Wasatch High School junior Vince Witt was all confidence when he won the first-place prize of $10,000 last month at the school’s annual Invest Nest competition — a “Shark Tank”-style tournament in which student business owners pitch their concepts to a panel of judges.

His business, Vince’s Turf and Landscaping, raked in over $230,000 in 2025, profiting $50,000. 

Vince believes xeriscaping — his speciality — is the future of landscaping, given Utah’s desert climate and lack of water to share among developers. He said that puts his company in a strong position to grow.

Vince’s Turf and Landscaping has already booked more than $160,000 worth of jobs this year. Vince expects a gross revenue of $478,000 this year, profiting $105,000. Those impressive numbers proved that landscaping wasn’t merely a summer gig for the 17 year old.

As his uncle, Ben Witt, put it, “If you were to loan one of these kids money, which one would be the most likely to pay it back? If you ask yourself that question, hands down, it would have been Vince. A lot of these kids had good ideas. They had a lot of research. But far and away, he presented himself as the most capable person that’s actually went out and done work and built a business.”

Vince’s confidence waned by the time of the regional finals in Provo on May 4. But as soon as he entered the venue, iHub, his anxiety was replaced with “peace and comfort that (he) was going to do well.”

His hunch was confirmed when the organizers brought an oversized check onstage. The check, Vince said, was somewhat transparent, so he could see his last name on it before it was announced. He was full of excitement. On the check was a sum of $20,000. 

Vince is going to use his winnings to add landscaping maintenance — like lawn mowing and weeding — to his list of services. His hope is to make his business self-sustaining by the time he leaves on a mission trip for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in a little over a year. 

That starts with hiring new employees and training them to do landscaping work on their own. Right now, Vince said his 17-year-old cousin, Jack, is the only of his four employees who could handle a job without constant supervision and guidance. 

That’s in no small part because Vince and Jack have been landscaping since they were about 7 years old.

Their work started when Jack’s dad, Ben, purchased a 2-acre tree farm in Heber City in 2016. On weekends, Vince and Jack would help with everything from laying landscape fabric to installing drip irrigation.

Then, about four years ago, Vince’s father, Joe Witt — a prominent homebuilder in Wasatch and Summit counties and who died in an avalanche while snowmobiling in the Snake Creek area in February — allowed Vince and Jack to do the landscaping on a spec home. The boys did such a good job that Joe increasingly recruited them for projects, including a house that appeared in the Park City Showcase of Homes.

Vince’s mother, Terri, said Joe’s trust in Vince demonstrated his ability to believe in people.

“That’s what attracted me most to my husband,” she said. “He saw things in me that I never thought for myself, and then, I started believing them.”

Since Vince was about 10, he had aspirations to buy his own truck, work for his dad and inherit the family business, Terri said. Today, he owns two company trucks for his landscaping business.

Outside of work, Vince loves dirt biking, snowmobiling, boating and camping. 

“I really don’t like being inside,” he explained.

In fact, after seeing the reactions of happy customers, the most fulfilling aspect of landscaping for Vince is how dirty and hands-on it can be.

“I’m literally just covered in dirt right now,” he explained after a five-hour job. “I kind of like going home because I feel like I did something important. I got a job done. And then, when I’m home, it’s relaxing. I can be clean.”

Vince and Jack work from sunrise to sunset most days. 

“We’re right side by side, and we honestly just grind,” Vince said. “You’ve got to be willing to do the stuff no one else wants to do.”

Ben said he’s seen the boys work 15-hour days.

“(They’re) only 17, but (they have) more experience than most people in their 20s do. Tremendous work ethic. … Grit, determination, very smart, very business savvy,” he said.

Ben said Vince’s win represented his reaching the potential Joe saw in him. 

“(Joe) encouraged me to start my own business and was probably my biggest cheerleader, my biggest fan. And I could see that he wanted to put Vince on that same trajectory,” Ben said. “He knew the kid would be a success and told me that he was super excited for Vince to go to Invest Nest. That was the last conversation that I had with my brother. So, to see Vince win that, I felt like it was a fulfillment of Joe’s dream.”

