1-man vs 2-man MOWING CREWS
Mike Andes watches a two-person crew mow a residential yard with 30" and 21" mowers, comparing speed and maneuverability. He covers gate width limits, bagging strategy for Pacific Northwest lawns, and how to tag equipment with colored tape so you don't lose it.
Hey, everyone, it's Mike Andes. And today, yet again, my producers have called me out in the middle of the night to watch Elan BMO'd. And we're gonna do some voiceover. We're going to break down some game footage. But the winner of last week's challenge was.
Today. While I'm doing that, you're gonna be guessing what the square footage of this property is. And the winner, the person who guesses it first down to the closest square foot is going to win a $519 value package from landscapebusinesscourse.com and get full, full lifetime access to the program@landscapebusinesscourse.com now, last week, we had a similar challenge, but you had to guess what the price was. If you missed that video, watch it right here. But the winner of last week's challenge was.
Jesse Savage. He guessed $65. Who's the first one to do so? So in today's video, you're going to be guessing the square footage of this lawn, the turf square footage. And whoever gets it down to the closest square foot first in the comments below will win three full lifetime access to landscape businesscourse.com without any further delay, let the game begin. All right, so they pull up to a lawn here. This is actually a really nice residential area. Not too much traffic, but a great neighborhood to get lawns. I love these lawns. I don't need big, big properties with massive zero turns. I like these light, nice, little cookie cutter lawns. I almost just told you the square footage range, but we're not going to do that because you got to watch the whole thing. And so on this specific lawn, they actually have two push mowers. I. I've talked about in the past why we focus more on push mowers than we do zero turns. But for properties of this size, you don't need a big zero turn. It's not going to save you a whole lot of time. And then you're going to see there's a lot of things you kind of got to mow around. And the bigger the mower, the slower it actually takes you when you got to go around little trees and irrigation heads and lighting and all the rest of it. So what they did here is they broke up. The first person went in the backyard with a 30 inch X mark, and the person in the front yard got a 21 inch Honda. Both push mowers, by the way. So in the backyard here, we got bagging clippings, of course, because here in the Pacific Northwest, it is very standard that we have to bag clippings. I know for most of you you're able to side discharge or mulch your clippings, but we got to do what we got to do here in the Pacific Northwest. Now, this is the 30 inch exmark. I have to say, as much as I like it for large properties because it's wider and you get more cut, it's a little bit of a hassle to move around. It's like a, a big mower. It's. Even for myself, like, I consider myself pretty strong, dude. It's really tough to move around. And after 10, 12 hours of mowing, it really wears you down. Whereas like a 21 inch mower, it's like half the weight. And what's cool is you can actually pick up the entire 21 inch mower without like feeling you're break your back. You can pick up the 30 inch mower, but you're not picking it up very long and you're basically risking your back blowing out. So it's really heavy. But more importantly, it's just like a workout to move it because the wheels are so wide. And every time you push it, it's like you're literally doing a tricep dip because you got to push it so far down, it's hard. And so you get that thing filled up with a bunch of clippings too. Like an extra 70, 80 pounds of clippings that are wet. It can be really, really hard to maneuver. Whereas here in the front yard, we got Dylan just mowing away with a 20 inch mower. It's a, it's a, it's just a residential mower. It's very, very light. It's cheaper too. So I don't know, I kind of love hate relationship when it comes to these mowers. 30 inch ones, because they're nice and wide. So when we do bigger properties that are 15, 20, 30,000 square feet, it's relatively more time savings than a 21 inch mower. Yes. But it is going to absolutely be wearing you down after a whole long day of mowing. Now, one thing I didn't notice here is they left the window down. Some people are going to comment on that. We have only one time ever had something stolen out of a truck and thankfully nothing happened. But we live in a pretty good area. I'm gonna say, like, this is a kind of like a gated community, really nice area of town. But typically I wouldn't recommend leaving the windows down on your mower truck as you are Mowing along. And in fact, we actually did have someone steal a trimmer off of our truck, but it wasn't this. This side of town. This side of town is like super chill. It's out towards the kind of the farm area, kind of upscale, small neighborhoods. But downtown, we just had a trimmer stolen right off the rack. Right off of this rack right here. Someone stole a trimmer. And you can see they don't usually, but they pop right off and really nice. And that's why we have them on the passenger side. So when we park up against the sidewalk, you can access the trimmers really easily. If you're going to have racks in your trailer or have a trailer set up like we do, then you got to make sure that you have the trimmers on the correct side. Now we got him using the line trimmer against this plastic edging. That stuff is absolute garbage. I don't know whoever invented it, but it eventually gets torn, torn up. And when you're weed whacking up against it, if you have any friction over time, it's going to wear out the fibers of that plastic and it's going to be trashed. So don't use it. Just use edging that is concrete, either laid blocks or where they actually put concrete curbing in and lay it that way. So that's just my recommendation. Now, back in the backyard, Jesse's still here mowing with the 30 inch mower. Again, because it's a much more square footage in the backyard than it is in the front yard. All right. But there's lots of obstacles. And if you had a 60, 70 inch mower, you're first of all not going to get in the backyard. And one of the job notes on the specific property says you can only access the backyard through one gate. And that gate is only 36 inches wide. So you're only going to get a 30 or a 32 inch mower in the back. Anyways, having a massive zero turn on this property would literally mean it would just be holding down the trailer while we were out mowing. So you're going to have to do this anyways. And that is use this weed whacker around these lights, around these little tiny saplings. And again here, what we're gonna see is Jesse struggling yet again with the 30 inch mower. It's tough to maneuver and like it's a push mower and it's still hard to get around this fireplace and around these tiki lamps. It's just a pain. Honestly, I love it for the Fact that you get extra nine inches out of cut compared to a 20 inch mower. But I just don't know if it's 50% more efficient. And the fact that it's gonna also cost four or five times more than that push mower is, again, I just don't know if it's worth it. Now this blower that you see I'm using right now has a little green tag on the back, little green piece of tape. That means that it was recently fixed. How we operate at our shop is if it has a red piece of tape, it means that it's broken and you should not touch it. That is changed to green once it is fixed. So that way the crew knows they can take that piece of equipment out on the route. And so that way we just don't allow for broken equipment to end up on a job site because it slows everyone down. And no one wants to be slowed down in the middle of a mower out with broken equipment. Because you can't make P4P pay for performance dollars. It's gonna kill your P4P for that day if you got broken equipment. And you find out halfway through the route. So they're wrapping up here. And again, quick, nice, quick job. Residential house. They're gonna go probably less than 30 seconds to the next property. And this is what we wanna do. Knock them out, knock them out, knock them out. Because this truck right here is actually the truck that I used to use as my personal truck. And then the truck that I would go do estimates in, now we put a ramp rack on it, we got racks on the side. And. And it's a moneymaker. I bought this truck, literally, it's F250 probably about six, seven years ago for $10,500. And it was like the most I'd ever spent on a truck. But I did it because I was gonna be driving it personally. Well, now, $10,000 for a truck won't get you anything half that nice, let alone back when I bought it, when it only had 90,000 miles on it. So this is the property from aerial view. This is gonna give you kind of a better overview picture of the entire property. So what you need to do right now for. For your chance to win a $519 full access package to landscapebusinesscourse.com in the description below. I want to know from you, how many square feet do you think that property was only of turf? All right? Not doesn't include the concrete, doesn't include the house. Doesn't include the patio just grass comment below, and whoever hits it first in the comments will win. Landscapebusinesscourse.com Lifetime access.
