$850 Repair! Are Zero Turns Worth It? My Reaction to Brian’s Lawn Maintenance

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes and you're listening to the landscape business course and today the background is red because we are doing a reaction video to Brian's lawn maintenance. If you haven't watched Brian, you should, you should subscribe. I've done one video on him before. I know that this is going to add some value in terms of about your equipment. So let's jump into this video if you haven't watched already. Brian made a video last week about zero turn of his that he put the lug nuts on the tires incorrectly and it messed it up and he had to go get them fixed. I thought, I think he had said it was like $650 mistake. Let's see what it actually ended up being and what it really cost him. Let's jump into it.

What's up guys? Alright, another day, another day in paradise here. It's actually Monday afternoon and I'm about to run up here to Weingartz. I just pulled in about to go pick the X mark laser Z that we dropped off last week, Thursday, Friday. So a lot of you guys wanted to hear what the final result was. I'm gonna go grab the bill here. But Brad shout out to you. Brad, I know Brad watches the videos. He's the service manager up here. One of the service managers up here, Brad text me said 850 bucks. 850 bucks for those. It was the damage track this tire and then the, the drum with the floor for whatever the bolts that the tire goes on. So you know, here's the deal. I'm a little frustrated in general. Not because of the expense or the tire or the ram. Although that is the frustrating part. You know it's funny, like I wanted to. This is, this goes all the way back to four months if you guys remember in like March that I put that the tires on on my own, right? My friend Sawyer came and helped and I'm like yeah, like dude, we can do this thing. It's just changing two tires, just changing two wheels out. Like it can't be that hard to do. And I know a lot of like my haters, my biggest fans, my haters, they're like oh, he's not very mechanically inclined or like he has this stuff always go to Weingartz and you know, you hear the rumblings and I'm like yeah, yeah, yeah I do. Yes I do. So I was like, you know what, this time I'm gonna put the tractus tires on. Exmark did provide them. I was very, very thankful for that.

Good job, Exmark. Keep giving Brian stuff. It's very smart, very good. All right, but let's talk about this. I'm the same way in terms of like, I am not mechanically inclined. Brian is probably 10 times more mechanically inclined than I am. And the bottom line is like, running a great business does not have to do with one part of your business, especially out in the field. Like if, if you aren't the best at mechanics, you can still run a great lawn care business. If you're even not the best at say, marketing, you can still run a great lawn care business. It's about knowing your weaknesses. And then like, for example, Brian takes stuff to Weingartz, I take our stuff to Carl's Mower where they fix a bunch of stuff. And yeah, it costs us money and we try to fix the smaller stuff. We have some mechanically inclined employees that fix stuff. But just realize what your weaknesses are. And it's totally fine to use people that are better at things than you. And so if your weakness is marketing, you know, have someone build your website. Oh yeah, like lawn care web design, lawn carewebdesign.com. no, but just like if there's things in your business that you're weak at, just, just be self aware enough to realize what they are and then have someone else cover your mistakes, hire out those positions and you're gonna see like Brian's talking about here. He made a big mistake because he tried to do something he didn't. He maybe wasn't super comfortable with or was out of his line of expertise. And that's when you get into trouble. And so, yeah, I'm way worse. Brian, don't worry about it.

We didn't really have anything else going on, right. Because it was Covid. So I had all of March off all of April and I'm like, you know what? I can go buy a $50 little automotive style jack. We can pop up the back axle of the mower, right? And we can go and install those two tires on my own. Well, I thought I was going to. I thought I did a good job. I thought we did a good job. And apparently we did. Apparently the lug nuts that I put on, I put them on backwards. In fact, I was reading a bunch of you guys comments on that other video. Some of you guys said, Ben there done that 20 cent mistake can cost 600 bucks. A couple of you guys actually have already also done that. A couple of you guys said to drill four new holes, like machine drill, like a cnc, like a drill press make four new lug spots for the new wheel. I thought that was a good idea, maybe salvage the ram. But I read all your guys comments and again, I wanted to to be the hero here and do my own maintenance and put on my own tires. Didn't think I could really mess that one up, man. But the best comment that I saw was, hey man, at least you're honest. At least you own it and at least you know, you realize it was your mistake. And he goes, somebody said that that was a really rare thing to see nowadays from a lot of like lawn care YouTubers, you know. But yeah, dude, I messed up. I'm a little bummed out, bro. It's 650 bucks for the Tractus tire. 850 or so out the door. So I'm gonna go pick that up. Let's go jump inside, see what's new and it is what it is. Let's go check it out. I want to go see what the mistake was, see if I can help you guys out. Little PSA so you guys know what not to do next time and we'll see what it kind of looks like once it's all done.

