Athletic addition: growing business through sports hardscaping

Editor's Note: This article originally appeared in the November 2025 print edition of Lawn & Landscape under the headline “Athletic addition."

Ian McCarthy launched Massachusetts-based Blue Claw Associates, a full-service landscape construction and maintenance company, in 2018. Though very different from the role he’d held for most of the previous decade — that of a professional basketball executive in Canada — the new business venture directly aligned with McCarthy’s earlier landscaping industry work in the area.

“In 2016 or 2017, I held a reunion of former employees from my old company, which I’d started in 1996,” McCarthy explains. “They encouraged me to get back into the industry again.”

In fact, McCarthy re-hired many former employees as part of his Blue Claw Associates launch. Buoyed by the new company’s success, McCarthy quickly felt ready to diversify his service offerings. In 2021, he launched a new business — Blue Water Pools & Spas — from scratch. Then, in 2022, he expanded his service portfolio yet again, with the purchase of Boston Tennis & Sports Court Company, a longstanding area leader for tennis and pickleball court installation and maintenance.

In under seven years since launching Blue Claw, McCarthy has led the combined businesses to roughly $12 million in gross revenues, and he has grown his staff to include more than 70 employees, including 52 at Blue Claw, six at Blue Water Pools and 15 at Boston Tennis & Sports Court Company.

“We’ve done a lot of growing in a relatively short time,” McCarthy says. “My competency in the landscaping industry comes from several decades of experience, and now I’m jumping into these new industries, working to quickly get up to speed in those as well.”

A partnership model

Blue Claw Associates includes offices in Nantucket and on Cape Cod, offering landscape construction and maintenance services to those areas as well as portions of metro Boston. The company’s business model leans on building strong partnerships with area designers and builders to ensure a steady stream of work.

“We don’t design, so we don’t compete with (builders and designers), and that’s really allowed us to use those partnerships to scale our businesses,” McCarthy says. “Plus, the level of detail we provide on our masonry services has allowed us to distinguish ourselves and separate ourselves from other competing companies.”

As a result, Blue Claw has not needed to advertise directly to customers. “Once we do right by a design company, they keep sending us projects over and over,” McCarthy says.

Roughly 90% of Blue Claw’s landscape business is residential, with a key focus on new hardscape and landscape installations. Their maintenance division also includes some non-residential projects, including contracts with several area resorts and homeowners associations.

Growing again

McCarthy’s acquisition of Boston Tennis & Sports Court Company in 2022 came as a lead from a fellow landscape industry colleague, who was aware that the company’s longtime owner planned to retire.

The company serves all of Massachusetts and specializes in building and maintaining asphalt and clay sports courts for clients — generally for tennis or pickleball, plus the occasional basketball court. While installations of new courts occur regularly, court maintenance for pre-existing customers also represents a huge driver of the business, essentially providing its own steady flow of work, McCarthy says.

“We don’t need to do any advertising,” he says. “The phone basically rings off the hook, with former clients needing maintenance.”

Some clients may want the courts refreshed yearly, while others try to stretch out service a bit longer.

Maintaining clay courts involves stripping the top layer of clay, putting down a new layer, and replacing the lines, McCarthy says. Maintenance on asphalt courts, meanwhile, includes power washing, repairing cracks, putting down a resurfacer and freshening up the painted lines.

All of this work feels, in many ways, similar to the skill set McCarthy and his team have long honed in their hardscape division at Blue Claw — making the add-on service feel like a natural match. “It’s essentially construction, but they call it maintenance because you’re rehabbing an old court,” he says.

For the most part, Boston Tennis & Sports Court Company retained its existing employees and management team, so its business acquisition process has been relatively easy, from McCarthy’s standpoint. “They’re pretty self-contained. They have their own facilities, whereas Blue Water Pools sort of lives within Blue Claw’s offices.”

Expanding to pools

McCarthy’s launch of Blue Water Pools in 2021 grew, to some extent, from necessity. The company specializes in installing and maintaining higher-end gunite pools, known for their durability and versatile design options.

“Coming out of COVID, we had a hard time finding pool contractors who were able to respond and move projects along,” he says. “And, we typically couldn’t complete our (hardscape) work until they did theirs, so we just decided to take the pool installation in-house to keep timelines running smoothly.”

McCarthy created the new service division as its own, distinct corporation. From an organizational standpoint, Blue Water Pools acts as a subcontractor to Blue Claw Associates on projects involving a pool installation.

McCarthy admits there was initially a learning curve in adding on the new pool service line. But, he addressed those challenges by hiring new staff members with pool industry experience and by being open to on-the-job training for his existing staff.

The degree of automation expected in the pool industry today especially surprised him. “People want to be able to turn their lights on and manage their pool chemicals all with their phones,” he says. McCarthy has recruited his adult son to oversee these technical aspects of the company’s pool maintenance division.

Most often, Blue Water Pools echoes Blue Claw’s approach of working with designers and builders, though the pool company does sometimes work directly with homeowners. In those cases, McCarthy starts by referring homeowners to a partner designer to develop a pool design plan.

Now in its fourth year, the pool expansion has been a success, not only as its own distinct business but also as a business driver for increased landscape and hardscape work for Blue Claw.

“We sometimes get a pool project by itself, but when clients find out that, ‘Oh, you have a company that does hardscape and landscaping, too?’ then they give us that work as well,” McCarthy says.

For clients, keeping all the hardscape, landscape and pool work with one contractor not only eases work timelines but also simplifies communication flow.

“Clients realize that by working with us, you don’t have separate landscapers pointing fingers at the pool guy, and the pool guy pointing fingers at the landscapers, making excuses for why timelines aren’t being met,” McCarthy says.

All in all, McCarthy feels the three businesses work very well together. In multiple cases, the independent companies have successfully attracted clients for one another. Plus, on a personal level, McCarthy has enjoyed the challenge of taking on two new fields.

“I jumped into landscaping in 1996 without knowing very much about it,” he says. “So, I’m accustomed to taking on an administrative role and then sort of learning the field afterwards.”

The author is a freelance writer based in Kentucky.