Feature
Member Spotlight on Kurt Fellenstein Founder and CEO of Trinity Turf
16 | VIRGINIA TURFGRASS JOURNAL July/August 2022 www.vaturf.org
What is Trinity Turf, and what is your role? We’re a wholesale distributor, I would call us a regional distributor. Full-service, full line of anything for turf -- so grass seed, fertilizer, pesticides, erosion control, pretty much if it goes on the grass, we sell it. We just don’t sell sod, which sometimes people confuse us for a sod company, if you look at TrinityTurf.com you go to Texas to a sod company, but TrinityTurf.net is us, we’re based in Virginia and we’re the regional distributor. As far as my role goes, I’m the Founder of the company. We started in 2004, I took on a few partners pretty much immediately after starting, and they were active for a while. I actually have one partner that is still active, along with my wife, who works day to day doing all of our accounting. What did you do before founding the company? I began my career with Wetzel Seed Company. Wetzel Seed has been bought and sold several times and the name has kind of gone by the wayside, but I worked under Bob Wetzel when I was there. I enjoyed my time there, but there was another opportunity that I left for. That company was family-owned, and they were trying to do a Southern expansion, they were based out of New England. About six months into that, I told my wife, “It’s really great working for this company, but if something ever happened, I just don’t think I could go to work for somebody else. I just think I’d do it on my own.” About six months later, they came to me and said, “Things just aren’t working out with our expansion, we’re going to have to retract back up into New England, but we found some other company to take you over.” I was like, “Thanks, but no thanks, I’ll do this myself.” I was really fortunate that I had built a loyal customer base, and I felt like they were buying from me more so than the company and that the majority of them would follow me no matter what I did. Thankfully that was the case, so I had a really loyal group of customers that said, “If you’re going to do this on your own, we’ll back you.” Just getting started back in 2004, I just had the corner of a warehouse for this other company. I kept a pallet or two pallets worth of stuff in that little corner. Then over the years it’s grown. Our main facility is in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia – we’re in Weyer’s Cave – we have about 20,000 square feet of warehouse there; and then also in Richmond, VA we opened up a location several years ago – and we have about 24,000 square feet of warehouse there. And currently we have about 22 employees. Things have grown quite a bit over the last 18 or so years. While we have our struggles from time to time, my core group of employees have been fantastic, and we have had very little turnover. I attribute that to always treating people well. I am humbled that talented people would leave their families and come work for me. In exchange, I try to pay a fair wage, treat them well, and reward hard work. My current business partners are Apryl Fellenstein, who I mentioned works full time for Trinity Turf, and Chad Barnett who also works full time as a salesperson. Without them, Trinity Turf would not be what it is today.
