November 10, 2025
Rob and Linda Tester.
Waterloo Chapter volunteer is all about sharing
By Julia Harmsworth
Before getting into the green trades, Rob Tester was a licensed chef.
“I compare landscaping to when I was cooking, because I was a banquet chef for most of my career. You were doing platters all the time, and there was nothing — no paper drawn, no layout. You created everything in your head. It’s an art,” Tester said. “I took that and incorporated it into my landscaping.”
As a teen, Tester had worked for his uncle cutting grass and maintaining his grandparents’ three-acre lawn. So when a recession hit the restaurant industry hard in the ‘90s, he took his inventory and management skills and returned to landscaping.
“I’ve been cutting grass a long time!” Tester said. Now a co-owner of TNT Property Maintenance in Ontario’s Kitchener/Waterloo region, he doesn’t do much maintenance himself anymore, and instead focuses his time managing the business alongside his wife, Linda, and kids Bobby, Brian and Melissa. The five of them are known within Landscape Ontario’s Waterloo Chapter for their fierce dedication to volunteerism.
Tester has served on the Waterloo Chapter Board for over 20 years in the roles of treasurer, president and now past president. He rewrote the association’s funding formula in the 2010s to ensure each chapter has enough funds to function, sits on the baseball committee and grew the chapter’s frequent school greening initiatives to include 20 to 30 companies.
Linda and Melissa have made their mark organizing the chapter’s annual Fall Freeze Up dinner and dance. “They do their thing, I show up. If they need something on the day of, I’ll pitch in and help out, but they do it so well, I don’t have to do squat! It’s their part of what they do for the chapter,” Tester said.
Tester’s niche is education advocacy. He works with school boards to encourage high school students to think seriously about landscaping and horticulture as a career; he aided a Waterloo Region District School Board program that helped students at risk of not passing high school by involving them in the trades.
He does outreach to universities, too, especially the local University of Guelph, connecting their Horticulture Program with the association. “Our future is education. Our future is the students who are coming up,” Tester said.
He believes the solution to attracting more people to the trade can start with schools: connecting with both post-secondary horticulture students already planning a career in the trades and high school students who may be unfamiliar with the trades, and “sell[ing] this as an industry and a career.”
In the early 2000s, Tester began judging the annual Skills Ontario landscape horticulture competition. “The next thing I know, I’m co-chair,” he said. He’s been running the event ever since, sending gold, silver and bronze medal winners all the way to nationals. He’s yet to send an Ontario team to worlds, but he hopes to do so before he passes the baton.
It's a great place to connect with future employees, too. Tester says he hasn’t had to look for an employee in “forever.” “They come to me, or they’re out of the school system. And I train them,” he said. One employee Tester hired straight out of high school recently moved away after 10 years with the company. He’s taking that knowledge and bringing it to a new community — and every once in a while, he thanks Tester for it.
For Tester, that’s what Landscape Ontario is about: “It’s the friendship. You’ve got a group of peers you can share information with and you can gain knowledge to help you in your own business. It’s sharing. It’s that old Scouts Canada Beaver motto, ‘Sharing, sharing, sharing.’”
Looking to the future, Tester would love to see environmental sustainability become a bigger part of the green trades, and for the construction industry to take more cues from horticulture professionals. He advocates for installing interlocking bricks instead of paving with asphalt and loves rain gardens — TNT is no stranger to green infrastructure.
“We’re really smart people in this industry. We may not have a lot of letters behind our names, but we know what’s what in the environment. Because that’s what we play with. We play with the environment every day,” Tester said.
In his free time, Tester loves following the Ontario Hockey League, and is excited to travel more with Linda in retirement — with an eye for both history and good gardening. He caters for weddings, church functions and the Cadet Corps. Each year, the family caters a dinner for veterans at the local legion on Remembrance Day.
“You volunteer, you put something into it, [and] you’re going to get something out of it. It will come back and reward you one way or another,” he said. “It might not be tomorrow, or the next day, but it comes back.”
