Honest and ethical

Before GPS guided us through every turn, before cell phones rendered moot the rote memorization of numerical chains, before the simplest search engines showed off every business within 10 or 20 or 100 miles of our exact location, we flipped through the Yellow Pages.

Greg Turner flipped through them more than most folks. He thumbed the alphabetized tabs and ripped out listings to build his route, one lawnmower shop and logging industry dealer at a time.

This was 1987. Turner was still in his 20s and just starting his sales career. Don Clark had hired him to drive around South Carolina for Townsend Saw Chain, a Homelite OEM, peddling saw chain and other chain saw-related accessories.

“I built this truck program up, just cold calling and going in the door, giving them a business card,” Turner remembers. If you think you have a need for a high-quality, lesser expensive chain, he would pitch, I would love to help you. “My first few days out I bet I didn’t sell $20 worth of stuff,” he says. Within a few months, he was selling $8,000 some days.

Turner could have been happy in South Carolina, but he followed Clark to Power Lawnmower Parts, working out of Rochester and driving seemingly everywhere — down to Virginia, up to Maine, over to Ohio and even Michigan. Foley United purchased PLP a couple years later and Turner stayed on.

He has never left.

Turner has worked for Foley, now known as The Foley Company, through four moves, the births of two children and three grandchildren, a handful of promotions and new titles — ultimately to global sales director starting in 2017 — and, last June, a bicycle accident that left him unable to walk. He is retiring after 35 years with the company — after 35 years of sales trips, of training around the world, of developing friendships that have kept him grounded and grateful.

One of his first industry friends was Jim Nedin, a Toro service manager then at EH Griffith in Pittsburgh who became a trusted consultant and received the Edwin Budding Award in 2019. “I did not know what a grinder was,” Turner says with a laugh. “He spent three days working with me, and what a guy to learn from.”

Toro senior marketing manager Barry Beckett and Jacobsen managing director Alan Prickett both became friends and professional lights who helped him connect with distribution bases and their customers in the field. So were Reinders commercial equipment division manager John Jensen, Smith Turf sales manager Brent Miller, Turf Equipment & Irrigation CEO Tyler Sorenson, and Troon Golf SVPs Jeff Spangler and Charlene Gallob. “You can learn a lot just watching people interact with people and I feel like I’ve been blessed being able to apply what I observed and learned over the years,” Turner says.

Turner counts the 1993 introduction of the AccuMaster, the first fully enclosed and fully automated tabletop spin/relief reel grinder as one of the early highlights of his career — “Foley has always been the innovator in our business,” he says — but far from the last. In 1998, he moved up to international sales manager and traveled outside the country for the first time, heading down under to Australia to train new customers at five Toro Australia locations for Cameron Russell. He later logged nearly two decades of work trips to China, Vietnam, Thailand, Sri Lanka, South Korea, Myanmar, Malaysia, Japan and India. “Just about every country in Asia,” he says. “Cambodia might have been an exception.” He traveled throughout Europe and South Africa, too, teaching people about grinders as Nedin once taught him.

“Foley took me places I would have never, ever dreamed of going,” he says. “It was just a great experience. There are good people all around the world and our turf industry is full of them. It’s amazing.”

Turner’s professional career ended suddenly after his bicycle accident. Early retirement, he calls it. He was in the hospital for a month and a rehab center for three months after that. He and his wife, Debbie, purchased a van fitted for his wheelchair. He returned home in October 2024 and, incredibly, started driving again, now with hand controls, in April. He and Debbie now share their home with their son, Christian, daughter-in-law, Amy, and grandson, Caleb. “To hear his voice in the mornings,” Turner says, “it’s a joy.” Their daughter, Brittany, son-in-law, Kevin, and granddaughters, Eliana and Madison,live nearby.

At the invitation of Foley president and CEO Paul Rauker, Turner will attend one more GCSAA Conference and Trade Show early next year in Orlando to “share a proper farewell to an industry I’ve loved” and catch up with old customers who became friends. He will probably pass along the lesson his first industry mentor, Clark, passed along to him before his first day selling saw chain to lawnmower shops: You be honest and ethical in everything you do and you’ll go far in this business.

“That just stuck with me,” Turner says. “It’s been the way I’ve tried to live my life, and I hope the people I’ve touched over the years remember me this way.”