Getting the lay of the land
Terry Warner has grown up, built a business and raised a family all within a block of where she was born in Harwich. To say she is rooted is quite an understatement.
Today, she operates Warner Surveying from a spacious but unpretentious office attached to her home on a dirt road. She can balance more than 300 projects a year while raising two teenagers and managing a staff that now includes her husband.
“I may own the ultimate home-based business,” she said. “The kids were very young when I started. We have been here every day when they come home from school. Sometimes, it’s difficult mixing home and work responsibilities, but I like being here whenever I am needed.”
That includes coaching her daughter in softball, basketball and field hockey, something Warner is quite qualified to do, given her high school days as a three-letter athlete.
Now, Warner works until 2 p.m. most days, along with another employee, Lorna Allen, who also has school-aged children. Having an office at home and balancing her schedule between work and family also has proven a successful economic formula. It’s cut down on rent and other overhead while eliminating any need for after-school child care expenses over the years.
In 1998, her husband, Bob, a former builder, joined the business. “His body was beginning to feel his age, and I always needed another person. One day, he asked, ‘How about I work with you, if we can stand it?’”
“He takes a ribbing because he works for me,” she laughed. While the arrangement has proven professionally successful, Warner concedes that their workday extends far beyond the normal eight hours. “We still talk about a job in the middle of the night sometimes. We can argue over things – how should something be done. But overall it’s been good.”
He handles the fieldwork, and brings the results home to her. “I take it from there,” she said.
Warner concentrates primarily on surveying for residential septic tank installations and replacements, a business that has been extremely busy since the housing boom that began in 1999 and only recently slowed. She also does certified plot plans for people seeking additions and subdivisions, as well as lot stakings and boundary line surveys. She has discovered a niche that lets her survive among intense competition. There are more than 20 other survey companies located within five miles of her Harwich home office.
While the fieldwork is the most visible aspect of her business, the typical job begins with research of deeds and plans, continues with legal and regulatory check-offs and culminates with the computerized planning and plotting process – and all that falls to Warner.
She marvels at how new computer software and communications technology has allowed her to grow her business with little extra staffing. Moreover, it has let her work almost totally at home.
“I can’t imagine going back to drawing things by hand,” she said. “In the past, I would have to travel several times a week to the Registry of Deeds in Barnstable and spend hours searching jobs by hand. Now, I simply access the files electronically via the Internet and download them into my computer.”
“Technology means you can make more money faster, and your work is more in-depth. Now, you see the results of your work as you do it. If you make a mistake, you see the error immediately. It’s not an exaggeration that work is 100 times faster today than 10 years ago.”
Other computer software lets her download all the fieldwork, compare it with deeds and plans and then draw final plans for clients. She can e-mail engineers and sanitation experts along the way, and eventually digitally send off her work to clients.
“I work with one engineer very frequently, but we don’t actually see each other until we have to actually stamp a final septic plan,” said Warner.
From the ground up
Warner is the classic example of someone starting at the bottom and working her way up. She joined the BSC Group, a large Boston-based company, in 1982 as a secretary in its Hyannis office. “I had just graduated from college and gotten married. The housing economy began to bloom then, and they decided to train me in field work and as a drafter to help with the work volume,” she recalled.
Soon, she was joined by more surveyors and engineers as well as geologists, environmental planners and landscape architects on the Cape, as work, especially regarding wetlands and conservation areas, increased.
Her training intensified and Warner became an adept computer user, especially at AutoCAD, which today includes animation tools that can detect flaws early in design work. The software enables Warner to turn design models into actual construction documents that depict exactly what needs to be built.
Unfortunately, the housing industry bottomed out in the late 1990s, and her office closed for several years before reopening in Yarmouth. “It was unbelievable to watch people leave or be laid off,” she said.
Warner determined right then that she would not find herself at the mercy of future housing cycles. She studied – even while pregnant – to earn the Surveyor in Training certificate and then the Professional Land Surveyor designation.
Then, she ventured out on her own, originally under the business name Terry Warner, PLS. She received some work from local sanitarians and a few attorneys, and off she went. “I really had no grand plan,” she recalled.
At that time, she did everything, including the survey fieldwork, with help from her father on some fieldwork. She put a sign on a truck and relied on word of mouth for the next job.
Eventually, her husband volunteered to join her, and as work grew, she recruited an employee – another mother in the neighborhood who could work until 2 p.m.
The latest housing downturn has assured Warner of her business model. With such low overhead and no extensive staffing, she is able to adjust to cyclical demands.
“What I have seen lately, in just the last couple of years, is a growing number of teardowns and replacements of existing homes,” she said. “That really will be the future, given that there is so little land left to develop.
“People are buying small cottages and rundown houses, whose land value now is more than the building is worth. They tear them down and put up bigger ones with larger septic tanks.”
The challenge, she noted, is that in many cases, the bigger homes are located on small lots. Survey precision is a must. Boundary lines are sometimes viciously fought over. Moreover, septic systems today often take up much larger footprints because they must be shallower.
Hometown Harwich
She was born here as a Crowell. She grew up in the house at the end of driveway. “This was a sandpit,” she said, pointing to her backyard’s four acres.
Back then, 50 years ago, Harwich bragged of no stoplights and routes 39 and 137 near her home were just woods.
“I love to travel, but I always want to come back home. I am particularly privileged because with my kind of work, I see gorgeous places on the Cape that most people cannot access.”
At the same time, she notes an anomaly given such rapid growth: It is not translating into a rising number of young families and children. “My high school class in 1975 was 103. The size of my daughter’s class is 88. Population is growing, but not at that age group or among young families,” she said.
She sees more evidence of that in her work, since so many of her 300 survey and septic projects a year come from second homes that do not bring school-aged children into the community. “As a result, you can see a shortage of service workers during the summer. There are not enough people to wait on the tourists and second-home owners.”
Warner’s current business is vulnerable not only to a slowing pipeline of work, but to a potential revolution in the way Cape Cod handles its waste. Title 5 septic systems may be state of the art, but they cannot process the nitrogen that escapes into the Cape’s estuaries and fresh water; and it is nitrogen that is killing vital oxygen.
She envisions more reliance on larger sewer systems and clustered waste treatment facilities, and, she said, “That would wipe out a lot of my business.”
“I am beginning to consider diversifying,” she said – especially into conservation and wetlands planning, which she considers a bullish business in years to come – and one that reflects her own love for a place that always has been home.
Originally published in the March/April 2007 issue of Cape Business.
Cape Business Newsletters
Keep up with the latest issues affecting your business and your life! To sign up for any of the Cape Business newsletters, click here.