The hardscaping industry offered everything she was looking for and more.
Now as the Design Build & Marketing Assistant at Absolute Landscapes in Dayton, Maryland, Shulski has carved out a unique role that blends her transferrable skills in psychology, marketing, customer service, and project coordination.
Finding Her Way to Hardscaping
Shulski’s connection to Absolute Landscapes began long before she started working there. Her father had worked for the company for a few years and the owner, Matt Sabine, was a close family friend who had been there when her parents got married and when she was born.
But despite this familiarity, Shulski admits she “always knew what my dad did, but not really the depths of it.”
When she moved back to the Maryland-Pennsylvania line after graduation and started exploring career opportunities, she approached the search with an open mind.
“I was in the mindset where you don’t know until you try,” Shulski said. “You try something, at least you know if you don’t like it or you do like it or you like this part of your job and not this part.”
She met with the Absolute Landscapes team and was drawn to the industry by its unexpected complexity and opportunity for growth.
“It’s something that many people don’t really understand in depth and it’s far more specialized than just what it is on the surface,” she said. “No two projects are the same.”
A Day in the Life
What makes Shulski’s role particularly unique is how she touches most phases of a project. She’s involved from the very first point of contact with leads, setting up in-person design presentations, reviewing and assisting with materials and schedules, sending weekly client updates, and even visiting job sites for photo shoots and final walkthroughs.
“I like getting involved from that very first point of contact connecting with leads as they come in, setting that tone, telling them all the things that we do to separate ourselves from other landscape companies in the area,” Shulski said.
Shulski describes her role as requiring “a lot of strategy and coordination,” with many moving parts happening behind the scenes.
“I do a lot of the design build admin and coordinate marketing work. There’s always a continuous effort to anticipate their needs before they become problems,” she said. “It’s been super cool to kind of transition into a key part of the design-build hardscaping team.”
Being on a project site is one of her favorite aspects of the job.
“It’s different, changes up the day-to-day life,” Shulski said. “I’m able to go on-site and put the contracts I enter into a visual aspect so I can actually see what’s going on and then take pictures to capture and use for marketing purposes.”
The Power of Transferable Skills
Shulski has learned that her seemingly unrelated experiences and background really converge into valuable professional skills. Her psychology degree, restaurant service experience, marketing internships, and athletic background all play crucial roles in her current position.
“What fascinated me about the industry is that there’s a lot of growth, innovation. There’s creativity. It’s a lot of teamwork,” she said.
Growing up playing sports and being part of a bigger family that team dynamic was something she had always valued.
The relationship-building aspect of the work has also been particularly appealing.
“The psychology part of me comes out when I’m kind of working with the sales team or working with the project management team,” she said. “I love that we get to work together and help build strategies and build those relationships with clients and internally on our team as well.”
Absolute Achievements
Though she has only been at Absolute Landscapes a little over a year, Shulski has made a major impact.
Absolute Landscapes wanted to showcase a fresh new look and vision for their 25th anniversary. Shulski helped coordinate the rebrand.
“We were able to take on a fractional CMO [Chief Marketing Officer] who has been an incredible mentor to me. Together, we’ve shaped a new rebrand with a new logo and vision and energized the entire organization. Once we kind of latched onto that, everybody mentioned, ‘We can’t unsee it. We just need to refresh everything. Let’s do it. Let’s go full throttle,’” Shulski said.
She is coordinating everything from rewrapping trucks to getting new signage and digital marketing to managing quotes and ensuring no small item was missed.
“That was super fun and we still having lingering items, ordering new pens as an example. But it was very exciting to prioritize those top items and make sure all of the client-facing items were finished first, executed, and followed through the whole way.”
Shulski also submitted a winning entry to the 2025 Hardscape North America Awards on behalf of Absolute Landscapes. Their project, The Quarry in Clarksville, Maryland, won the Segmental Concrete Pavement – Residential (less than 3,000 sf) category. She helped coordinate the photo shoot for the final project and wrote the award submission for it. Shulski and designer Jackie Davis even traveled to Louisville, Kentucky to accept the award at HNA.
“It was really awesome for me to take part in travel for work to collect that award,” Shulski said. “That’s definitely something that makes me most proud.”
Advice for Aspiring Hardscapers
Shulski wishes she had understood from the beginning “just how dynamic and fast moving the hardscaping industry really is. From the outside, it might look like purely construction or design, but once you’re in it, it’s like an onion. There’s so many layers.”
Weather changes, client communication, logistics, timelines, coordination between field and office teams—all of these elements require constant flexibility and adaptability.
“Everything’s different and day to day, there’s always things being thrown at you,” she said. “The test is, ‘how are you going to continue? How are you going to finish out your day?’”
She emphasizes the importance of being what she calls an “ideal team player,” a concept from a book her team read together when she first started at Absolute Landscapes.
In Shulski’s description, the ideal team member is hungry, humble, and smart. Hungry means having the drive to stay engaged and always look for ways to contribute. Humble means recognizing the team effort and being willing to learn from others. And smart, in this context, “is more than just having the brains.”
“Being smart is really just being able to connect with people and have strong personal skills, that awareness to communicate and collaborate efficiently, read the room, understand how to be a chameleon and talk to different people the way that they talk to you,” Shulski said.
Shulski encourages young professionals and aspiring hardscapers not to be limited by their job title or their degree.
“There’s just always room for growth,” she said. “You don’t know unless you try.”
Looking to the Future
24-year-old Shulski is still figuring out her long-term career path, but she feels like she has found something meaningful in hardscaping.
Despite her current hour-long commute, she shows up every day because she feels valued.
“I’m honestly just blessed at the end of the day to have somewhere that I can come to and feel like I have the support I need,” she said.
“I’m surrounded by a good mix of people with different personalities and I’m motivated by learning from them. People are super passionate about what they do around here, so that really pushes me to also elevate what I do.”
