Exploring Life & Business with Tyler Wootton of Northmark Property Services

Today we’d like to introduce you to Tyler Wootton.

Hi Tyler, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I didn’t come to landscaping the obvious way. Before Northmark, I was running a trucking company in Wisconsin and a food wholesale business in Pennsylvania. Two completely different industries, but they taught me the same things – how to manage people, how to keep operations running tight, and what it looks like when a business actually holds itself accountable.
When I sold both and started thinking about what came next, I came home to Columbus. I grew up here. And pretty quickly I saw something that bothered me.
The bar in commercial landscaping is just low. Property owners were being let down by companies that didn’t communicate, didn’t show up consistently, and didn’t seem to care much whether the job actually met the client’s standard. For me, that wasn’t discouraging – it was the whole reason to get in.
I brought Joe in as my partner. We’ve known each other since New Albany High School – he was the quarterback, I was the offensive lineman blocking for him. He’d spent six years running his own residential landscaping business, so he knew the work as well as anyone. I bought his operation, shifted the focus to commercial properties, and we rebranded it Northmark.
The name means something to us. North is the fixed point in the sky – the one marker that doesn’t move, the one you can always find when you need to orient yourself. That’s what we’re building here. A company that commercial property owners in central Ohio can point to as the standard.
Everything we do runs through three words: Execute. Document. Verify. We do the job correctly and on time. We take before and after photos every single time we complete a service – no exceptions. And we follow up with every client to confirm the work met their expectations, not just ours. In an industry where accountability is treated as optional, we’re making it the foundation.
This year we’re committing one million dollars to growth. Central Ohio has a lot of properties that deserve to look better, and we’re here to make that happen. Joe and I knew a long time ago on that football field that we worked well together. Turns out it translates.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Honestly? No. And I’ll be upfront about that.
This past year was one of the hardest of my life. My dad, John Wootton, was a pastor here in Columbus for many years – a lot of people in this city knew him. Losing him while trying to build something new, while raising twin three-year-old boys at home, was a lot to carry all at once. There were days where the business stuff felt secondary to just getting through.
I don’t have some polished story about overcoming adversity and coming out the other side with all the answers. What I have is a business I believe in, a partner I trust, and a reason to keep pushing. My dad was somebody who showed up for people. That stuck with me. It’s part of why accountability matters so much to me in how we run Northmark – you either show up or you don’t.
On the business side, landscaping and snow removal will humble you fast. Weather doesn’t care about your schedule, equipment breaks at the worst times, and keeping quality consistent while you’re growing is a real challenge. We’re working through all of it.
I think the honest answer is that it hasn’t been smooth, and I’m not sure it’s supposed to be.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
Northmark Property Services. We’re a commercial landscaping company based in Dublin, Ohio, serving property owners and managers across central Ohio.
We specialize in commercial landscaping, HOA services, and snow and ice management. Where a lot of landscaping companies try to be everything to everyone – residential, commercial, one-off jobs, whatever comes in – we made a deliberate decision to focus entirely on commercial clients. That focus matters. Commercial properties have different demands, different timelines, and different stakes than a residential yard. The people responsible for those properties need a vendor they can count on without having to babysit.
That’s the gap we’re filling. The commercial landscaping industry has a reputation problem – missed visits, no communication, no accountability. We built Northmark specifically to fix that, and our operating principle reflects it: Execute. Document. Verify. We do the work correctly and on time, we photograph every property before and after every single service, and we follow up with clients to confirm the results met their standard. That last step – actually checking – is something most companies in this space simply don’t do.
The name Northmark is intentional. North is the fixed point in the sky that doesn’t move – the marker you orient everything else around. That’s the standard we’re holding ourselves to, and what we want to be for commercial property owners in this market.
What I’m most proud of is that the reputation we’re building is based on how we actually operate, not just how we market ourselves. We’re early in this journey, but the feedback from clients has confirmed that what we’re doing is different. Central Ohio deserves properties that look sharp and companies that stand behind their work. That’s what we’re here to deliver.

Can you talk to us about how you think about risk?
My friends and family would call me a risk-taker. I’m not sure I see it that way.
Every major decision I’ve made has had a lot of math behind it. I don’t jump – I calculate. But I’ll admit the jumps have looked pretty big from the outside.
My first job out of college was picking up dead bodies for a funeral home. That’s not a joke. I knew coming out of school that I wanted to own a business, and I had heard that funeral homes were solid businesses. But I didn’t know if I could actually do it – walk into that environment and handle what it required. So instead of wondering, I went to a local funeral home and asked for a job. They said yes. I started that same day. Over the next two years I picked up over a thousand bodies, on call twenty-four hours a day. Someone eventually wrote a book about that experience called The Pick Up Guy, and it was turned into a movie script before production shut down during COVID and never got back off the ground.
But I didn’t stay in funeral homes. I went to work at Amazon. The day after our honeymoon, my wife and I moved to Connecticut for the job. When I got promoted we moved to Nashville – a city I loved, even if the corporate path wasn’t where I wanted to stay. At twenty-six years old, with eight thousand dollars we had saved, I left and started a trucking company. We moved to Wisconsin to build it. What started with that eight thousand dollars became a real company, and eventually landed Amazon as a client.
When we were ready to be closer to family, we moved back to Columbus two years ago – where I grew up in New Albany. That’s when I started a food wholesale business with my college roommate, who ran the warehouse out of Pennsylvania. I invested a significant amount into that partnership – not into an existing business, but into a person. There was no business yet. I trusted him because I knew him. We grew it to a point where I could sell my half this year and start Northmark.
I haven’t worked a job since Amazon. I haven’t looked back either.
So am I a risk-taker? Maybe the honest answer is this – I think the bigger risk is not going after what you want. If you don’t try, you never find out what was possible. I’d rather pick up bodies in the middle of the night and know than wonder for the rest of my life what might have happened if I had.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://Northmarkohio.com