CO.STARTERS Spotlight: Jackson Fence Company And Their Commitment To Community

“We're just your hometown fence company.”

Community is the center of the Jackson Fence Company, a West Tennessee residential fencing company and this week’s CO.STARTERS Spotlight. As I speak with founder and manager, Canon Johnson, being a local business is definitely a title he wears proudly on their sleeves. 

After working for the construction industry for nearly a decade, Johnson noticed how under-serviced the fencing market was and dreamt of giving West Tennessee better service and quality for their backyards. Nearly four years since the Jackson Fence Company was founded, it has remained true to its values of quality and customer service.

 “We're all about doing better for Jackson,” says Johnson. “What we enjoy the most is the feeling we get when we give back to the community.” 

A few months after founding the company, Johnson noticed an ad for the CO.STARTERS program, a nine-week program through theCO to equip and educate aspiring entrepreneurs with the tools they need to begin their business and realized it could be the next step in growing his business. He says the biggest takeaway from the program was understanding the importance of targeting a specific audience, which led to his decision of solely supplying residential fencing needs. 

“It's easy to think that I can just be all things for all people, but they really taught us to hone in on one segment and really capitalize on that,” says Johnson. “So we have evolved into ‘Jackson Fence Company: Your Backyard Fence Company,’ and because we've marketed that idea so heavily, it's really resonated with people since we're accommodating that specific space.” 

Though they have seen much success in their business, starting a company from the ground up comes with many challenges, and Johnson says one of those main challenges is staying organized.

“Organization was really simple on the front end because we could spend more time with each step of the process, but as the demand increased, we found that all that our time became limited,” says Johnson. “It's been really important on our end that there is a process for everything.”

He says if he could go back and change one thing from the founding of his company, he would have built better processes for each step, both physically and administratively, but he wants young entrepreneurs to leave with one piece of advice from his story: just start. Though it is important to plan and prepare, he says your dream business will never happen unless you begin the work. 

“If you want to be an entrepreneur, you have to be a worker at the core,” Johnson says. “It was not too long ago that this was just an idea, but with a lot of hard work and a lot of luck, it's become a little business.” 

You can contact Jackson Fencing Company on their website or at jacksonfencecompany@gmail.com.