KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — Tennessee’s final team walkthrough was finished. Most of the roster was ready to settle in for a calm night at the team’s hotel, preparing for a game less than a day away.
Grant Frerking hoped he might be able to spend his night relaxing, too. His first glance at his phone assured that wasn’t going to happen.
The emails, missed calls and voicemails were too many to count. There wasn’t time to count them, anyway.
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Frerking was officially in crisis mode. One of his crews was stuck on the side of Interstate 285 in Atlanta rush-hour traffic, staring at a broken-down truck, unsure of what to do. They passed their questions up the chain of command, and no one was higher than Frerking.
His employees were calling. His frantic, angry client was calling.
He did the quick math. His biggest account needed a fix. They were hosting a grand opening of a new property the next morning. But his employees’ workday was technically over.
And he still had football game preparation and homework to finish up.
“I was like, ‘Look, we’re going to do our best. We might lose thousands of dollars on this job, but we’re going to get it right for you,’ ” Frerking remembers telling them.
He put together a frantic, expensive plan he saw as his only option. He called around and found some lights from United Rentals. He called in three separate crews on the road and promised hefty overtime pay.
“We grinded it out,” Frerking said.
By midnight, the job was done. His client was happy.
“We don’t tell customers no. We find a way to get it done,” Frerking said. “That one customer ended up giving us a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of work the next year. Just because we made them happy that one time and had guys out there until midnight.”
For the past five years, this has been Frerking’s life. He’s a 19-year-old sophomore at Tennessee and a walk-on receiver for the football team.
He’s also the founder and CEO of Metro Straw, a million-dollar company with branches in Atlanta, Nashville and Charlotte and a claim as one of the largest landscape management companies in the Southeast.
“I still can’t understand how he does it,” said Spencer Topping, who started with the company around a year after it began and has ascended its ranks to director of operations at 21.
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Most days, Frerking’s mornings are taken up by class time. In the afternoon, he’ll hustle over to the team facility for meetings and an afternoon practice. When that’s over, the supply chain management major will knock out some homework and/or meet with the football team’s tutoring staff to attend to his academic responsibilities.
When he’s not in class, on the practice field or in the weight room, he’ll be tied to his phone answering calls and emails. “I probably go through three recharge cycles on my phone each day,” Frerking said.
When the football and homework are done, he can handle paperwork or more responsibilities tied to Metro Straw. He’s usually up until 2 a.m. or later tending to his business.
“Then I’m like, ‘Maybe I’ll sleep in tomorrow. I don’t have class until 10.’ Well, all the guys are showing up to the office at 6, 6:30,” Frerking said. “That’s when all the fires start coming. A problem here. Somebody needs an answer there.”
Most days, he’s up by around 7 a.m., running his business from here, about 200 miles away from its home base in Atlanta. It’s where he went to high school, but outside of the occasional down-and-back trip on a Sunday, he’s only in his hometown for about four weeks out of the year.
Almost five years ago, Frerking was a 15-year-old with an entrepreneurial spirit and no vehicle to exercise it.
“One day — I think it was around middle school — he came to us with tears in his eyes, because he wanted to know when he could get a real job,” said his mother, Susan Frerking.
At 15, he was determined to make his own job.
“We didn’t want to go to the mowing lawn side of things,” Grant Frerking said. “Anyone can do that. And how do you set yourself apart?”
But he saw opportunity in what’s known in the green industry as “ground cover enhancements.”
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For Metro Straw, that meant pine straw, specifically. The sell is simple: Say goodbye to mulch and say hello to pine straw.
Pine straw is less expensive. It lasts longer than mulch. And it’s naturally acidic, which serves as a weed barrier. These days, whether a commercial or residential job, around 80 percent of the business is laying pine straw and 20 percent is mulch.
The product is still growing, a promising sign for the business. Outside the Southeast, pine straw is extremely rare. He recently fulfilled a request from his uncle, who owns a large landscaping company of his own in Kansas City, to experiment with pine straw in the Midwest. Frerking sent him two 18-wheeler truckloads. His uncle sold out in just over a week.
But when the business was still in its infancy, it was 15-year-old Grant and a couple friends going to the local nursery and buying pine straw to spruce up the landscaping at the homes of Wesleyan School parents. “I’d pick him up from practice, drive him, drop him off, he’d do a job until it got dark,” Susan Frerking said.
He eventually hired a few older friends, including some like Topping, who went to Norcross High School across the street from Wesleyan. A couple already had trucks and access to trailers that made the jobs easier and didn’t require multiple trips to local nurseries. “Normally mixing friendship with business doesn’t work, but for us, it’s worked well,” Topping said.
Frerking focused on customer service and eventually expanded into serving as something of a matchmaking service. He’d partner with crews that did the work and match them with businesses looking for landscapers.
