A Seat at the Fed's Table: Nurseryman Craig Ruppert Provides a Business Voice at Policy Board

Gazette Business Oct. 14, 1999
By Charles Spencer
Staff Writer

Craig Ruppert has got it made in the shade. Since selling Ruppert Landscape Co., the part-owner of Ruppert Nurseries in Laytonsville has more time to spend on his farm with his family, and in his charity work - as well as helping to set monetary policy as a member of the Federal Reserve.

He prefers not to talk about the sale price of the company his partners, brother Chris Ruppert and Chris Davitt, sold to giant TruGreen-ChemLawn in August 1998, but he's glad he was able to give out more than $3 million in bonus payments to about 300 people, with the top 20 employees based on seniority and level of management receiving from $80,000 to $100,000 each.

On a perfect late-September day, he climbs into his pickup truck to give two visitors a tour of his well manicured farm, with its rows of trees, and his home overlooking an irrigation pond. Yogi the chocolate colored Lab runs ahead of the pickup a few paces, stopping occasionally to look back. If there's a dog heaven, this is it. Yogi races ahead as the truck lurches over a path along the treeline bordering a soybean field, branches whipping over the cab and brushing a photographer curled up in the bed next to a bale of hay.

This is a tree farm, after all. There are rows upon rows of trees - 24,000 of the company's 34,000 trees are at this location, with others in 100 varieties growing at six other farms in Sunshine, Olney and Ashton. They have weathered the drought, thanks in part to an irrigation pond on the property. Most of the 3,000 to 4,000 trees the company will sell this year will end up at garden centers and wholesale nurseries in the Northeast.

While the trees survived the drought undamaged, business has been down 20 percent. But Ruppert says he expects to make up that deficit this fall as customers discouraged from buying because of the drought get around to purchasing trees they wanted this summer.

Bouncing along in the truck heading toward a row of trees, Ruppert talks about his position as a member of the board of directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, Va.

"It's a tremendous experience, participating in the creation of monetary policy," he says.

It seems a strange statement coming from a man driving a truck through a field behind a playful dog, but Ruppert may be the perfect Fed board member.

"Craig is just a very entrepreneurial and very connected kind of guy in terms of keeping up with what's going on in the business world," says Hunter R. Hollar, president and chief executive officer of Sandy Spring National Bank, who nominated Ruppert to be a board member. "That's exactly what they're looking for. He's ...just a natural for the position."

Once a month Ruppert travels to Richmond, where he meets with eight other members of the board of directors for the Fifth Federal Reserve District, which includes the District of Columbia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and most of West Virginia. In Richmond, the board meets to discuss monetary policy, including decisions on whether to raise interest rates charged to banks, lower them or leave them untouched. Directors enjoy considerable power because Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan cannot change rates without their consent.

The Federal Reserve System - with its 12 regional banks, the Board of Governors in Washington D.C., and 25 branch offices and 11 regional check processing centers nationwide - has three main responsibilities: influencing money supply and credit, regulating and supervising bank holding companies and certain commercial banks, and giving payment services to depository financial institutions and the Treasury Department.

"People like Craig Ruppert, who has a great deal of know-how in running an organization, are extremely valuable to us," says Kemper Baker, vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. "Just being able to sit down, get their ideas and get their recommendations is helpful...He's an extremely capable and at the same time outgoing person. He's very valuable here."

Ruppert says the role of directors like him is to bring in anecdotal information on the state of the economy from their contacts with businesspeople in their area, information that complements the hard data of economists. Ruppert was appointed to the term, which ends Dec. 31, 2001, for the period beginning Jan. 1, 1999, when he was still running Ruppert Landscaping.

Back home on his patio, Ruppert sits in the sun and talks about life after the sale of the company. Ruppert Nurseries was not part of the sale, and for a few months after the sale to TruGreen-ChemLawn he and Davitt stayed on to provide leadership for the new owners while Chris Ruppert ran the nursery. But they decided to go to the nursery themselves.

The nursery has about 25 employees. At the time of the sale, Ruppert Landscape had 850 employees and 13 branch offices from Delaware to Georgia, and annual revenues of about $45 million , putting it in the top five landscaping companies in the country. TruGreen-ChemLawn, the No. 1 provider of lawn-care services, is part of ServiceMaster Co. of downers Grove, Ill., a corporation with $4.7 billion in sales in 1998 and the owner of brand names like Terminix, American Home Shield and Merry Maids.

If the partners have one regret about the sale, they say it is missing the people they had worked with for so many years. The Rupperts and Davitt have worked together on and off since childhood, when the business began in the Rupperts' family garage in Chevy Chase with a few used lawnmowers. It became incorporated in 1977.

Each partner is quick to credit the others for the company's success. "To a certain degree we escaped the normal brother problems by having different responsibilities," says Chris Ruppert, who is a year and a half older than his brother. "Both of these gentlemen (Ruppert and Davitt) are the most unassuming, sweet-hearted, kindest people," says Joyce Mahoney, Food for the Poor's Maryland director.

Chris Ruppert says he is interested in other organizations, such as the Olney Rotary. Like his brother, he too is spending less time on day-to-day operations to consider other opportunities.

Both brothers are a little unsure about where the future will lead. For now they seem to be enjoying the time they have to pursue other interests and spend more time with their families, time that the sale has given them.

"Our long-term objectives aren't really clear yet," Craig Ruppert says. For now, "we want to do a great job of growing trees."