every day! Sabrina worked at Unizan Bank, and the business was going pretty good. We had now been in business for over 4 years and times were a little easier. Then we found out in 2005 that we were going to have another baby girl, Anna Belle! Now we decided that after this new baby girl comes that Sabrina would stay home… This meant that we would not have her income, or insurance anymore…. Oh boy, actually Oh girl…. This was scary for me!

I continued to work hard to keep our company growing. We had just moved into our family farm house on Loudon and now we were going to lose an income. The most important thing was that our baby Anna Belle was born healthy! I went to work with even more drive and dedication than ever before! Now I had three people depending on me. We experienced so many blessing as every job we did came at such a great time. We worked hard and most of our customers paid their bills on time and things were good. When you depend on every dime to earn a living every slow pay matters! We would go weeks with out a paycheck so we could meet payroll, or to pay a huge stinking tax bill. While we waited on cash flow!

Anyway that’s another story.

All the while we continued to grow at an amazing rate year after year. In 2006 our family grew as we had our son, Elijah, and this was one of the best gifts God has ever blessed me with! I thought I was destined to has 3 girls… Don’t get me wrong I love my Girls… I just really wanted a son. So now we decide that our family was complete and we figured out what was causing us to have so many kids!

I was even more driven to provide as we were buying pullups and we had two kids in diapers and we were buying formula. Are you kidding me? I really never knew kids could cost so much!

We continued to grow our company and now we had our name JAKES filled in: J for Jake, A for Anna Belle, K for Kaleigh, E for Elijah, and S for Sabrina.

Around this time I decided to change our Company name to Jake’s Property Services and offer many more services which reall fulfilled my vision of the ALL TRADE company! Check us out www.jakesps.com to see all we do! We now employ 4 to 6 full time Employees my wife and I solely depend on this company for our income, and we still live on our family farm in Granville, Ohio. I have learned so many things the hard way it is not even funny, But I would not change one thing if I had the chance too. I am so proud of my family and this journey! I 100% give all of the credit to my Lord and saviour Jesus Christ. As you can tell I really am not that smart, and there is no way I could have accomplished so many things in my own strength! I am 28 and I have 3 amazing children, a beautiful wife, and a company that is doing well in a down economy! It is impossible to do this sort of company with no money to start with and no real major business plan! Just a kid with a dream! That is it! God is amazing! I have many stories I could share with you about how God has come through for us! I hope this story gives you some faith to know that God can bless you and your business as well! He wants to, and he will. We just have to be ready to let him!