Craig Ruppert believes deeply in growth, whether it’s associated with the 75,000 trees he raises on his 600 acres in upper Montgomery County or the people living with disabilities or poverty he helps raise up. The CEO of Laytonsville-based Ruppert Companies, whose subsidiaries include Ruppert Nurseries, learned early in life that growth can and should be carefully nurtured.
It was, in fact, Ruppert’s childhood memories of disabled youngest sister Colleen that led to his extraordinary commitment to the Easter Seals Greater Washington Baltimore Region. In the early 1990s, at the request of a friend, he agreed to answer phones at a telethon for the organization. Later, while contemplating an offer in 1996 to join the nonprofit’s board of directors, he visited the Easter Seals Child Development Center in the Washington, D.C., neighborhood of Columbia Heights. The building was oddly familiar to him. After consulting with his mother, he realized that he had accompanied her to the facility as a child, when she dropped off Colleen at the center’s early education program, at the time one of the few such programs in the area for children with disabilities.
“Colleen thrived there,” Ruppert recalls. He promptly joined the Easter Seals board, eventually becoming chairman, a major donor and a catalyst for the creation of a new Easter Seals facility in downtown Silver Spring.
Named 2008 philanthropist of the year by the Montgomery County Community Foundation (MCCF), Ruppert, 55, has helped implement an extraordinary culture of giving within the companies he started more than 30 years ago. Since 2003, 5 percent of Ruppert Companies profits before taxes—about $300,000 annually—have been donated to a variety of charities, including Easter Seals, Food For The Poor Inc., and Ruppert’s almamater, St. John’s College High School in Washington. In addition, company employees have participated in handson community service projects, including the renovations of a Little League field in the District and the grounds of 13 D.C. schools. Ruppert also established the Ruppert Family Foundation, from which he makes substantial personal donations.
“Craig sets a great standard—to make a commitment to give back,” says MCCF Executive Director Sally Rudney.
Ruppert and his wife Pat, 54, live on a former Laytonsville dairy farm in a stone house that looks at least 100 years old but was actually built by the couple in 1996. Surrounding the home is a setting as bucolic and rural as imaginable in modern-day Montgomery County, with verdant rolling hills, neat rows of trees and a catch-and release fishing pond.
“We’re fortunate to be in the business we’re in—it’s nice to have a big, beautiful yard and live on a farm,” Craig Ruppert says. “It’s not easy to grow trees and make money on them, but the benefit is you get to live here.”
Married for nearly 28 years, the Rupperts have three daughters and a son. Pat was a stay-at-home mom and a volunteer while Craig grew the business. “It was hard work and long hours [in the beginning],” says Craig’s older brother, Chris Ruppert, 57, of Rockville. Chris Ruppert, now retired, remains a partner in Ruppert Properties. “We did everything—Craig had a full-time job during the day [at a local fire restoration company]—and then came back in the evenings to do bills and estimates. Sixty hours was a light week,” Chris says.
Over the years, all four Ruppert children worked in the business at least one summer, “sweating every day and getting calluses like everyone else,” Craig says. Today, Sophie, 26, runs a sleep-away camp in North Carolina; Charlotte, 23, a recent graduate of the University of Richmond, is considering joining the Peace Corps; Jack, 21, is a senior at Pennsylvania State University; and Julie, 19, is a sophomore at Virginia Tech.
A tall and rangy man who dresses during the week in workman-like khakis and a polo shirt embossed with the company name, Ruppert began his professional life while a teenager. With eight children in the family, there was little money for extras like a car, so he and Chris started a lawn-cutting service while in high school, operating out of the garage in their parents’ Chevy Chase home. Joining them was 11-year-old neighbor Chris Davitt, one of 10 children in his family.
Ruppert’s father, architect Carl Ruppert, who died last year at the age of 86, encouraged and supported the boys. “He didn’t over-advise us when we started our lawn business. We just took over the garage and set up an office in the basement,” Craig Ruppert recalls. His mother, 88-year-old Antoinette Ruppert, still lives in Chevy Chase.
“My parents were good examples—they were active in their community and church. They never had a lot of money, but they were always involved,” Ruppert says.
Following high school, Ruppert enrolled at the University of Maryland in College Park, but after a year and a half he decided that the academic world wasn’t for him. He continued to run Ruppert Lawn Service while also working full time at a local fire restoration company. In the mid-1970s, Ruppert Landscape Company was born and Ruppert began landscaping large commercial properties, doing away with the residential lawn care service. By the mid-1980s, the company expanded, eventually opening 13 district offices from Philadelphia to Georgia, with about $45 million in annual revenue.