“We’re not doing anything special,” he said. “We keep true to our word. We’re honest. We, quite frankly, just pick up the phone when you call us. We might be double the price of another guy, but he might not call you back for three weeks. We call people back. We say ‘Hey, here’s what we do, here’s our prices.’ They just keep coming back and they keep referring us. That’s how we’ve grown to this point. …
“A lot of our competition is on the side of the road. They’ll have an 18-wheeler and a trailer and a mobile home selling straw. I was like, ‘There’s gotta be a better way to do this.’ Businesses spend millions subcontracting out for landscaping beautification. It’s probably not being done the right way. Or, even if it’s looking the right way, it probably isn’t being done the way they like or the most efficient way.
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“So, I went in and said, ‘We’re going to take a professional approach in everything, from customer service to installation to how we treat our people, and we’ll see if it’ll work out.’ And we did that. And we treated people right and grinded. We called people back. We checked up on customers. My managers follow up after every single job we do. We made them happy when they weren’t. And it made this straw mulch industry that no one would think of getting into as this small margin market into something that people actually care about now and are like, ‘Hey, I have a straw guy who’ll get it done right and make it look good so you’re not just calling around all over the city trying to find some day laborers to go by Home Depot and halfway do it.
“We’ve really taken an aggressive, professional approach to an industry that didn’t have it.”
As expansion started to take shape, so did the need to take the business and make it formal, beyond just a glorified lemonade stand.
“Who wants to finance a truck to a 16-year-old, much less give them a $50,000 line of credit right off the bat?” Frerking said. “Banks don’t want to hear stories. They just want to see the numbers and go off of that.”
His father, a lawyer who used to work for Georgia Pacific and now works for USD Group, helped him set up the business as a formal LLC and apply for his federal tax ID. His older brother Andrew, who played quarterback at Baylor and earned a finance degree, helped him with money decisions and sorting out spreadsheets.
“We got ahold of some big-time landscapers in Atlanta that are still with us to this day, so we went from a $50,000 business a year to a quarter million,” Grant Frerking said, “and now, we’re to this point where we’re a million-dollar company across Tennessee, Charlotte, Birmingham and Atlanta.”
Commercial landscaping is around 80 percent of their business now, long graduated from priming family lawns. Today, the business manages around 300 accounts and, depending on the season, has 100 to 150 people on the payroll.
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And there are no more trips to nurseries. The company harvests almost all of its pine straw from a farm in Jasper, Fla.
They focus largely on major corporations based in the Atlanta area. Coca-Cola’s plants and Chick-fil-A locations are two of their major clients, as well as Waffle House. Metro Straw also does ground coverings for all of Georgia State’s campuses in Atlanta and has expanded to SEC campuses, too.
Auburn, Georgia, Vanderbilt and Tennessee are among his clients.
“We didn’t have any plans of extending into Knoxville, but we’ve come up here and we’re already doing 75-100 grand of business in Knoxville. We don’t even have a branch here,” Frerking said. “We’re bringing guys over from Nashville and up from Atlanta to knock stuff out.”
Frerking’s business existed well before his days playing for the Vols, shielding him from NCAA violations. However, to retain his athletic eligibility, he’s not allowed to leverage in any way his status as a Tennessee athlete to grow the business.
The Athletic approached Tennessee in mid-August and requested an interview with Frerking. To grant it, the university’s compliance department had to apply for an NCAA waiver. Even family members conducting interviews without the waiver could have been an NCAA violation. The waiver was officially granted this month.
Two years ago, Frerking debated whether to attend college, much less playing college football.
As a 6-foot-5 senior receiver at Wesleyan, Frerking caught 64 passes for 678 yards and nine scores and had a looming decision about what was next.
All three of his older siblings played a sport for a major university. Beyond Andrew’s career playing quarterback at Baylor, his older sister Lauren is a senior on Georgia Tech’s volleyball team. His oldest sister Katie played basketball for Auburn and spent time playing professionally in Sweden before joining Missouri’s coaching staff in August as a graduate assistant under Robin Pingeton.
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After initially thinking over the decision, Grant Frerking tossed out the possibility to his family of skipping college altogether and focusing on his business. “That was a shellshock to them,” he said.
His dad laid out the case to change his mind: You only have four years to experience college. He might have 40 or more to pursue a business, tap into his entrepreneurial tendency and live out his dream of never having a boss.
“If this fails like businesses do all the time or something falls through, am I going to look back and regret not going to college?” Frerking said. “I told myself, ‘Yeah, I would.’ ”
But he wasn’t willing to give anything up. He knew he wanted to get a degree, but he wanted to extend his football career, too. And he definitely wasn’t willing to step away from the business.
