The adventure begins🌲

Hi everyone! We’re Pat and Liz, and we’re super excited to officially be under contract to purchase Treetop Acres, a stunningly beautiful 22-acre Christmas tree farm in Lockport, NY.

We still can’t quite believe this evergreen dream coming true. As we learn to own and operate a tree farm, we want to share it all, with all of you — starting now.

A little bit about us

We both have strong roots in WNY and live just down the Erie Canal, in our beautiful 99-year old house in the village of Brockport, NY.

Pat grew up just South of Buffalo in Holland, NY and graduated from University at Buffalo. (Go Bulls!). Liz grew up in Rochester and initially moved to Buffalo to attend Canisius College. (Go Griffs!) After falling in love with the place, she stuck around for almost a decade after graduation.

We met back in 2013, when we both lived in Buffalo. We hit it off and dated for a few months, before very amicably ending things when Liz moved away. Fast forward to almost 8 years later, and we reconnected in a different city, after a lot of life and learning.

We fell in love and now we’re engaged, co-parenting Pat’s awesome 8-year old daughter Emmarie, and puppy-parenting a 7-month old rescue dog named Pierogi. Oh, and we both work full-time jobs and are buying this Christmas tree farm.

We never intended for our lives to play out like a Hallmark movie, but that seems to be what’s happening. And to be honest, it’s pretty great.

Meant to be
(in the Christmas tree farm business)?

Pat is an entrepreneur at heart and always has been. As a kid, he made drawings of birds and sold them to family and neighbors. He also created and sold Sportsmen’s Newsletter, a subscription-supported publication for outdoors enthusiasts. 

As an adult, he built and ultimately sold a very successful photo booth company, when having a photo booth at events was all the rage. He started with one photo booth, hustled hard, and ended up with six constantly-booked photo booths.

And that wasn’t his only business. As someone who loves hiking, biking, kayaking, camping, disc golf, skiing, and other such activities he knew all about the expense of buying equipment new. He also understood peoples’ propensity to want to upgrade every so often.

After getting a feel for the second-hand market, he started a specialty consignment shop called Survival of the Gear that bought and sold used outdoor sporting gear. He also ran classes and events out of the store, bringing like-minded people together to learn about and participate in the activities they love most. In addition to building a business, he built a community.

After having his daughter and moving to Rochester, he closed the store and began working in IT for the regular hours and financial stability. Today, he’s in management at a high-growth cybersecurity company and while he loves what he does, he’s never lost his entrepreneurial spirit or his passion for running his own business.

As a copywriter and creative director at an advertising agency, Liz is no stranger to building brands and selling product. After 20-something years of helping other peoples’ businesses succeed, the thought of pouring her strategic thinking and creativity into a project that she can (quite literally) own is more than just exciting, it’s inspiring, and energizing on a whole new level. Her one most recurring question for Pat is if he’s going to have enough trees once she gets control of the marketing machine.

But why a Christmas tree farm?
And why now? 

As someone who grew up on 13 acres and loves to be outside, Pat has long dreamed of owning and operating a tree farm. Liz was totally in on the idea when she found out Taylor Swift grew up on a Christmas tree farm.

In all seriousness, though, our decision to take this leap is based on the right opportunity presenting itself.

We certainly could’ve found a piece of land and started from scratch. But when we found out that there was an established tree farm for sale, we knew we had to find out more.

Lucky for us, Treetop Acres has great roots. Pun intended.

Sure it’s nice that there are mature trees ready-to-sell, but what really sold us is the farm’s history. The founders/current owners John and Vicki Fuerch have worked hard to build a wonderful and reputable business selling U-Cut Trees for the past 30 years. John was a teacher who ran the farm on the side and used the extra income to put his daughter through college and medical school. The more we learned the more we felt this was the right opportunity, at the right time.

Building on a strong foundation

We plan to up-level every customer’s visit with more family-friendly holiday experiences on the farm. We’ll have cookies and cocoa and introduce additional products including handmade wreaths and ornaments. And maybe even sell festive holiday charcuterie boards someday.

Partnering with and supporting other local businesses is another thing we’re very excited about, and there are non-holiday related revenue streams we’re exploring as well. Yoga in the pines, anyone?

Fun fact: Christmas tree farms are the ideal (mostly) seasonal side-hustle

As an added bonus, Christmas trees are really great at doing their thing, independently. Which means we can do this AND both keep our well-paying day jobs.

There’s planting to be done in the Spring, trimming and shaping to be done in the summer, and a couple of busy weekends after Thanksgiving. But overall, the time investment is very manageable while the potential to expand is exponential. 

We’re purchasing a well-established business that has existing customers, name recognition, and a great legacy – with tons of room for us to make it our own and nurture its growth.

It’s a little wild to think about the fact that we’ll close in October and have our first holiday season as Christmas tree farm owners in a few short months, but we’re beyond excited and can’t way to carpe the heck out of this (and every) diem, this (and every) December. 

Funding the farm &
an invitation to invest

To make this purchase possible, we are working with a lender that specializes in farms and agriculture. This is especially great because they structure loan payments around when you harvest crops, or in our case, sell Christmas trees. The proceeds from holiday tree sales will more than cover our loan payment each year – so, even without the introduction of other products, services, and experiences, the financial outlook is very positive.

We’ve already put down a deposit and can cover the downpayment and closing costs by selling off some of our investments, but we would prefer not to sell them, if we don’t have to.

As anyone who has tried to finance anything lately knows, interest rates are pretty high these days — so what we’d really love to do is create a mutually beneficial situation where we borrow the funds to close (about $80 – $90k total) from friends and/or family members and then pay those amazingly generous and supportive people back over time, with interest.

If you’re in a position where you could loan us some of your hard-earned cash money, we’d sign a legally-binding document promising to pay that cash back plus more interest than a CD or high-yield savings account would pay. And that makes it a smart investment and a win for you.

It would also be a win for us, because we get to hang onto our investments, further protecting your loan and mitigating risk. And the interest we pay to you will be less than the interest a bank would charge.

If you want to know more, see the numbers and our detailed business plan, or explore how you can be a part of this dream of ours — definitely let us know.

Please follow along, and join us on our Christmas tree farm adventure

We’re excited to share our experiences and what we learn. Please feel free to follow along as we complete the purchase, create a logo, build out our new website and social channels, learn to make wreaths, navigate our first season, and get to work growing our compact Christmas tree farm.

At the very least yule enjoy some tree-mendous puns and cute kid and puppy photos.

We appreciate you taking the time it took to read this far — and your future support already means the world to us.

Stay tuned and Go Bills!