Before getting into the green trades, Rob Tester was a licensed chef.
“I compare landscaping to when I was cooking, because I was a banquet chef for most of my career. You were doing platters all the time, and there was nothing — no paper drawn, no layout. You created everything in your head. It’s an art,” Tester said. “I took that and incorporated it into my landscaping.”
As a teen, Tester had worked for his uncle cutting grass and maintaining his grandparents’ three-acre lawn. So when a recession hit the restaurant industry hard in the ‘90s, he took his inventory and management skills and returned to landscaping.
“I’ve been cutting grass a long time!” Tester said. Now a co-owner of TNT Property Maintenance in Ontario’s Kitchener/Waterloo region, he doesn’t do much maintenance himself anymore, and instead focuses his time managing the business alongside his wife, Linda, and kids Bobby, Brian and Melissa. The five of them are known within Landscape Ontario’s Waterloo Chapter for their fierce dedication to volunteerism.
Tester has served on the Waterloo Chapter Board for over 20 years in the roles of treasurer, president and now past president. He rewrote the association’s funding formula in the 2010s to ensure each chapter has enough funds to function, sits on the baseball committee and grew the chapter’s frequent school greening initiatives to include 20 to 30 companies.
Linda and Melissa have made their mark organizing the chapter’s annual Fall Freeze Up dinner and dance. “They do their thing, I show up. If they need something on the day of, I’ll pitch in and help out, but they do it so well, I don’t have to do squat! It’s their part of what they do for the chapter,” Tester said.
Tester’s niche is education advocacy. He works with school boards to encourage high school students to think seriously about landscaping and horticulture as a career; he aided a Waterloo Region District School Board program that helped students at risk of not passing high school by involving them in the trades.
He does outreach to universities, too, especially the local University of Guelph, connecting their Horticulture Program with the association. “Our future is education. Our future is the students who are coming up,” Tester said.
He believes the solution to attracting more people to the trade can start with schools: connecting with both post-secondary horticulture students already planning a career in the trades and high school students who may be unfamiliar with the trades, and “sell[ing] this as an industry and a career.”
In the early 2000s, Tester began judging the annual Skills Ontario landscape horticulture competition. “The next thing I know, I’m co-chair,” he said. He’s been running the event ever since, sending gold, silver and bronze medal winners all the way to nationals. He’s yet to send an Ontario team to worlds, but he hopes to do so before he passes the baton.
It's a great place to connect with future employees, too. Tester says he hasn’t had to look for an employee in “forever.” “They come to me, or they’re out of the school system. And I train them,” he said. One employee Tester hired straight out of high school recently moved away after 10 years with the company. He’s taking that knowledge and bringing it to a new community — and every once in a while, he thanks Tester for it.
For Tester, that’s what Landscape Ontario is about: “It’s the friendship. You’ve got a group of peers you can share information with and you can gain knowledge to help you in your own business. It’s sharing. It’s that old Scouts Canada Beaver motto, ‘Sharing, sharing, sharing.’”
Looking to the future, Tester would love to see environmental sustainability become a bigger part of the green trades, and for the construction industry to take more cues from horticulture professionals. He advocates for installing interlocking bricks instead of paving with asphalt and loves rain gardens — TNT is no stranger to green infrastructure.
“We’re really smart people in this industry. We may not have a lot of letters behind our names, but we know what’s what in the environment. Because that’s what we play with. We play with the environment every day,” Tester said.
In his free time, Tester loves following the Ontario Hockey League, and is excited to travel more with Linda in retirement — with an eye for both history and good gardening. He caters for weddings, church functions and the Cadet Corps. Each year, the family caters a dinner for veterans at the local legion on Remembrance Day.
“You volunteer, you put something into it, [and] you’re going to get something out of it. It will come back and reward you one way or another,” he said. “It might not be tomorrow, or the next day, but it comes back.”