Adrian Pinto: From Wall Street Banker to Landscaping Empire

Adrian Pinto spent the early years of his career in the high-altitude atmosphere of New York finance. As an investment banker at Credit Suisse and an associate at Greenbriar Equity Group, he spent his days modeling billion-dollar transactions and analyzing industrial conglomerates.

But from his vantage point in the glass towers, Pinto noticed a recurring anomaly.

He kept encountering blue-collar businesses—aerospace component manufacturers, HVAC networks—that had been built into nine-figure empires not by engineers or tradesmen, but by former finance professionals. He looked at the founders of companies like Whitcraft, a massive aerospace supplier, and realized they were just like him: guys who understood capital, not necessarily how to run a CNC machine.

"This guy is obviously smart, driven, and a hard worker, but he's not smarter than I am," Pinto recalls thinking. "Is it possible for me to do this, too?"

That question led Pinto to trade his suit for a GMC truck and his Manhattan apartment for the suburbs of Atlanta. Today, he is not analyzing deals for a private equity fund; he is the former operator of Georgia Scapes, a commercial landscaping firm that he successfully doubled in size and exited, completing the full cycle of entrepreneurship through acquisition.

Pinto’s journey began with a strategic retreat. Realizing he couldn't conduct a serious search for a business while working the grueling hours of private equity, he left Greenbriar for a European family office. The new role offered him the one asset he lacked: time.

When the pandemic hit in 2020, Pinto found himself in the perfect environment for a stealth search. Working remotely, he could scour listings and take calls with brokers without peering eyes looking over his shoulder. He narrowed his focus to Atlanta, where his wife had family, and initially targeted the "holy trinity" of maintenance businesses: HVAC, plumbing, and electrical.

He quickly hit a wall. In Georgia, owning those businesses required specific trade licenses that he didn't have. Lenders balked at the idea of a finance guy hiring a general manager to hold the license, viewing the "key man" risk as fatal.

Pinto had to pivot. He needed a business that was complex enough to benefit from his financial acumen but accessible enough to operate without a trade school degree.

He found the answer in a listing for a commercial landscaping business.

Initially, Pinto was skeptical. He assumed landscaping was a race to the bottom on price, plagued by high churn. But as he dug into the data of Georgia Scapes, he saw a business model that defied the stereotypes. It wasn't just mowing lawns for office parks; the company had a massive division dedicated to "recurring construction" for home builders.

When large developers built new subdivisions, they needed landscaping for hundreds of homes over the course of months or years. It was project work, technically, but it behaved like recurring revenue. It was predictable, high-volume, and sticky.

Pinto bought the business in July 2021 for a multiple of just under three times earnings. The business was generating roughly $3 million in revenue with healthy margins.

The transition from dealmaker to operator is rarely smooth, and Pinto’s first week was a trial by fire.

He shadowed the seller for three days and realized with dawning horror that the previous owner was not just managing the construction division—he was the construction division. He held all the relationships and technical knowledge in his head. Pinto realized by hour two that he could not replace him.

He had to move fast. He negotiated with the seller to help him find a replacement manager immediately, an unexpected cost that ate into the company’s pro-forma earnings.

Simultaneously, Pinto realized the infrastructure of the business was archaic. He had received advice from a mentor to build a "chassis"—a strong operational foundation capable of supporting future acquisitions. Georgia Scapes was not yet a chassis. It was a company where 100 employees filled out paper timesheets by hand the day after they did the work, ensuring the data was both late and inaccurate.

Pinto went to work implementing digital systems, installing telematics in the trucks, and professionalizing the back office. He wasn't just fixing problems; he was building the suspension for a much larger vehicle.

Pinto’s background in private equity had trained him to look for growth through acquisition. His original plan was to roll up smaller landscapers across the Southeast.

But once he was in the seat, he discovered a powerful truth: in the fragmented world of small business, organic growth was cheaper and easier than buying it.

He applied a white-collar lead generation strategy to a blue-collar industry. He joined the Atlanta Apartment Association and scraped the contact information for hundreds of property managers. He didn't wait for the phone to ring; he launched cold email campaigns, sending thousands of messages to decision-makers.

The strategy worked. For every 100 emails, he got a handful of meetings. For every handful of meetings, he closed a contract.

Combined with the booming housing market in the Southeast, this engine drove Georgia Scapes from $3 million in revenue to nearly $6 million in just over a year and a half. The growth was so explosive that the effective multiple on his purchase price dropped to around 2x earnings—a home run by private equity standards.

The journey has humbled Pinto in necessary ways. He learned that in a blue-collar environment, showing up in a suit and dictating strategy doesn't work. He bought a truck. He learned to listen.

In his early days, he overwhelmed his team with "bright ideas" for change, only to realize he was stressing them out. He pivoted to a more collaborative approach, gathering his observations over five months and then presenting them to the team for discussion rather than implementation.

He also learned the hard way about the risks of asset sales. He bought the business without a mechanical audit, only to find that some of the equipment was held together by duct tape and hope. He lost a major customer because the seller refused to let him introduce himself before the deal closed.

But eighteen months in, Pinto had earned his stripes. He had navigated the loss of key managers, survived the chaos of rapid scaling, and built a company that was growing faster than the competitors he once analyzed from his desk in New York.

He still kept a list of potential acquisition targets on his phone, typing in the names of landscaping trucks he saw on the highway. But for the time being, he was focused on the chassis. He was building a business that could run without him, aiming for the day when he could step back and see that the machine he built was self-sustaining.

Pinto’s journey into the weeds of small business ownership was always driven by a financial thesis: that a sophisticated operator could professionalize a fragmented trade, build a "chassis" for growth, and exit at a premium.

In October 2023, just over two years after purchasing the business, Pinto proved that thesis correct.

He successfully exited Georgia Scapes to United Land Services, a portfolio company of the private equity firm Centre Partners. It was the textbook play he had analyzed as an associate: he bought a small, unpolished asset, drove explosive organic growth, professionalized the infrastructure, and sold to a strategic platform for a multiple arbitrage.

Today, Pinto has traded the GMC truck for the role of capital allocator once again. He now operates Caravel Capital, investing with the authority of someone who hasn't just modeled the outcome in an Excel spreadsheet, but actually built it from the ground up.

The banker who left the skyscraper to mow lawns didn't just survive the transition. He completed the cycle.