In 1998, Craig and Chris Ruppert, along with Chris Davitt, sold Ruppert Landscape to ServiceMaster, which serves residential and commercial customers via a series of brands, including TruGreen, TruGreen Land Care and Terminix. Ruppert and his partners kept and continued to run the tree-growing portion of the company, which constituted about 5 percent of the business.
Selling the rest of the business took Ruppert’s life in a different direction. “I had more time, and with four kids growing up, I coached in every sport you could coach. I could think, read and explore other businesses,” he says, founding Ruppert Ventures and Ruppert Properties during this period.
A philosophy of giving
Five years later, when the non-compete clause of the sale expired, Ruppert realized that he missed the excitement of running a large business, as well as the challenges of managing people. The time spent away had given him the opportunity to structure a company philosophy centered on giving back to the community. “It’s not just giving away money, but a means to get our people engaged in the process, to get them personally involved in charitable donations,” Ruppert explains. “Employees want to be part of a company that shares—they want to share. It leads to greater loyalty and respect for the company. Being charitable doesn’t cost that much–it comes back in unmeasured ways, including better customer and employee commitment.”
Another benefit of company giving is that employees who are not in a position to personally give away substantial sums of money are able to be part of a large charitable donation, giving the man experience they would not normally have, Ruppert says.“It enriches their lives and our collective experience. It improves our work ethic and contributes to our ongoing success.”
Chris Davitt, 48, a Silver Spring resident and Ruppert’s childhood friend, is now president of Ruppert Nurseries and vice president of Ruppert Companies. He has worked with Craig Ruppert for 37 years and also believes in the philosophy of social responsibility. “Sometimes business and making money doesn’t sound seemly. The question is: How much is too much? If you connect profit with good causes, then it motivates you to do good work, rather than just being motivated by profit alone,” Davitt says. “The more you earn, the more you can give away—and the bigger difference you can make.
“Craig is certainly a good businessman,” Davitt says, “but his No. 1 quality isn’t his business skills or selling ability—it’s a wholesomeness.
He’s a good person, and everyone wants to work with him and be on his team.”
In 1998, after they sold the company, he and Ruppert discussed the amount of money coming in from the sale.“It almost didn’t seem right—it was too much. That’s when we started talking about doing some big things. We could change lives; we could save lives. And that’s a powerful feeling,” Davitt says.
Davitt had heard a speech from a representative of the nonprofit Food For The Poor Inc., based in Coconut Creek, Fla., an international relief organization in the U.S. that serves the poor in the Caribbean and Latin America. At Davitt’s urging, Ruppert accompanied him to the organization’s headquarters to talk to the group’s founders, and then followed up with visits to Haiti and Jamaica to see its operations in action, each taking along their oldest daughter (Davitt has six children).
After the visit, the men committed to a joint donation of $1million, according to Ruppert and Food For The Poor.
Robin Mahfood, president and CEO of Food For The Poor, has known Ruppert for 10 years. “Craig has been an ambassador for the poor. He really is a very compassionate person with a caring heart,” Mahfood says. Nearly a dozen times, Ruppert has led 30 to 35 family members and friends on missions to the Caribbean to help build schools and homes in impoverished communities.
Ruppert’s children each have gone on a mission with him. “It’s really built the relationship between father and child,” explains wife Pat. “I’m very grateful to Craig for his good parenting and setting a fine example.”
The brutal poverty they witnessed on those trips taught the children that, while they have so much, it has to be juxtaposed against those who have so little. “He’s always told us that a lot is expected of those who have a lot. That philosophy is deeply ingrained and is always in the back of our minds with every decision we make,” says oldest daughter Sophie Ruppert Felts.
An important factor behind Ruppert’s devotion to good causes is the love and respect he has for his sister Colleen, now 48, who was born with Down syndrome. “Craig became a different person because of Colleen and his parents’ response to the challenge, which allowed her to be who she is,” Pat Ruppert says. Her in-laws, she says, simply rolled up their sleeves and went to work to help Colleen reach her potential. Today, she’s relatively independent and lives in a group home in the District, works at the U.S. Government Printing Office and speaks on behalf of people with developmental disabilities.
