For Vietnam Native, Call from PG&E Turned Into 35-Year Career of Turning Dirt ‘Into a Piece of Art’

Kim Creedon and her husband were doing well financially. She was a dental assistant, and he was a chemist. They had a child with another on the way. So Creedon asked her mother to leave Vietnam to help with the kids.

However, shortly after relocating to America, Creedon’s mother broke her leg in a car accident. Creedon, who immigrated to America from Vietnam at the age of 23, quit her dental assistant’s job to take care of her family and they needed to make up for the lost income.

Her husband’s friend knew someone who was successful in the janitorial business. The friend suggested placing an ad in the local newspaper offering her services, even though she had never performed this type of work professionally. “I’d get 20 calls a day from people,” said Creedon.

One of those calls came from PG&E. Little did anyone know that call would lead to a 35-year relationship. And not just for cleaning floors and toilets.

‘I didn’t know anything about landscaping’

“A woman (Joy Vanwell) from PG&E called out of the blue and asked for help with the Gateway Oaks building,” said Creedon about that call in 1988 to clean the 200,000-square-foot building in Sacramento. “I had no employees. Just me. I also got my mother, sister, niece and nephew to work for me. Joy loved my work.”

Six months later, another PG&E contact asked Creedon if she wanted to work outside and mow the five acres of grass surrounding Gateway Oaks. She said yes. “I only had one lawn mower at home,” said Creedon. “It took four hours because we didn’t have the right equipment.”

That same person was happy with Creedon’s work and asked her to do all the landscaping at Gateway Oaks. “I didn’t know anything about landscaping,” she said.

The weekend before Creedon met with the landscape architect in San Francisco to discuss the job, she took Polaroid photos of the existing landscaping and spent the weekend at the library learning everything about the existing plants.

Creedon wound up “planting a lot of flowers. Flowers make people happy.”

PG&E was indeed happy. Creedon’s responsibilities expanded from taking care of company property throughout the service area to restoring landscaping where PG&E did repair work. Over the next two years, her business grew so much that her husband had to quit his job to help. The volume of work was so much that she hired four others to work with her.

Eventually, Creedon enrolled in college classes for a semester to learn basic gardening skills, but in all honesty, she said, “I learned on the job.”

Creedon’s passion was building Japanese gardens. She created the Japanese garden that was in front of PG&E’s former headquarters at 77 Beale St. in San Francisco. Coworkers who used the on-site daycare facility would see another of Creedon’s gardens.

‘An absolute jewel’ 

Creedon started her business in 1986, a time when few women owned a business or worked in landscaping. But after more than five decades of running Kim’s Landscaping Service, Creedon’s health problems forced her and her business into retirement last December. These days, Creedon is doing plenty of traveling and just took a trip to Antarctica.  

“When she started with us, she brought her newborn baby to planning and safety meetings. Nobody ever gave her a hard time about it,” said PG&E Gas Operations Sourcing and Contract Specialist Tiffany Frederick. “Kim worked as hard as she could and always did her best.”

“When you see a piece of dirt, you turn it into a piece of art,” said Creedon. “That’s satisfaction. I found a job I really liked.”

“Kim Creedon,” said Frederick, “is an absolute jewel.”  

For more about the ways PG&E works with diverse suppliers, visit www.pge.com/supplierdiversity.