Feature || 30 in Their Thirties 39 • SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT OF AGENCY OPERATIONS MEADOWBROOK INSURANCE AGENCY, SOUTHFIELD EMPLOYEES: 100 • REVENUE: NA • COLLEGE: UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
33 • PRESIDENT • MARINO’S LANDSCAPE, SHELBY TOWNSHIP EMPLOYEES: 50 • REVENUE: $5.7M
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MATTHEW M McGRAIL
SAM MARINO
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n 2004, soon after 17-year-old Sam Marino graduated from Eisenhower High School in Shelby Township, he made two major decisions: First, he wasn’t going to go to college; second, he wasn’t going to take the first job that came his way. “My family was actually in the pizza business at the time,” Marino recalls, “and I didn’t want to make pizzas. I wanted to do my own thing. So I bought a little lawnmower, I had a little pickup truck, and I borrowed $1,200 from my dad to buy my first trailer. The money I made in one day was better than people my age could make in two weeks.” From those humble beginnings, what is now Marino’s Landscape has grown exponentially into a design, construction, and maintenance business that grossed $5.7 million in sales last year. With more than 50 employees and 20-plus trucks servicing clients daily in Oakland, Macomb, and Wayne counties, many of the company’s design clients are now serviced remotely. “We can be much more efficient doing things virtually,” Marino says. Business is so good, in fact, that Marino is in the process of relocating his company to a much larger facility in Washington Township, about 10 minutes from his current location. “The person I bought the building from was my largest competitor. He sold the business about five years ago, and he called me and said he didn’t want to hold on to the building as an investment any longer,” Marino says. “The new building is 15,000 square feet, about three times the size of where we are.” Marino expects to move his business by late summer. He’s also excited about an upcoming job, priced at around $500,000, to landscape a new distribution center near Detroit Metropolitan Airport in Romulus. It’s just one of the many reasons why he confidently anticipates that sales growth this year will exceed the 26 percent jump the business experienced in 2020. — Tom Murray
ew people earn an engineering degree, it would seem, in order to pursue a career in insurance. But despite the vast difference between the two industries, Matthew McGrail made the transition look easy. Following graduation from the University of Michigan’s College of Engineering, he encountered an interesting career-day development: Insurance carriers wanted engineers, particularly Mutual of Wausau Insurance Corp. in Wisconsin. The insurer wanted to fill a risk control consultant position, and it was interested in technical expertise beyond the ins and outs of the insurance industry. “They went out on a limb and started talking to engineers because of (our) problem-solving ability,” McGrail says. McGrail joined Mutual of Wausau, and later accepted a position with Liberty Mutual Insurance that required him travel throughout the country before eventually getting an opportunity to move back to his native metro Detroit. The move back to Detroit involved a change: McGrail would be employed by Southfield-based Meadowbrook Insurance Agency — his first time working for an agency and not a carrier — as the senior vice president of agency operations. “As an agent, you’re definitely more responsible for that client’s insurance program,” McGrail says. “And if something goes wrong with that insurance program, you feel it (because of the relationship you’ve built.)” That’s the approach McGrail believes will lead Meadowbrook to be the single agency of choice in Michigan. Having applied his engineering acumen to field work for carriers, he now applies his strategic thinking and drive to the pursuit of the company’s goals. “We want them to think of Meadowbrook just as they think of the auto industry or U-M,” McGrail says. “That’s the kind of culture we’re trying to build here internally.” — Dan Calabrese
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