Up Close with Marcene Pugh: The Cartwheeling Number Cruncher

First things first: yes, that’s a photo of Marcene with famous gymnast Gabby Douglas, two-time gold medalist at the 2012 Olympic Summer Games.

Champions hang out together. 

When Marcene was 10, she was the gymnastics floor exercise champion for the whole state of Maryland.

She spent hours practicing in the gym four nights a week and all day on Saturdays.

“It gave me discipline and focus that I’ve used my whole life,” she says.

No back flips required, but the discipline and focus come in handy in her job as comptroller at Level Green Landscaping.

Tumbling Tot, Tall Teen 

Marcene was doing cartwheels at age 3, making her parents nervous.

They enrolled her in gymnastics. As Marcene likes to say, it stuck. For a while.

“I kept going through growth spurts,” she says. By high school, she was nearly 6 feet tall.

“You don’t see many gymnasts that tall,” she says. “All those leaps and jumps — there’s more of you to get off the ground.”

Tax Time, Woo Hoo! 

Luckily, Marcene had another impressive skill: numbers.

She was the kind of teen who actually enjoyed tax time. She looked forward to getting her W-2 forms in the mail, picking up the IRS forms at the library and happily crunching the numbers.

“I liked math,” she says. “I thought, ‘Let's give accounting a try.’ And it stuck.”

A certified public accountant, she spent a decade in public accounting, was comptroller at a private university, and was director of finance and administration for a nonprofit that researches employee benefit programs. 

Making Sure It All Adds Up

As Level Green’s comptroller, Marcene oversees the financial health of the company.

She makes sure all the numbers add up, so when the auditors show up, they’re happy.

She’s responsible for Level Green’s accounting and financial reporting, providing accurate financial statements and interpreting the data to help the company take advantage of opportunities and avoid financial pitfalls. 

And she makes sure paychecks go out every two weeks, which makes her pretty popular. 

While Level Green landscaping crews watch the results of their work as they transform properties, Marcene’s work isn’t as tangible.

“There isn’t always a daily measurement of how I’m doing,” she says. “But when I’m going through financial statements with a third party like an auditor, and no adjustments are needed for a year’s worth of transactions, then I know I’m doing a good job.”

Driving Miss Makayla

Marcene and her husband, Remel, have a daughter, Makayla, 7.

They spend a lot of time shuttling Makayla to cheerleading practice and church activities.

“I want her to be active,” Marcene says. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s gymnastics or soccer or basketball or cheerleading.”

Friday nights they all go out to dinner, and Makayla gets to pick the restaurant. 

An animal lover, Marcene started college majoring in pre-veterinary medicine, but her love of numbers won out, steering her to accounting.

She spent two years as treasurer of a county humane society and hopes to bring a pet into the Pugh home as soon as life settles down a bit. 

“It Takes All of Us”

Marcene started at Level Green in October, drawn to the company both because of the friendly family atmosphere and the excitement of growth ahead.

“As Level Green grows, we need stable procedures in place,” she says. “To come in and help develop that for a growing company is definitely appealing. You don’t want to work for a company that’s stagnant, that never moves beyond a plateau.

“It’s exciting to join a company that says, ‘We’re at $25 million now, but in five years we want to double that.’

“It takes all of us, as a team, to make that happen.”

Want to Join the Team?

Marcene is just one of the dedicated team members we have here at Level Green Landscaping. And we’re always looking for hard-working, talented people to join our team.

Are you ready to work for a company where everybody works together toward exciting new growth?