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In 2014, Midway resident Joel Clark appeared on “Shark Tank,” seeking investment in his bear-branded pancake mix company, Kodiak Cakes.

None of the sharks offered the investment Clark was hoping for — $500,000 for a 10% of the company — so he walked away. Despite the botched deal, sales skyrocketed from $3.6 million in 2013 to $6.7 million the next year, according to Inc. business magazine.

“When they aired that episode, our website completely crashed,” Clark said. “For two months, we were just trying to keep up.”

These days, Clark is a bit of a shark himself, albeit one with fewer teeth than Kevin O’Leary or Mark Cuban.

On Monday, he was one of four local business owners serving as a judge for Invest Nest, a competition between 10 Wasatch High School students pitching their start-ups in hopes of winning the $10,000 grand prize.

“It’s a cool opportunity to get young people going early on creating businesses, because that’s really how this economy grows,” Clark said. “I have so much respect for entrepreneurship. Creating jobs. Taking risks. It’s really cool. And to start teaching kids skills at an early age like this, it helps them believe that they can do it, because it’s kind of an intimidating thing.”

Invest Nest was started nine years ago by Heber City locals, J.W. Davies and Brad Allen, from the Davies Allen CPA firm, whose children went to Wasatch High School. When they brought the idea of Invest Nest to Weston Broadbent, the school district’s career and technical education director, he was instantly on board. 

Since then, it has become an annual competition that has expanded to 15 other school districts across Utah and Idaho. 

Students compete in three rounds, the first two involving the judges narrowing down contestants through short pitches. 

The third round involves a “Shark Tank” meets “American Idol” competition open to the public. Attendees vote for their top-three winners, who are awarded $10,000, $7,500 and $5,000. The remaining seven contestants walk away with $1,000.

Each school district’s winner will compete in a state competition for $25,000 on May 4 in Provo.

The competition is entirely organized by fellow high school students, who participate to learn leadership and organizational skills and receive scholarship money. This year’s team of student volunteers at the high school will be awarded between $10,000 and $15,000 overall, Davies said. 

“I want to own my own business eventually,” said junior Easton Anderson, one of the organizers. “It’s taught me how to make connections and how to ask people for help, and it’s connected me with all the local business owners. So, I have lots of connections now to hopefully help me in the future.”

Anderson and the rest of the student team have led the charge in securing a venue, finding judges and soliciting sponsors and donations from local businesses. What stuck with Anderson the most was just how clever his competing peers were. 

“I would have never come up with their business ideas,” he said. “Most of them have started from just hobbies that they were doing, and then they said, ‘Well, let’s go sell it to someone.’”

That was certainly true for senior Sarah Cutting, who has transformed her passion for illustrating and painting local flora and fauna with watercolors into a business called Rewild Design Co. 

She sells merchandise for nature lovers, like shirts, stickers, educational posters about birds and bugs, 3D butterfly bookmarks and even a set of playing cards based on a frog’s metamorphosis.

Cutting dove into nature during an eighth-grade ornithology project. She began bird watching in her spare time — a hobby which “got a little intense” — as well as hiking along the Provo River and researching plants and insects. One of her favorite species is the Wasatch penstemon, a tall, berry blue flower native to the Wasatch Mountains.

“So many people don’t know that we have such a huge diversity of species here in Wasatch County and beyond. In the past couple of years, I’ve discovered that. It’s just incredible to me, and I want to share that with others,” she said. 

Cutting started Rewild Design Co. around January 2025. She sells at art markets, through her website and even a wholesale catalogue she launched last fall and distributed to seven retailers, including REI and the Natural History Museum of Utah.

She’s made just over $12,000 since then, taking home over $4,100 after expenses. In 2026, she hopes to bolster her social media presence, increase her presence in retail stores and take home $35,000 in revenue. In five years, she hopes to make $350,000 yearly — donating 1% to local conservation efforts — and have a presence in 100 retail stores across the Mountain West.

Cutting didn’t join Invest Nest until this year because she had to work up the confidence to compete.

“I’m not the most expressive. I don’t consider myself a great and engaging presenter. I’m going to lean into what makes my business and myself unique,” she said before the third round. 