So, two years later, he’s in the middle of the life he signed up to live.
He is understated about his life away from the field, though. Tight end Eli Wolf shared a meeting room with Frerking last season before Frerking moved to receiver and didn’t know about the business until a few months ago.
“I started drilling him with questions,” Wolf said. “There was one time he offered to go out to dinner but all the restaurants he was recommending, I was like, ‘Man, I’m a broke college kid. I can’t afford that. I thought that was kind of funny. Now, it all makes sense.”
The group of Vols ended up at Texas Roadhouse and declined Frerking’s offer to pick up the tab. “Had he taken us to Ruth’s Chris or something, though, I’d probably have told him to do it,” Wolf said.
Receiver Marquez Callaway learned about the business last year, but only after a few months of knowing his teammate.
“He’s real low key about it,” Callaway said. “I don’t know much about what he does with his business, but if he works as hard with that as he does for football, he’s gotta be exceptional.”
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As for the lack of sleep? That’s nothing new. In high school, he used to start his day at 5:30 a.m., setting up an office in a nearby coffee shop to make sure his crews for the day were lined up and knock out paperwork and invoices before chapel band practice began before school. And as a three-sport star at Wesleyan who initially intended on playing college basketball, after school almost always meant some kind of practice.
“The business thing, do we say, ‘Back off that and be a kid for a while?’ But he loves it, and he’s learned so much,” Bill Frerking said. “It’s unique, the position he’s put himself in.”
It’s a question Bill and Susan Frerking have discussed often, but not one with an easy answer.
“You have one shot to go to college and enjoy it, especially as a college athlete,” Bill Frerking said. “It’s not usual that a parent would be encouraging their kid to take it easy. That’s the personal piece I think about the most. Stress and carrying loads, they take a toll on a young man. He’s just been doing it for so long, I don’t think he even realizes what anything else would be like. … I don’t want him to look back on this stage of life and say, ‘I wish I’d have focused on school and football and being a college kid more,’ but this is what he loves, and now people are relying on him for their companies and families are relying on him for jobs.”
Football is an important focus, well beyond the privilege of wearing the Tennessee orange and white.
“As weird as it sounds, football teaches you a lot outside of just the game,” he said. “Being accountable. Being a teammate. Working together with the guys every day. Grinding. The bond. It teaches me a lot I can share with my guys in Atlanta or Nashville. It’s a meaningful game. You develop relationships. You’re with people every day. There’s a special bond you form working toward a common goal.”
Last week, Grant gave a presentation in his philosophy class on an ethical quandary he’d faced while running his business. More than a few times, when fellow students get wind of what he does in his “free” time, the same questions arise.
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So, uh, why are you even here?
“Being here and being a student, especially being in business-centered classes in college, has taught me almost nothing about how to run a business in real life,” Frerking said. “Going out and facing real-world customers, hiring and firing grown men and women, is nothing you’re going to learn in a macro or micro econ class.”
But the experience can’t be duplicated, even if Frerking’s college experience has diverged so aggressively from the norm. Showing up to a freshman-level business class is like Bill Gates showing up to be tutored on Microsoft Excel.
“People always ask me if football is an escape,” Frerking said. “As much as I want it to be, no. The things you’re most passionate about never leave you. And if they do leave you, you’re probably not that passionate about them. But the time management is tough. You just want to be a college student sometimes. You want to go out with your friends, and sometimes you can’t do that.”
It helps that Frerking’s parents still pay for his tuition and living expenses. When it came time to buy a car, his parents purchased him his first truck.
“I’ve never had to use this job to pay for anything,” Frerking said. “With my parents, it was always just kind of like, ‘You started this, you’re working hard, reap the benefits.’ I can just save all this money. It makes you feel more comfortable about the future. It’s been nice. It’s given me freedom and taught me money management. I’m probably one of the only guys on our team that has mutual funds and a life insurance policy.”
Unlike almost every other student in Tennessee’s directory, Frerking doesn’t have to stress about the post-graduation job search, but he does have looming decisions about what to do with the juggernaut he built almost on accident.
“Three years ago, if you asked me if this is what I wanted to do? Probably not,” Frerking said.
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His passion lies in the chase of entrepreneurship, not in decaying pine needles or property beautification. He’s not looking for a way out, but he’s open to handing off the business to one of his capable lieutenants or selling it.
“I genuinely like running the business,” Frerking said, “The tech industry, drop shipping, the Amazon/UPS moving products from conception to consumer has always been intriguing, but I may stick around on this for a while. I’m not going to let up on it.”
But for now, he’s on a well-paying grind. He has pursued and welcomed this college experience. And when he does get a free few hours, he doesn’t have to think long about how to use it.
“I usually take a nap,” he said.
(Photos courtesy Susan Frerking)
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