Okay, so let me stop here and just say this is kind of why one of the reasons one of my arguments against zero turns is they're really expensive to fix. Now if you haven't watched other videos about zero turns, I give a more balanced view here. Don't comment about me making our employees use push mowers. And they're so I'm abusing them and all the rest of it. Let's be very clear. If your business makes more money, you can give more money to the employees. Like at Augusta Lawn Care, we have a profit sharing program and pay for performance. And that's paid for because we were really efficient and we don't have, you know, a bunch of zero turns and massive amounts of equipment. We are very lean and we use 30 inch mowers. Now I know that on big properties you're not going to be able to get away without having zero turns. And for a lot of you, if you have quarter acre, half acre lots that you're consistently mowing, yes, you're going to have to use a zero turn. But if you're doing small 5,000, 6,000 square feet or less properties, mowing, you can easily get away with a trailerless setup with just a push mower. And you get a lot of those for the same price as getting a very expensive setup. And so one of the things I'm against one of the things that leads me to this conclusion is that zero turns are expensive to fix. What one tire is gonna cost him $850 if a 30X, an Exmark 30 inch mower, or some people use a Toro Time Master 30 inch.

If something breaks on that thing and it's more than like 100 bucks, I'd be surprised. The whole engine probably costs $1,000. And so I just see time and time again people spending thousands of dollars every year on tires and brakes. And they have issues with spindles and the belts and all the other stuff that goes into a zero turn. Not against those things, but when you start having that and then we have to have bagging in our market. So you gotta have an $1800 plus tax, usually about $2200 with installation, 23 with tax. $2300 out the door for a bagging system on a zero turn. Like you're looking at $12,000 for an entry level commercial zero turn. And then you're going to be spending thousands of dollars each year on maintenance. Like literally the maintenance per year on a zero turn. If you're not mechanically inclined and you're taking it to a place like I do or like or Brian does here, you're looking at like the cost of having a 30 inch mower. Like a 30 inch mower. The whole thing is $2,500. So if you spend that every single year on maintenance on the zero turn, it basically means you could buy a new 30 inch every single year. And so I'm not making any, you know, saying that you should do that. I'm just saying that if you have small properties, you don't need a big, big setup. A big trailer with three 52 inch mowers and stand ons and sit downs and all the rest of it. Like you can get away with the trailer list set up definitely, if you don't beg. And you can get away with push mowers if you are in a market where you have small neighborhoods. And so just something to think about when it comes to maintenance and repairs.

All right, fam, check this out.

All right, so here's where we're at.

What a. What an interesting couple in the last few minutes. So here is the brake drum that the brake pads clamp onto. Right here is the.

New tractus tire. By the way, I'm in love. Hey, Cisco, we'll see you're on the vlog, bro. See, we'll see you, man.

See, all you guys are the fans, man. Cisco came up here, I Don't. I don't know, Cisco. But he was like, dude, I watch the videos. Cisco, you're in the video, bro. Thumbs up, man. Come on. All right. That's what it's all about, man. Whatever. All right, so this right here is on the inside of the rim, right? So Brad was just up here again. Shout out to Brad. Brad said what we did is we installed the lug nuts backwards, man. So what happened was it's supposed to be acorn in. They're on now correctly. What I did is I put it on like this. I thought they would go flat on the. The bolt here. That is not the case. Alright. So a little acorn side goes in, goes on first. And so what happened is these bolts, they kind of lock into the backside here. Little divot. And we sheared off two of them like straight up off the drum. So the Tractus tire was 650. The new drum was like 100. Something Brad was saying, a lot of.

People have asked me, should you switch to the no air tires like these ones here? I think they're really awesome. A tire that gets flat on a zero turn or any tire is annoying. Really annoying. I would not pay to switch out your tires if your tires don't need changed already. Like if you have 100 or 200 hours on your mower, you don't go buy, you know, don't go spend $1,200 on getting these. These tires that have no air in them. Don't do that. Wait till they wear out or they pop or they shred or something like this happens if you're gonna do the upgrade. But we've never used them. They're a little bit more expensive. But I do see the value in them. I really, really do. Because downtime is the worst thing in the world. And you also don't want to pay or have like spare tires in every single truck and trailer that's mowing. So. So if you're going to have zero turns, you're going to have these big mowers. Cool to have them. Really good thing to have them because you don't want downtime. Even if you have spares at your shop. It's just not worth downtime. Guys driving 30 minutes, a whole crew kind of ruins their day. I really like these airless tires and I just wouldn't recommend switching out your regular tires for these tires. If you don't have bald tires and you've put a thousand plus hours on that zero turn or, or you've shredded the tire or something crazy has happened and you gotta switch them out anyways. That's the only time I would switch them out.

