Meet Lindsay Scherr Burges

We recently connected with Lindsay Scherr Burges and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Lindsay, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?
I think resilience is just picking yourself up over and over again. I think it is reframing whatever happens to you as a learning experience. You cannot get too obsessed with your own success or your own failure. You just have to pick yourself back up and keep trying even after you’ve failed or you’ve succeeded. I have become very used to rolling with the punches – in life and business. After the 2008 financial crisis, I was caught right in the middle (I was a commercial real estate broker) and was left with a ton of credit card debt. I left the industry, but kept my hustle. I kept trying, reinventing, working, networking, and experimenting with new opportunities until I found one that was the intersection between what I wanted to do and what other people wanted to pay for. It took a lot of effort. It took a lot of optimism. It took a lot of trial and error. It took knowing when to ask for help, and also when to take others advice.

I think my parents instilled a huge work ethic in me by having very high standards, but also allowed me to make mistakes and work on figuring them out. I’ve always been a person who has pushed through challenges, even as a child. I was not shamed for my mistakes, but rather encouraged to keep trying. That has been the cornerstone of my success – Just. Keep. Going.

Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
Lindsay Scherr Burgess is the Founder and Moss Boss of Green Wallscapes, a company that brings spaces to life with no-hassle preserved moss, walls, logos, lettering and art. The work is special because it works with preserved plants, meaning that there is no mainteance, water or light required to keep it looking beautiful. She has done projects in over 35 states, Canada, and the Caribbean and employs a team of mostly female artists in her West Palm Beach studio. Her company’s work has been called “a lavish expression of botanical joy” and has been featured in Architectural Digest, Veranda Magazine, Palm Beach Post, Palm Beach Daily News, and more. In 2023, Green Wallscapes won Gold in the iPlants Magazine Biophilic Design Awards. Green Wallscapes was selected to participate in the prestigious Kips Bay Decorator Showhouse in 2019. Green Wallscapes’ client list includes major developers like Amli Residential, Aimco, Greystone, and Zom and major brands like Amazon, Starbucks, Autonation, Stella Artois, Garden of Life, Hilton, Westin, Marriott Vacation Rentals, and more.

Lindsay started Green Wallscapes in her home in 2016, when she glued some moss to a frame after seeing an inspiration photo on Pinterest. A few months later, a friend asked her to make one for them, and the company was born! It was a side hustle until 2018, when Lindsay decided to dive in head first into entrepreneurship. Green Wallscapes growth has been very organic over the last 8 years and now we have a team of 10.

Lindsay’s background is diverse, she has worked in organic produce, construction, commercial real estate, and book publishing in a sales and marketing role. She loves to travel, speaks fluent Italian, and can be found painting, doing yoga, and jet-skiing on the weekends. She graduated from Northwestern University, and lives in Grandview Heights with her entrepreneurial husband, Jon and their Daughter, Skylar.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
1) My network. I started networking as soon as I graduated from college. I would attend local trade events relevant to my industry and then make sure to add them to my LinkedIn or other social media platforms (it depends on your industry!) as soon as I met them. I took training on networking so that I could use my time effectively. 20 years later, it has truly paid off, because people who I met and be friended (all over the country), now get to see what I am doing. Many of my business colleagues from Chicago, have reached out about moss walls, because I post about them regularly, even though I live in Florida now. It’s awesome to have a large network- you never know how things are going to work out! I would also suggest starting a MLM (multilevel marketing business) in an area that you are somewhat interested in, and then you can learn how to network without fear (because you will get a ton of rejection, so it’s easy to get over yourself). They also teach you so much about mindset. I started a Mary Kay business when I was 24. I hated makeup, so it was a bad option for me, but now there are a lot of great options out there, and the training was PHENOMINAL.

2) Growth Mindset – If you have a growth mindset it means you look at everything through the lense of learning and expanding. It’s super helpful when you are going through a tough time, it helps to keep the positive mindset. I will ask myself, what am I learning here? How can I prevent this from happening again in the future? Or how can I repeat this because I like the result I am getting?

3) Cross Pollination of Ideas – I have been in a lot of different industries – food, real estate, construction, book publishing, etc. I’ve taken lessons from each area and applied them to another area. The underlying structures in all these businesses are basically the same, so it’s understanding the patterns that make you powerful. I also learned how to sell across a wide range of services (b2b and b2c) which has helped us tremendously.

Before we go, any advice you can share with people who are feeling overwhelmed?
I have a baby and a business, so I am overwhelmed a lot. When things get really crazy and difficult, I usually go back to my mantras – “it’s just moss” and “most things can be solved with more time, more money, and more moss” and that helps me not go as dark. A lot of it is also making sure that I get enough sleep and enough food, and not too much caffeine. I will do somatic meditations (focusing on different body parts) or take walks or sometimes when it is really bad runs to move out the negative energy. Amazingly, I have gotten through some really tough moments, and have also built up my resilience “muscle” and tools to get through challenges. One thing that entrepreneurship will do to you is make you crazy… resourceful.

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Image Credits
Photo Credit: Green Wallscapes Team

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