A 22-year-old lawn-care owner made $70K last year with $7K cash and two trucks. Mike Andes coaches him on scaling: skip the new equipment, focus on door-to-door marketing and hiring crews instead.
22 years old.
$70,000.
$25,000 (equipment financed and paid off in one year).
$7,000 (and could get another $2,000).
$280 per month.
All right, we're in business. Not much of that.
All right, we got the long haired God in the room.
I need some wisdom.
Cool, man. Tell me. Give me a little context. Kind of like what you've been up to and things like that. I know. I read your form and everything.
So I'm 22 years old. I went to college for, like, I don't know, two weeks. And I was like, that's not for me. And then I worked at Verizon, got into sales, and then I never wanted to have a boss. I didn't like people telling me what to do. So I called my former boss. I used to cut grass in high school. I said, I just want to start a lawn care company up. He said, oh. I was like, I'm gonna buy, you know, $1,000 truck and trailer. You know, go real low, low budget. He said, just finance everything for me. I said, say less. So we wrote up a contract. It was worth 25,000. Gave me a box truck stand on John Deere, lawnmower, the blower edger. We whip everything, all the essentials, right? And then I paid that off in a year. And the following year, which was last year, I did 70k in revenue. And now I wanted to contact you because you'll be able to tell me kind of the roadmap that I should be going on. What. What goal, revenue goal should I look forward to? Should I be. Should I, you know, hire two employees? An employee? Should I still solo and try to make as much cash that way?
Should I go for more landscaping? You know, that's basically what I'm here for.
Okay, cool. So do you pay off that debt to him, right?
There's no debt. I run the business out of my house. So the overhead is. There's no overhead. I just have to pay the insurance on the truck, which is 280 bucks a month. And then. Oh, yeah, the Weekly revenue is $2052,050.
What else?
That's it. Oh, I have 7k in cash. I could get another 2k in cash.
Yeah. And then I have two mowers, stand down mowers, one push mower.
And then I'm thinking about buying another walk behind.
Okay. The average cut price around my area is $25, and it'll probably take 20 minutes for one person to cut.
The houses in my area are really close together. It's like a metro Detroit. I'm not sure. I don't think it's like where you're at because you said you start at 60. I do have an area where I cut. Where the prices are higher. It's a wealthier area. I'm not sure if I should go for those types of customers because the average customer value would be higher due to the leaf cleanups. You can make your money on the leaf cleanups?
Yeah. What do you think?
Cool. So your thoughts on. On the walk behind?
Oh, yeah.
Were you gonna finance that? Are you going to?
Yeah. So my thoughts on the walk behind. Right. I was gonna buy the walk behind. I was gonna have one crew go out with two people, and I was going to use my. Another truck. I have two trucks right now. I just bought one yesterday. And I was going to put the ramps on the back and use the walk behind. And I'll go and cut 50 houses while they cut the 75. And then I was going to obviously try to get more accounts this year. Maybe they could have done. They could do 125 accounts, 100 accounts max. And then I would do 50, just so I can keep increasing the revenue. And then once I had more cash, I could buy a trailer. And then, you know, do you see what I'm envisioning? Okay.
Yep. Cool. So the question is, so not last year, the year before, what'd you do in revenue then?
I'm not sure. It probably was around the same because I did not grow at all.
Okay, so what are you going to do differently this year that's going to allow you to grow in terms of getting new customers?
Door hangers? And I was thinking about if I had to door to door, I'm not afraid to go door to door and try to get service that way. But I was honestly thinking, like, just to put out 20,000 door hangers, me and my girlfriend could do it all day. I could go out eight hours a day, nine hours, and just go door to door. I mean, the houses are so close. I could do a thousand a day.
Yeah, yeah. That's kind of what I was about, you know, alluding, you know, getting to. And that is the fact that, like, you have enough equipment right now to do well over 200,000 revenue in terms of two trucks, two stand ons. A push more like, I would recommend not getting the walk behind. Okay. Any dollar right now spent on equipment would better be spent on marketing, in my opinion, even if it is door hangers.
And, you know, because you don't have, like, tons of cash, if you're able to do the door hangers, that'd be great. But, like, if you're okay with talking to people, we have, you know, Nick, the guy who just started a franchise down in Marysville and worked for us for a couple years, he's 21, I think, and he actually, like, he was not afraid to knock on doors either and talk to them. Not just door hangers. And you can really use kind of your age and all of that to get good, you know, a lot of clients, you're not gonna be able to do a thousand a day. You might only get a hundred done. But if you talk to 15 of them and five of them become customers, like, that's worth it, right? Yeah.
I would really say if you are willing to talk to people and just not make it a sales pitch, but introduce yourself, hey, I'm in local area. If you ever need something, let me know. And then what you do if you strike up a.
