this is whitstock's right hand person.witnessed the incredible growth, including whitstock's friendly reunification with his dad. >> 2006 was the first year in this build iing, 2007 we saw th wheels shaking and in 2008 we banded together and held on and made some really, really hard decisions. >> then in february of 2011, as aquascape was limping along trying to survive another day, the unthinkable happened. >> when the economy was at its worst, i had my entire building collapse, thank goodness, on a sunday. i saw the entire span on the ground and fell to my knees. >> with the busy summer season just a few weeks away, he went from having a business through the roof to a business collapsing under the weight of the recession and then to a business with a collapsed roof. >> the building was condemned. we were basically out of business. >> and the channel of rebuilding aquascape became a rallying cry for whitstock and his employees. this picture taken a few days after the building collapse says it all. and now aquascape is lea

that crazy guy up there on the forklift is greg whitstock, the founder and ceo of aqua scape. and this enormous place, which embodies everything whitstock is all about, is called aqua land. >> all right. let's open up the gates! >> today is the biggest sale of the year for this st. charles illinois based business that got it started 25 years ago. it's pond building. just a few years ago, the fate of aqua scape was in question. >> adversity can pull a team together or apart. without them, i wouldn't have been able to do it. >> greg's adventures in pond building started at just 12 years old when he built his first pond in the backer yard with his dad. >> that first pond leaked, turned green and even my prize turtles migrated away. that was the beginning of my odyssey with water features. every summer, i would spend my summers ripping it out, rebuilding it and mcgyvering up my filtration smgs. >> over the next seven years, whitstock innovated along the way and figuring out how to make the maintenance of the pond relatively simple. >> i thought, there has to be a business here. >>