I don't know. I just text Brad my credit card at this point.

850 bucks later, dude. Over four 25 cent washers, bro. Or four 25 cent lug nuts. So acorn side in really quick. So see this right here? Acorn side in, when you're tightening on things and you guys can see how it's flat now. Pretty flush there. So. All right, man. Well, I know some of you guys also were saying, you know, why don't we just put the other tires back on there or whatever. Look, I gotta be honest with you guys. I really like the tractus tires. They're dope. We got one. So it's a stupid hit, man. Last year was the axles on the trailer. This year, apparently it's the the one track is tire. And I was thinking like just the other day, like it was like mid August, right? Like we haven't had any issues just yet. Things are going great and then 850, $900hit.

So personally I probably would have used the old tires and popped it on to save the $850. I think I would have done that. Like, hey, lesson learned, made the mistake. You know, we already got these new tires because the tire. It sound like he only has like 100 hours on this machine. I would have put the other tires on. But hey, he got them originally free from exmark. That's awesome. Exmark should be sending him this one for free too, in my opinion because he has great branding for them. But in general, I would say if I had a mower that had basically brand new tires as backups, I probably wouldn't go spend $850 to get one tire replaced to keep it as having the air free ones. Just one point of view. I know some people are so big into these type of tires and it is such a big deal for them. That's fine. I get it. Especially if you're solo and having your mower down means you make no revenue. It's probably a good thing to have those type of tires so that a nail does not put you out of business for a day or two.

All right, thumbs up. This video again. I was trying to do my own maintenance, try to be the hero and you know, I was like, what's the worst that can happen? You know, I'll just change the tires. It can't be that big of a deal. And then imagine this. Now here's the thought that I'm really thankful didn't happen was imagine if I was stuck on my three acres and the whole freaking wheel just sheared off, just popped off. You want to talk about raising the stakes on that one?

Yeah, that's true. Like when it comes to equipment maintenance, it's something you do not want to do yourself if you're not confident because it can lead to a lot of worse injuries for you, your employees, et cetera. And so sometimes you are just gonna have to be willing to pay for it. And like I said at the very beginning, it's okay to have weaknesses, things you're not good at getting. Just make sure that you're recognizing that and you're willing to pay other people to cover those weaknesses. Whether you hire them, whether you service out things like equipment, or service out things like your advertising, service out other parts of your business that you're not good at, that's totally fine. It doesn't mean you're a failure. It doesn't mean you're worth less than other people. You're not a good operator. That has nothing to do with it. Be self aware, know what you're good at and pay someone else to do these mistakes. Put forth $4 worth of work into the mower instead of 850. But I hope something was said today that was helpful about mowers and about these bigger pieces of equipment. They do cost maintenance, they do cost repairs. And it's something you need to take into account when you buy them. Alright? Don't think that you're going to buy this $12,000 machine just like everything hunky dory maybe for the first six months, maybe something like that. But even after 100 hours with 90% of tread left on those tires, he had an issue. Same thing that can happen with spindles and brakes and all the rest of the things that go into a zero turn. There's a lot of moving parts and it can be expensive. Like stuff happens. You hit a stump, you can literally mess up a lot of stuff. A rebar state coming out of the ground, big expense. So keep that in mind when you're buying equipment. And keep it in mind if you're in the balances of whether or not you should be using bigger equipment, if you can scale it back in terms of size, or using a push mower on just your smaller properties. Not a bad option if you have a route or two routes in your business that you can use a trailerless setup that just has a push mower. And again, I highly recommend trailerless setups. For anyone that doesn't have to bag clippings, get a mow and go ramp or a trailer rack. A trailerramp.com both of those great options for you not to have to lug the big trailer around even if you do have a zero turn. We in our market, we have to bag clippings. We have to leave the bed of the truck open. So so we do a push mower on the back on a cargo carrier. So without any further delay, let's wrap it up. Thank you so much everyone for supporting landscapebusinesscourse.com check it out. Go become a member and I promise you the P4P software is fantastic. It'll really help your business as well as lawn care web design. I'll see you there. Until next time. Be great. Nothing else pays.