By Kristine Archer
Creativity, imagination and hard work are the staples of a successful landscaping firm. Darryl Shaver and Sandro Aiello, owners of Darsan Contracting in Concord, Ont., put these three tenets into practice as they built their company, which offers high-end residential and commercial landscape work, from flagstone, decks and paving to pools, water features and fencing.
Forging a partnership
A stonemason by trade, Shaver got his start in the business in 1987, after completing a three-year program at Toronto’s Humber College. He worked for other people for a few years, learning some valuable lessons along the way.
“I was exposed to a lot of custom work, which is what we’re into now,” Shaver explains. After getting his bearings in the industry, Shaver broke out on his own, working alongside a variety of different landscape architects. It was on one of those jobs where Shaver would meet his future business partner.
“We met through a friend of Sandro’s,” Shaver says of the first time he was introduced to Aiello. “He had purchased a house in North York, Ont., and needed somebody to do his landscaping.”
Aiello, a business graduate of Toronto’s Seneca College, was employed in the construction industry at the time.
“I was involved in earth works—excavation and relocation of earth—and then got into a lot of structural work, such as excavation of residential homes and trenching and forming for front staircases,” he explains. “That’s when I got involved in landscaping, which just happened to be around the time I met Darryl. Our personalities really fit together well.”
After tackling a few landscaping projects and some winter snow removal work together, the new associates decided to officially join forces and start their own company.
“We understood how each other worked,” Aiello says. “After a couple of years we said, ‘We’ve got to pull everything together.’ That’s when we took the plunge.”
Even the company name was a joint effort, according to Aiello.
“We took the first three letters of Darryl’s name and the first three letters of my first name,” he explains. “We didn’t want to do ‘regular’ landscaping. We wanted to get into high-quality residential work.”