She must have succeeded in showing the audience her perspective on the natural world, though, because she took home the second-place prize of $7,500. 

Taking home the top honor and $10,000 was 17-year-old Vince Witt, who runs Vince’s Turf and Landscape. He does landscaping on homes from start to finish. He’s currently shifting his focus to artificial turf installation in response to Utah’s largely snowless winter. 

“New construction in certain HOAs isn’t allowed to have traditional lawns anymore. The water is too scarce. So you have to have artificial turf or xeriscape landscaping,” he said. “Therefore, I think this trend’s going to move upstate, and everyone’s going to be forced to buy what I offer.”

Vince has been landscaping professionally for four years.

“I’ve been doing this with my dad and my uncle since I was a little kid. And my dad and his seven siblings all did construction of some sort. So, I’ve grown up in it,” he said.

Vince’s father was Joe Witt, a prominent homebuilder in Wasatch and Summit counties who died in an avalanche while snowmobiling in the Snake Creek area in February.

“I worked for him pretty much my whole life. I remember, since I was little, him asking me to run and grab tools from his truck,” Vince said. “Slowly, he started incorporating me more and more. And then, he started letting me do his landscaping on his jobs.”

His dad’s connections have served him well. He’s worked on multimillion-dollar homes, one of which appeared in the Park City Showcase of Homes, and brought home more revenue than any of his Invest Nest competitors.

In 2025, Vince had a gross revenue of just over $230,000, profiting over $50,000. In 2026, he’s already booked almost $160,000 in jobs. He expects gross revenue of $478,000 this year, taking home $105,000.

After adding the $10,000 prize to his bank account, Vince hopes to double his employees from four to eight and participate in a three-month “turf training” internship in Los Angeles through his family’s excavating company.

Vince doesn’t yet have a strategy for the state competition. For now, he’s going to bask in the glory of his win.

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The Utah Olympic Park hosts the 19th Annual Springer Tourney Ski Jumping on their HS-10 and HS-42 jumps Thursday and Friday. On Saturday, July 29, the park will host the HS-134 U.S. Large Hill National Championships and Nordic Combined races. (Tanzi Propst/Park Record)

Link to full gallery here: https://parkrecordphoto.smugmug.com/PHOTOS-Springer-Tournee-HS-10HS-42/

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The annual Psicobloc competition is back in town, taking up residence at the Utah Olympic Park’s Olympic Freestyle Pool Thursday and Friday evenings this week. The competition brings in world-class climbers from all over the world to test their strength and agility in free-climbing over a body of water. (Tanzi Propst/Park Record)

Link to full gallery here: https://parkrecordphoto.smugmug.com/PHOTOS-Psicbloc-Competition/

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(Tanzi Propst/Park Record)

Link to full gallery here: https://parkrecordphoto.smugmug.com/PHOTOS-Park-Citys-Best-2017/

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The Town Race Series slalomed on C.B.’s Run at Park City Moutnain Resort Monday afternoon, March 13, 2017. Locals were able to sign up and participate in the event. (Tanzi Propst/Park Record)

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The 11th annual Park Record Spelling Bee was held at the Egyptian Theatre Tuesday evening, March 7, 2017, featuring competitions for 2nd and 3rd graders as well as 4th-8th graders. The 4th-8th grade bee will be sending its winner, two-time champion Melinda Buhlman, to Washington, D.C. in May to compete in the Scripps National Spelling Bee. (Tanzi Propst/Park Record)

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Skiers and snowboarders from at least three different states convened at Park City Mountain Resort to participate in the USASA Big Mountain West Series Championship halfpipe and slopestyle courses. (Tanzi Propst/Park Record)

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Athletes from around North America convened at the Utah Olympic Park for the US Freestyle Aerial Finals. The three day event was the second stop at the park for the NorAm Cup. (Tanzi Propst/Park Record)

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Deer Valley Resort’s Champion and White Owl black diamond runs will play host to the Visa Freestyle International competition this coming Thursday, Friday and Saturday. The competition will see aerial competitions and mogul races. (Tanzi Propst/Park Record)

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