Colleen Vacelet, Founder & President, Intreegue Design
By Katie Turner
It was a little after 9 p.m. when Colleen Vacelet called her husband from the car and asked, “What do you think about buying a doors, frames, and hardware company?”
She was on her way home from meeting with a friend and mentor who owned a construction supply company. The friend had been trying to sell, but the deal had fallen through. It was a spark for Vacelet, and six months after floating the idea to her husband, she owned the company.
“I’m the one that always comes into the relationship like, ‘Hey, we should do this,'” she says. “And he’s like, ‘Let’s take an analytical view of this and really see what’s going on.'” A finance executive by training, Vacelet’s husband has been supportive of Intreegue’s growth from the beginning. “He always says, ‘If you win, we win,'” Vacelet says. “He gives me space to be me.”
Vacelet is a licensed landscape architect who founded Intreegue Design in 2013 and has since grown it into an award-winning firm with offices in Baltimore and Napa Valley, California. The company she purchased, Order Green Supply, is a commercial building materials company. And as of last year, she is a partner at Macris, Hendricks & Glascock (MHG), a civil engineering firm approaching its 50th anniversary, where she leads the landscape architecture and planning practice along with marketing and business development.
While each business model is completely different, Vacelet sees them as part of a total ecosystem in the building and construction industry, which is a space she has navigated since childhood.
Raised on the Job Site
Growing up, her father, fondly known as Pop, owned and operated a landscape contracting company, where Vacelet worked as part of the crew starting at 15. She says he didn’t always go easy on her, but it was those summers that helped her truly understand the hard work and perseverance that goes into running a business.
“One summer, the crew included my two younger brothers. I served as the foreman and received the moniker of ‘bossy older sister’ from my brothers. My Pop actually even fired me once, which made for an awkward family dinner,” she laughs. “But of course hired me back the next day. Working on the crew with my brothers and being mentored by my Pop gave me an opportunity to learn how to lead slowly, and make mistakes in a place that was familiar and supportive. To this day, my family are my strongest supporters.”
“Those are such good memories,” she says. “Manual labor is hard work and it makes you appreciate what it takes to turn what you are designing on a plan into a reality. Instead of just learning design, I learned how it actually gets put into the ground.”
The First Big Win
Vacelet launched Intreegue out of her home — no partner, no book of clients, consulting two days a week for a former employer to buy herself a cushion while she built. When she landed her first significant contract, she called her father, fully prepared for a victory lap.
“All right, great,” he told her. “Get out there and get the next one.” She sat there, stung, until he added, “Business isn’t just ‘get one job’ and now you’ve hit the jackpot. It’s cyclical. You’ve got to keep going.”
It landed. Pipeline, she understood, is not a milestone but a discipline — the work does not stop when the contract is signed, and a good year is not a permanent condition. Her father had spent a career building a business in an industry where the phone stops ringing without warning. He wasn’t withholding praise. He was teaching her how to grow a business.
Building the Bench
Vacelet knew that if she wanted to scale a business, she first had to build one that didn’t need her in the room. When she launched Intreegue, she took inventory of every place she had worked — what those firms did that made her want to show up, and what they did that made her want to leave. She built the firm around the first list and away from the second, and it’s paid off. At a recent team retreat, one of her designers told her the office feels like home.
Growth, at times, felt agonizingly slow, and she credits her husband for continually reminding her of what she had already achieved and to stop measuring the company against how fast it could scale and started measuring it against whether it was worth working for. She also had to let go of the idea that she needed her hands in every day-to-day decision.
“I don’t need to render every drawing coming out of Intreegue,” she says. “These guys can do it and it looks great. It doesn’t have to have my touch on everything. But that took some time for me to learn.”
Now, with a studio director running the team and senior designers she trusted, Vacelet has something most owners of firms her size never get: room to think about the next thing.
Different Supply, Still Supply
The next thing turned out to be doors.
Vacelet had met Laurie Lessans, the owner of Order Green Supply, at a women in business event, where Lessans walked up, put an arm around her, and announced she was going to mentor her. Over a series of happy hours, the relationship grew stronger and eventually, when Lessans was looking to exit and her first buyer fell through, Vacelet made an offer to acquire the company.
It seemed like a major pivot from traditional landscape architecture to construction supply, but Vacelet trusted her instincts on the deal. During the pandemic, hunting for revenue to keep her team paid, Vacelet had started buying out the furniture packages for the pool decks and clubhouses Intreegue was already designing. Doors and hardware were not patio furniture, but the mechanics were generally the same.
“It’s different supply, but it’s still supply,” she says.
Lessans had built Order Green Supply out of her garage in an industry that produces very few woman-owned suppliers. When Vacelet acquired the company, it kept both the business and its WBE certification intact — a handoff, as Vacelet describes it, from one woman in construction to another.
Always Take the Meeting
MHG came to her through a lunch she nearly declined. The firm was losing the vice president who led its small landscape architecture division, and someone had told the partners to ‘call Colleen Vacelet’. She went, mostly because an old mentor had given her a rule she still follows: always take the meeting and find out what it’s about.
What she found was a brilliant set of engineers with almost 50 years of experience and a vision to evolve their company for the next 50 years. They saw her energy as a great way to bring that evolution to fruition by growing the Landscape Architecture group and expanding geographically.
She now leads MHG’s landscape architecture and planning practice along with its marketing and business development, and she runs the MHG and Intreegue teams as a single group of about a dozen people.
What that unlocks is reach neither firm had alone. Standalone landscape architecture firms routinely lose projects to civil engineering firms that keep a landscape department in-house; MHG’s landscape work, meanwhile, was going uncaptured for lack of anyone chasing it. Together, Vacelet can put survey crews, civil engineering, planning, landscape architecture and, at the end of the job, the furniture in front of a single client. “Soup to nuts,” as she says.
The three businesses feed each other in the other direction, too. The general contractors bidding MHG’s plans are the same contractors Order Green Supply wants to win. “There’s a lot of cross-pollination,” she says.
The Next One
Vacelet has embraced mentorship throughout her career. She used to advise young landscape architects on moving up in the profession. Now she hears from entrepreneurs weighing more strategic questions, like exit strategies, acquisitions, and business planning – conversations she never expected to be leading.
“Ten years ago, I just thought I was a landscape architect drawing circles on plans,” she jokes.
She takes mentorship seriously in both directions, and says she has never outgrown needing one herself. “I don’t care how old you are, you can always have a mentor,” she says.
Her advice to women entering a male-dominated industry is to stop trying to fit in.
“You don’t want groupthink,” she says. “You’re the only one in the room, and that gives you an edge. I’m not trying to fit in. I’m trying to be me — that’s going to make your company better, because now you’re going to get my perspective.”
Thirteen years after starting out of her house with no clients, she has a landscape architecture firm, a supply company, a partnership in an engineering firm, and no apparent intention of stopping.
Her father was right. There’s always a next one. I95