Richard Poynter

A Career Built from the Ground Up

I grew up in a modest home with an outdoor patio that featured a stone grilling pit. My father, brother, and I built a picnic table, and we enjoyed many family meals together there over the years. We also had beautiful backyard trees well-suited to climbing and from which I could see into the front and back yards of my neighbors – an aerial vantage point that would become quite familiar to me soon enough.

My professional journey began while I was still young, working in a local garden center. This was a time when American residential architecture was beginning to rethink the relationship between the house and the outdoors. The emphasis was shifting away from the public front porch and toward the privacy of the backyard as a place for family life and entertaining.

This was also an era when residential design was looking for ways to bring the outside inside (remember green shag carpeting?) and, increasingly, to extend the living space of the home back outside.

Witnessing this change in the industry, I was given the go-ahead to establish a first-of-its-kind division within the garden center. Early in my career, I had the opportunity to help develop an approach that combined patios, landscaping, and outdoor living rather than treating them as separate parts of a project. I found that I was able to cut through the noise, quickly assess site conditions, and turn problem areas into assets for a more refined outdoor living space.

In 1992, I founded Poynter Landscape Architecture, formally establishing that focus and spending the next 30 years building the company into a highly recognized St. Louis landscape architecture and design-build firm known for complex, creative residential projects.

Over the years, our work received numerous national awards and was featured in publications including St. Louis Homes & Lifestyles, Ladue News, Ladue Magazine, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and The Garden Bible, written by Better Homes & Gardens writer Barbara Ballinger.

The goal was never simply to become the biggest company. I was more interested in taking on projects that challenged our design ability, construction knowledge, people, and processes—and in creating a company where everyone—including me—could be genuinely excited to come to work every day.

A large part of the company’s success came from learning how to hire the right people, develop their abilities, and create systems that allowed the business to grow without losing sight of the quality and design standards that defined our work. Over the years, I trained and worked alongside landscape designers, landscape architects, craftspeople and installers, project managers, and professionals involved in virtually every facet of the business, including sales, estimating, construction, quality control, customer service, operations, and marketing.

By the time I stepped away from the company after 30 years, we had completed thousands of projects throughout the St. Louis region, received national recognition for our work, and been active in professional and industry organizations at both the local and national level.

Learning From Other Business Owners

Over much of my professional life, conversations with colleagues and other business owners have often extended well beyond the work itself—to people, growth, difficult decisions, and the challenges that come with running a business.

One of the people who influenced me most was Joe Wyman of Treeland Nursery, who became an important mentor. I would sit in his office and we would sometimes talk about business for hours. We probably had ten or twelve of those conversations in a typical year, and over time they became an important part of how I learned to think about business.

Years later, after Joe had passed away and the nursery had closed, I was driving by and offered to take down the old Treeland sign in case his daughter wanted to keep it. She told me she already had plenty of remembrances and said I could have it if I wanted it. It has hung prominently in my garage ever since.

I came to really value that kind of exchange—the chance to think through a problem with someone who had experience, perspective, and no need to make the answer more complicated than it had to be. Over time, I found myself having similar conversations with other owners and colleagues, sometimes offering the same kind of outside perspective that had been so useful to me.