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Sod business started as a general store
By Dan McCue
Staff Writer
No one could have envisioned what Jim Roquemore’s family business would become when Robert L. Patten started it in 1894.
Patten opened a general merchandise store in Lanier County, Ga., after his grandfather, James Patten, became the first non-Indian settler of what would one day be the county seat, Lakeland.
Robert Patten’s son, Lawson, made the first significant transition in the life of the business in the late 1940s, when he converted a former cotton warehouse near the family’s store into a seed-cleaning plant for grasses, which he also sold from a modest nursery.
At that same time, Robert Patten’s daughter Nell married Bill Roquemore, whom Lawson would persuade to join the business a few years later. Roquemore, a natural entrepreneur, continued the businesses’ growth in agriculture, designing and building many of Patten’s early seed-distributing and planting machines.
During their years of working side by side, Patten and Roquemore helped pioneer the production of Centipede grass seed and later improved seeds for such varieties as Emerald and Meyer Zoysia, St. Augustine and Bermuda grasses.
Diversification of the business continued through the 1960s and 1970s as the company became involved in the design and operations of golf courses in Atlanta, South Carolina and the Bahamas.
For more than 20 years, the company would expand its agricultural holdings by leaning on golf revenue during years when the sod business was slow, and grow its golf holdings with sod revenue when wet years tamped down the links business.
“We were diversified enough never to really have a down time,” said Jim Roquemore, Bill’s son. “Our clients for golf were different from our clients for turf. But at the same time, the commonality was grass.”
Today the company employs some 700 across four states, and operates a network of 17 retail outlets in the Southeast with its branded product, Super-Sod.
Since the beginning of the decade, the company’s sod sales have risen about 15% a year, Roquemore said, with sales amounting to about 100 million square feet of sod in 2000 to more than 200 million square feet last year.
Roquemore deflects any assertion that he deserves credit for the company’s continued success, saying that as chairman, his job wasn’t to “build a bunch of stuff,” but rather “to continue to vision of those who came before me.”
Nevertheless, he offered his view on what makes a company a success.
“Number one, give people more than they expect. And it’s real good to do what you say you are going to do. Every time. Because if you don’t have credibility, people don’t know what to believe,” he said.
Dan McCue is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail him at dmccue@scbiznews.com.
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